The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  On March 29th, 1966, opening night of the Broadway musical “It’s a Bird It’s a Plane It’s Superman” directed by Harold Prince, with book by David Newman and Robert Benton, music and lyrics by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, among the crowd milling about in front of the Alvin Theater on West 52nd Street was a shabby old man. Tear your heart out just to see him. Right. But it would more cause anger than knee-jerk sympathy to learn that it was Joe Shuster, the guy who first drew Superman, standing there without the money to buy a ticket to his own creation.

  Shuster was working as a messenger. Broke, going blind, unable to get work in the industry he had helped bring into being, he was delivering parcels to midtown offices. Which brings us to story number two, guaranteed to cap the Siegel and Shuster anguish with an anecdote emblematic of the way the comics business has treated its best talents:

  Joe found himself making a delivery to DC. He walked in with the parcel, and no one knew who he was. He started to leave—so the tale goes—and Liebowitz, the guy who’d gotten the boys to sign over Superman for $130, came out of his office. He recognized Joe. Frayed cuffs, old jacket, looking gray and destitute. They confronted each other after all those years.

  One version has it that Liebowitz gave him money to buy a new suit. Another version says the millionaire publisher pulled a fistful of money from his pocket, thrust it at Shuster, and told him never to come back. A third version says it was ten bucks. A fourth telling ups the amount to a hundred bucks. But all versions concur that the messenger service received a call from DC later that day, insisting that the old geezer who’d done the delivery that day never be given that run again.

  Who the hell knows what the truth is? Time and the failing memory of the principals blurs the facts. And like those families that go to Watergate lengths to conceal the skeletons, corporate unity and maintaining a pleasant image for an industry that sells reading matter to kids smothers the gasps and smooths the jagged edges.

  But what happened to Siegel and Shuster is not uncommon. Wally Wood, whose extraordinary art was showcased in the EC comics and Mad for more than a decade, worn out and alcoholic, unable to draw after a lifetime at the board, worked so hard he has migraines not even a Dexedrine addiction can ease, returns from his doctor in Los Angeles, having learned that he’ll be hooked up to a dialysis machine for the rest of his days, puts a Saturday Night Special to his head and blows his brains out. They don’t find his body for three days, there in that squalid little room.

  Joe Maneely, Atlas Comics artist who drew more than half of the covers for the seventy comics a month the company was producing in the Fifties, having gone days without sleep to complete work unceasingly thrown at him by a publisher, rides a commuter train out to Jersey. He steps between cars to clear his head—some say he’d been drinking, but so the hell what—the train takes a sharp curve, the cars jostle him, and he slips between them, and is crushed to death.

  Jack Kirby, whose thousands of pages of brilliant art for Marvel made Thor, the Fantastic Four and The Avengers such stars that Marvel now commands almost 60% of the market, only recently, after a public crusade, has managed to regain a fraction of his originals, hundreds of pages of which have been given away as convention auction items, have been ripped-off by office personnel, have been tendered to fans visiting the publication offices in New York, have been sold and resold by dealers for a tidy fortune over the years. And to this day he receives no co-credit line for characters he helped to create.

  Jack Cole, who created Midnight and Plastic Man, whose cartoons illuminated the pages of Playboy in the Fifties, after twenty years of backbreaking labor in the comics Gulag, pulled the trigger, in effect saying ah to hell with it.

  Reed Crandall, whose stylish renditions of Blackhawk remain a pinnacle of comic art that newcomers still struggle to reach, died broke and legally blind, a night watchman in Kansas City, not one cent of pension or royalty coming to him from the uncounted pages of exemplary art that made millions for half-a-dozen funnybook companies.

  And that’s the way it was. Till 1981, till Kirby’s Captain Victory and Sergio Aragonés’s Groo the Wanderer started making money in the direct-sales market, and comics creators were able, at last, to break out of the beanfields of the two major publishers to begin controlling their own destinies.

  And at that point, the pressure to keep comics a childish, introverted, essentially frivolous commercial product, began to ease. Once there were alternatives, the maturity that had always been there, stunted and ridiculed, censored by the Comics Code Authority and the strictures of the publishers, burst loose.

