Short Cuts: Harlan Ellison!
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| The Illustrated Harlan Ellison |
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| Detective Comics 567, 1986 |
Redartz: Welcome to another day, and another edition of Back in the Bronze Age! Today we take a 'Short Cut' to a pretty big subject: Harlan Ellison! Writer, critic, iconoclast, curmudgeon; he has worn many labels and shattered many more of them. Books, comics, television; he's written them all. His story "Repent, Harlequin! said the TickTockMan" blew my mind. His book "The Glass Teat" led me to take a media course in college. His comic story in Detective 567 made me smile.
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| The Controversial Comics Journal interview |
Have you any favorite Ellison stories? Books? He tends to be, shall we say, outspoken. Any thoughts about this icon of fiction and fantasy, and his career?
14 comments:
Not being one to read the credits on a TV show when I was a kid, my "conscious" introduction to Ellison was via the triple-whammy of Justice League of America #89 (which featured "Harlequin Ellis" as the main character and was dedicated to Ellison by the issue's writer, Mike Friedrich)/Avengers #88 (the comic that hooked me for life--Ellison plotted)/Incredible Hulk #140 (the sequel to the Avengers ish). Those mags all came out--in March 1971. Was it Ellison's birthday or something?
I later became a fan, bought some of his short-story collections. Loved Dark Horse's Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor in the 90s (yeah, I sound like a hypocrite after my speechifin' about the Code earlier, but that mag was never intended for kids and wouldn't attract one). The array of artists and Ellison's curmudgeonly persona as he narrated "between the stories" was very cool.
My favorite Ellison, though not comics, was his "The New York Review of Bird" story in Weird Heroes #2. That was "Ellison as a super-hero"...kinda. Ironically, it was probably the most violent of the "non-violent" heroes WH wanted to showcase, but is was a hoot to see "Ellison" cut loose on those "uneducated" bookstore clerks who wanted to shelve ALL of his works in the Sci-fi section. And we get to see "The Shadow" as he'd "really be" in the 1970s. Neal Adams illos for that story were glorious, too.
I remember reading an issue of the Comics Journal back in the early '80s. For some reason, Harlan Ellison was guest-writing the responses on the letters pages. It was an absolute tour de force of vitriol! I remember him calling one unfortunate respondent a 'pimple-brain'.
I'd never seen anything quite like it at the time, and was duly astounded; although such insult-fests are commonplace in today's realms of social media.
Oh gosh, I am probably on the other end of the spectrum from you, Groove. I think I liked Harlan Ellison for a really brief stretch in high school, maybe, but he wore thin very, very quickly. As a writer (and I haven't read a ton of his works, mind you, because I couldn't develop an enjoyment for him), I always got a sense of his self-aware, self-satisfying tendency to push conventional boundaries as a goal in itself, rather than because that's where the story organically took him. His story in AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS (forgotten the title); the story/novella A BOY AND HIS DOG; and his famous rejected drafts for CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER are all examples of this for me. I feel like the writer is obstructing my view of the story.
Admittedly, his personality has never failed to grate on my nerves, so that probably has an effect as well. We do call him "curmudgeonly" now, but really, he was far, far too young to have earned that acceptable appellation when his fame was rising. To my mind, he was just a self-absorbed jerk.
The prof I had in a college literature class-- Perspectives in Fantasy & Science Fiction-- had a correspondence relationship with Ellison, and was of course a HUGE fan, and clearly modeled his take on the genre from an Ellison-esque perspective. Second day of class (first day was just a blow-off, get-these-books, see ya later session) he came in with a huge advertisement for an inflatable sex doll, and smarmishly pronounced that THIS is what every science fiction story ever written was about. And this wasn't a challenge for us to argue and prove him otherwise, this was a could-be-on-the-test thesis statement. No exercise of the imagination or speculative engineering or spiritually enlightening concept was anything more than a metaphor for rutting, grunting sex-- and that was the final word. (Andre Norton? Preoccupied with sex?? Wow-- not hardly-!) So that relationship has no doubt soured me on Ellison as well.
And. . . also in college, I was in an original Interpretive Drama adaptation of "REPENT HARLEQUIN" that we took to an adjudicated festival. The adapter/director is respected nationally in this branch of drama, and Ellison's agent gave the go-ahead. Down the road a bit, upon being invited to attend the opening, he sent an openly nasty letter to the director, telling her that, even though he couldn't revoke the permission, his agent had been out of line in giving it, and that he never would have personally approved of his work being dramatized this way, razza-razza-razza. Utterly dismissive and in-gracious, to say the least. The piece itself was pretty cool and well-received, though.