  By 1986, with the blasting open of the medium by Frank Miller and his Dark Knight Returns version of Batman as an aging, more-than-slightly-psychotic crimefighter coming back from retirement, comic books began to achieve the mainstream notice that aficionados always knew was potentially possible.

  If Siegel and Shuster were the artistic and imaginative godfathers of the field, if Neal Adams was the champion who shamed DC into giving them a yearly nibble at the profit pie, if Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were the first major talents to reduce the level of silliness in comics characters and show them as real people with unreal powers, then Frank Miller has been the ass-kicking, indefatigable spokesman for a new, adult outlook on funnybooks.

  The last two years in the world of comics have been a real toad-strangler. Censorship, duplicity, heroes and Quislings, mountebanks and arrogant poseurs. The Gulag has turned into a feeding frenzy, and from the melee has come a banquet of tasty tidbits.

  Here’s the line of logic, for those who think it’s been a long journey: if comics are so worthy, howzacum Joe Tobul’s mother tossed out the books I loaned Joe back in 1946 when we were both twelve years old in Painesville, Ohio?

  Because Joe’s mother, who was a nice lady, thought they were trash. And why did she think they were trash?

  Because those who ran the industry had a vested interest in keeping the material childish and narrowly focused. They were men of limited artistic vision, and their commercial view of the medium was equally as tunnel-visioned. And how did they keep the unpredictable artists and writers who aspired to nobler ends in line?

  They did it by holding both copyrights and trademarks on every last creation. If they owned Superman and Spider-Man lock, stock and longjohns, they could always fire those who threatened their policies, even if the one getting the sack was the talent who thought up the character in the first place. So we study the Siegel and Shuster case at length, not only because Superman was the feature that made comics as popular as they’ve become, but because what happened to Siegel and Shuster is the same scenario for virtually everyone who had come into the field.

  And that is why it took over fifty years for Superman to appear on the cover of Time; fifty years for journals like the New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Seventeen, and The Atlantic to publish essays that said, “Wow! Look what we’ve discovered!” fifty years for magazines like Spin (intended principally, one assumes, for MTV refugees who had the misfortune to learn to read) to write, “These days, comics stores are infinitely more exciting than record stores, even if you aren’t a dweeb in highwater pants.”

  Because for fifty years what could have been, was prevented from being. But six years ago the creator-owned comic came into existence, and the all-powerful interests that ran the Gulag found that the best talents were cleaning up with offbeat and original work for the independent, smaller houses. In a matter of months, direct-sales comics shops were springing up all over the country, selling many times the units that were being sold by traditional newsstand distribution methods.

  Companies like Comico, Kitchen Sink, Eclipse, First Comics, Quality, and Vortex were stealing away the artists and writers who were producing the books that made them the most money. They still had Superman and the X-Men, Batman and Daredevil, but Mike Grell had gone to First where he created Jon Sable; Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier had gone to Pacific where Groo the Wan
derer was pulling down big numbers; and Chuck Dixon was writing the revived 1940s character Airboy for Eclipse. Even more significantly, Dave Sim, up in Canada, was self-publishing the astonishing Cerebus the Aardvark, and copies of the first issue were selling for huge sums through dealer ads in the weekly tabloid of the funnybook world, Comics Buyer’s Guide; Steve Moncuse in Richmond, California, was self-publishing The Fish Police and copping reams of critical praise; Eastman and Laird had started publishing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Sharon, Connecticut, as a gag parody of the profusion of X-Men comics flooding the market, and suddenly their Mirage Studios was a thriving company.

  So Marvel and DC, who had outlasted the hundreds of comics companies that had flourished in the Forties and been destroyed by the likes of Dr. Wertham in the Fifties, who had blossomed anew in the Sixties and Seventies, now saw the empire at peril. For fifty years the giants had stonewalled the concept of author royalties, vowing Over our dead bodies! But Frank Miller, who had blown breath back into Marvel’s Daredevil, wouldn’t produce for anyone simply with a work-for-hire contract any more, so DC lured him away with a royalty deal, and he created the astonishing, multi-leveled six-book “graphic novel” Ronin; and then The Dark Knight Returns…and it was all over for the plantation mentality.