Ahh, enough of my fussing, though, eh? I'm rainin' on the parade-!
HB
My favorite Harlan Ellison comic books will always be the Avengers-Hulk crossover he plotted which gave us the atomic world of Jarella and Psyclop. The story is weird and strange and the art by Sal Buscema and Herb Trimpe is delightfully inked in both instances by the much underrated Sam Grainger.
I still miss my copy of Dangerous Visions which I loaned out to a student many years ago and never got back. Sigh. I need to find a replacement for that book.
Rip Off
Rip - I am with you. That Hulk / Avengers / Psyclop arc is my favorite Ellison story as well. And yes Grainger should be talked about more. His work with Sal Buscema on the Avengers was top notch.
I forgot Avengers #101! That's another fave (Rich Buckler/Dan Adkins art--good stuff. Oh, Jim Mooney inked Avengers #88; Grainger inked #89 and made Sal look even better, though. ;D)
Yeah, HB, Ellison was far too young to be a "curmudgeon" back then--he was actually a--ahm...doo-doo stirrer? lol. I still dug his work; just wouldn't wanna hang out with him. There are a lot of "artistic geniuses" who are probably personally unlikeable accept to their own inner circles. Do we forgive and enjoy the work? Or does it ruin the work? I guess it varies for me. Everyone tolerates (or refuses to tolerate) different things from different folks...
To your last point there, Groove, a recent (and wholly appropriate, IMO), albeit somewhat extreme example would be the utter disappearance of Bill Cosby from the television airwaves. We had been re-discovering and totally loving I SPY on broadcast re-runs until the scores of allegations of his serial sexual assaults came into the center of the public eye. And even if you try to watch the show on its own merits, you simply cannot surrender to it completely. At some level, the artist is always going to be intertwined with the art. . .
Hey, though, I'm still going to give a thumbs-up to Ellison the Editor-- both of those DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies (downstairs on the basement shelves even now, I believe) are excellent. Kind of puts me in a mind to go pull one out, in fact. Wonder if I have time?
HB
I haven't read much of Ellison's stuff, though I do have a Hulk paperback with some of the comics stories he was involved in 9and there was an issue of Daredevil for which he wrote the story that I always liked). From what I've heard about him as a person, I don't think I'd want to hang out with him (the Connie Willis thing alone is enough to make me not like him).
Ellison appeared as himself in the new Scooby Doo show a few years back, and in a subsequent episode Velma said she tried to reach him but he was unavailable, since he was at "a misanthropes' convention"; I think that pretty much sums it up.
Rip- our copies of DANGEROUS VISIONS seem to have shared a similar fate. I had both volumes, which have vanished somewhen.
Groove and HB- that sounds like a future discussion: do we separate creations from their creators?
I thought Harlan was being unreasonable when he when he blew his stack over how they "eviscerated" his story for that Star Trek episode.
I mean, without the commercials, those episodes are only forty minutes long, or so. You can't fit all that stuff in there.
However, when they panned his idea for a Star Trek movie script where the crew meets God, because it wasn't big and bold enough, he was right to be steamed.
M.P.
HB, Cosby is an extreme case, but yeah, there are definitely times when you have to face the person "behind the curtain" so to speak. And that would be a great discussion. After Ellison, John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore are the first to come to mind when it comes to "can/will/do we separate the artist from the art?" Some we can, some we can't. How do we decide? Veddy intedestink...
Anonymous said... "when they panned his idea for a Star Trek movie script where the crew meets God, because it wasn't big and bold enough, he was right to be steamed."
I thought that was because it would have 'alienated' (get it?) every devout Christian and Jewish person in America and worldwide.
Maybe, but why?
M.P.
And isn't that. . . isn't that sort of what Star Trek V was about anyhow-? Which is also the element that made it seem, strangely enough, limited and kind of stupid?? (Why would God physically reside at the center of one galaxy out of countless billions? Why would he take human form? Etc, etc, etc-- there was just no end of why-this-doesn't-work details that seemed to be waved aside in the drive to make that very weak film. . . )
And heck, this particular "God" didn't even seem to be a powerful an entity as most of the unimaginably advanced races of omnipo-beings that the Original Series was all-but littered with-! If Ellison was angry because they eventually sort of stole his idea, that's unfortunate, because it's an awfully bad idea, IMHO.
HB
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