  Rolling Stone did a major takeout on Miller and his gritty, surreal, film noir vision of the myth of superheroes, set against mean streets filled with vicious mad-dog vatos and SWAT-crazy fascistic authorities. Batman, middle-aged, wracked with guilt over the death of the young man who had been Robin, lost in memories of his caped-crusader career but retired for a decade, goes back to the shadowy alleys and rooftops of Gotham City, a half-crazed vigilante prowling in a nighttime world dolorous under the threat of imminent global nuclear warfare. Superman works for the government. The Catwoman is a madam. The Joker, now a media celebrity, shrills at us from the set of The David Letterman Show, having at last found his proper venue.

  And suddenly the UPI and Associated Press start blowing kisses and urging their adult audience to get a load of this! Not yet thirty, Miller found himself riding the wave of serious attention. The evening news shows interview him, treating him like a modern poet of urban society. Like Fulton, Chaplin, Kerouac or Nader, Miller has been in the right place at the right time, with the deliverable goods and an enormous talent, and he becomes the point-man for the entire comics industry. He opened the door and, because there are now alternatives to work-for-hire, work-at-command, other restless creators kick that door off its hinges and the Gulag begins to empty.

  Now an adult reader who makes no snob distinctions between the value of a Jim Thompson or Harold Adams suspense novel and the work of Pynchon, Jim Harrison or Joyce Carol Oates, considered “serious” writing, can go to the nearest comics shop and find magazines and graphic novels that—in this different medium of presentation—have as much emotional and intellectual clout as the best movies, the best novels, and one or two items on television. Here are a few of the best:

  •Omaha, the Cat Dancer: a spunky, sexy, cleanly drawn contemporary soap opera about the life and loves of a nude terpsichorean who happens to be a, er, uh, a cat. Kate Worley and Reed Waller are the intelligence2 guiding this fable. It is a magazine that has the religious Right crazed. It is wonderful.

  •Lone Wolf and Cub: a series of squarebound, stiff-cover reprints of the Japanese manga on which the “baby cart” films were based. The episodic story of a masterless samurai and his infant son, wandering through blood and shogunate Nippon, staying one jump ahead of the assassins sent to slay them. Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima tell the tales.

  •The Spirit: masterworks month after month by Will Eisner. Denny Colt, residing under Wildwood Cemetery, a cross between the young Jimmy Stewart and the Steve McQueen of The Great Escape, helps Inspector Dolan battle crime and usually gets the shit kicked out of him in the process. Stories of character and human foible, tragic and funny and illustrated by a man whose work is simply cinematic.

  •John Constantine, Hellblazer: a sublimely deranged view of present-day England and America as a black-and-white battle between the grotty, amoral survivor Constantine and all the demons of Hell that darken our lives, be they religious crusaders or violence-drenched street thugs. Jamie Delano is the deliciously perverse talent who dreams this stuff up every month. If Rimbaud and Baudelaire were writing comics today, they would acknowledge Delano as their superior in portraying decadence.

  •The Watchmen: a twelve-issue graphic novel that is what experts mean when they talk about science fiction doing what no other genre of literature can do. From Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a pair of olympian English talents, this milestone saga is nothing less than an illustrated alternate-universe novel postulating a world in which Nixon still reigns, in which superheroes have been outlawed because the common man fears them, in which a complex murder mystery is the core of a study of our times and our tenuous grasp on sanity. It was The Watchmen, following the Dark Knight opus, that kicked the Gulag’s door off its hinges. As exciting as Hammett, as intricate as Proust, as socially insightful as Auchincloss; if comics have approached Literature, it is here.

  •Concrete: probably the best comic being published today, by anyone, anywhere. Trying to describe the down-to-earth humanity and sheer dearness of Paul Chadwick’s creation requires more than words or pictures. Ronald Lithgow, ex-Senatorial speechwriter, has been, er, uh, altered by alien forces. His brain now lives in a rock-hard, monstrously ponderous body. And he visits Tibet; and he swims oceans; and he saves a family farm; and he performs at kiddie birthday parties; and none of this casts even a scintilla of light on the magnificence of what Chadwick is doing, issue after issue.

  •The Fish Police: another idea that turns to gibberish when one attempts to codify it. There’s this cop, Inspector Gill, who is a fish. Except he keeps thinking about something called “ankles.” He is obviously some other being, from some other place where people breathe air and “walk.” It is Chandler and Willeford and the antic parts of Hammett, told as an aquatic allegory. It takes Steve Moncuse to conceive it…and to explain it.

  If one now gets the sense that trying to encapsulate these ribald fantasies in mere narrative is akin to summarizing Moby Dick as a long story about a crazy one-legged guy trying to kill a big white fish or Citizen Kane as a biography of a guy whose life got fucked up because he lost his Flexible Flyer…one has put one’s little paw on the problem.

  Comics are a different medium. They combine film, animation, the novel form, the succinct joy of the short story, the mystery of the haiku, and the visual punch of great paintings. They are their own yardstick. Parallels fail. They must be seen to be enjoyed.

  And trying to sum up the hundred different wonders of a genre this various would fill (and has filled) copious volumes. There are the exquisite reprint books of Steve Canyon, Li’l Abner, Terry & the Pirates, Popeye and Shel Dorf’s meticulous reissuing of Dick Tracy. The English reprint comics of Judge Dredd, Miracleman, Halo Jones; the frequently dangerous stories of a war over which we still anguish, The ’Nam; Gerard Jones’s and Will Jacobs’s The Trouble with Girls, that stands James Bond on his ear; the satire on ’50s bomb-shelter Cold War paranoia, The Silent Invasion; and Eric Shanower’s gorgeous Oz graphic novels, and Nexus and Zot! and The Hernandez Bros. constantly enriching Love and Rockets, and…and…

  It goes on. It goes on without drawing a breath or relaxing its grip on imagination. Volumes can be filled with praise for the treasures these last six years have given us.

  In the pages of a new newsletter called WAP! (for Words and Pictures), for the first time in the history of the Gulag, comics professionals are speaking out. Endless recountings of the screwings and hamstringings of their work in a field that was purposely held at an adolescent level. In the pages of WAP! and in the pages of Comics Buyer’s Guide, the new, strong voice of an art-form coming to maturity can be heard. The censors tremble, the moguls fret, the occasional jumped-up fan turned editor of critic
al journal (in the same way that The National Enquirer is a critical journal) spits bile, but after a half century the talent is finally speaking out.

  (Comics Buyer’s Guide—free copy on request, available from Krause Publications, 700 E. State St., Iola, WI 54990. The former gives the inside, the latter gives the outside.)

  Television wearies. Films pander to the sophomoric, to the knife-kill crazies. Novelists write smaller and smaller about less and less. Fast food gives you zits. But from the rubble of the Gulag the song of imagination is heard. And there is an insistent rapping on the sanctified portals of the Frick and MOMA. Those who survived come with Zot! and Swamp Thing to demand that at last attention, attention must be paid.

  That’s truth, justice, and the American way.

  APPENDIX F | 1969/1970

  THE SONG THE SIXTIES SANG

  Seven-league strides have been made driving the words nigger, kike, spic, wop and broad back to the darkness from which they shambled. (Which is not to say there is any less bigotry and racism in the chopped liver; it’s just that even the most slope-browed trog knows it ain’t cool to use such catchy appellations in nouvelle society.)

  Consigning those words to the dust-heaps is one of the small benefits we derived from the heightened social consciousness of the Sixties. One of the uncountable number of good things the Sixties and its action handed down to us struggling through the Eighties.

  How ironic, then, that we now have a new epithet to replace the old derogatories used to dismiss those we hold in contempt; a freshly-minted replacement for beatnik, old Wobbly, longhair and burnout: now, from the pens and mouths of Sixties-bashers, we discover that those who fought, and in some terrible instances died, for those benefits are “refugees from the Sixties.” And the stereotype is a hairy, unkempt, ponytailed buffoon in either tie-dyed jeans or a Nehru jacket, mumbling like Shirley MacLaine about cosmic oneness, and offering flowers on a street corner in the Haight.