There is no other way to explain his ugly and shameful performance in Playboy; intellectually, artistically, critically, and morally he has come unglued, and he's done it in public, in front of some three million readers of America's premier magazine for Men.

I refer to an article idiotically titled "It Ain't Toontown" (and just as idiotically subtitled "Did your mother throw yours out? Too bad, because funny books are no longer kid stuff") in the December Playboy. Most such articles in the mass media are stupid and superficial, written by hacks, unmindful of aesthetic distinctions, historically ignorant. Such articles make few claims otherwise.

But, in a "news story" by Harlan Ellison's unofficial public relations bureau over at the Comics Buyers Guide, Ellison referred to this article as "a serious article," claimed that it "has been... the most difficult piece of nonfiction writing I've done in my entire career," and that "it had taken him more than a month of actual writing time to do the article and that he used more than 35 reference books" in his research. Furthermore, Ellison referred to comics as one of his "areas of expertise" recently on a nationally broadcast Larry King radio show, and it goes without saying that he considers himself a connoisseur of world art and literature.

Given all this, there is no excuse for the innumerable errors of fact, the slovenly and philistine artistic judgments, the historical ineptitude, the internal contradictions, and the various half-truths, untruths, and gussied-up truths that litter this essay from the first word to the last. The piece moves along at a breathless clip, like a flat rock skimming over a body of water, from glib catch phrase to glib catch phrase. It is larded with indiscriminate name dropping the quality and quantity of which would embarrass the most shameless mover and shaker at your average literary cocktail party. The sort of writing and judgment on display here would be intolerable in a piece of daily journalism; Ellison claims it took over a solid month to compose this, but it reads as though it were written, to use Connor Cruise O'Brien's trope, by a man who has a bus to catch. But even hurried writing wouldn't explain away the manipulative and cunning intelligence that abounds, about which more later.

The essay begins on a vulgar note lamenting the dearth of profiteering (i.e. if little Johnny's mother didn't throw his comics out, big grown-up Johnny could make a killing on the speculator's market), and ends on a vulgar note of philistinism (i.e. that contemporary comics like Fish Police and Concrete are better than contemporary film and literature). The latter is obvious nonsense designed to appeal to the upscale, trendy, semi-literate Playboy reader; the former is a hackneyed journalistic hook that anyone seriously espousing the mature artistic values of contemporary comics would avoid like the plague.

I had originally intended to segregate the pure errors of fact form the assertions of questionable judgment where there could be room for dispute, but the essay blends fact and fiction so seamlessly — like a Doctorow novel — that I have resolved simply to plow through the piece as chronologically as I can.

After drooling over the current collector's price of Captain Marvel #1 ($2700.00, for those of you who are interested), Cotton Mather and Frederic Wertham (misspelled) are dragged out for ritualistic flogging, a coupling that demonstrates Ellison's characteristic subtlety of mind. "Gore and protuberant" breasts are defended next, the deprivation of which, we are told, "blighted millions of lives [of children]." It is not made clear how gore and protuberant breasts would enrich the lives of children, but keep in mind that the defense of pre-Code horror comics comes from a man who once wrote, quite correctly, I think, of television's "ability to shape and mold manners or morals [of children]" and lamented the "phony shocks put over on kids too young to separate the wheat from the chaff." I don't want to dwell on this particular inconsistency, but it demonstrates the transient nature of Ellison's intellectual commitments. He has been on an anti-censorship kick lately, having bee whipped into a frenzy by some friends at DC over DC's proposed labeling policy, and has apparently forgotten his previous position on media's responsibility toward children. Not that he is ever consistent on such matters, mind you — he has also defended the simple black and white representations of good and evil in comics and cartoons for being healthy, simple-minded fun — but he has not, to my mind, defended anything quite as meretricious as pre-Code horror comics.

"In France," we are told, "comics are held in such high esteem that Metal Hurlant, a graphics magazine, is a best selling periodical..." Of course, Metal Hurlant went bankrupt over a year ago, and was never a "best selling periodical." As we will see, Ellison and facts are like oil and water. There are many fallacious layers to Ellisonian logic, though; even if Metal Hurlant were a best selling magazine, it wouldn't mean comics were held in high esteem in France any more than People magazine's best-selling status indicates the high esteem journalism is held in here.

Naturally, when Japanese manga is discussed, poor Kobo Abe's name must be invoked, the first in a long litany of profaned literary figures, as in "... millions of copies of comics books... are sold every week, as thick as the annotated Kobo Abe, read by more adults than children in that most literate of nations, and read as seriously as novels and financial reports." There you have it: a nation that takes its comics as seriously as its financial reports. A utopian premise to a man as preoccupied by monetary value as Ellison, but, alas, it's probably untrue given Japan's superior economic status in the global marketplace and their obsessive attention to matters financial. But, even if it were true, it wouldn't mean much since most Japanese manga is as abysmal as most American comics. Like so much of what you'll read in Ellison's essay, this is meaningless hyperbole.

With that in mind, how seriously are we expected to take this loopy assertion: "In parts of Africa, Marvel's ebony super-hero, the Black Panther, is looked on as a significant mythical figure, in the way Spaniards revere El Cid." Even if this were true, which is highly unlikely, what parts of Africa consider the Black Panther a myth figure? Facts, please — how is the deification of a moronic comic book character relevant to the advent of literate comics? The answer is, it is not in the least bit relevant, but these questionable pseudo-statistics are trotted out to impress people with quantity of experience rather than with quality. "Quality of pleasure being equal," said Bentham, "pushpin is as good as poetry." Just as a few pounds of Kobo Abe is as good as a few pounds of your average manga.

"For more than half a century," we are told, "comics in America have been kept adolescent, considered throwaway trash, beneath the notice of 'serious' critics of art..." So far, so good, but then he hauls out a list of artists, artisans, hacks — among whom there is no difference in the Ellisonian critical view — and if this fails to impress the reader, there is a list of media-saturated superheroes following on its heels. The Playboy reader is told that while he was "busy fighting wars," comic books went whistling past puberty and reached adulthood. But, wait. What wars were Playboy readers fighting when comics went flying past puberty? Korea? Vietnam? Grenada? Wall Street? Surely this means something, but what?

The first comic Ellison praises as emblematic of the new-found artistic adulthood... The Incredible Hulk. I'm not kidding. Consider this for a moment. In a world in which Art Spiegelman's Maus has been nominated for a National Book Award, has been generally praised for bringing literacy and seriousness to a sustained comics narrative, and has sold more copies and received more intelligently favorable press than any other comics album in the U.S.... Ellison chooses to introduce Playboy's readers to the world of adult comics by praising some hackwork in an issue of The Incredible Hulk. (Consider also that Maus was not even mentioned once, and you begin to realize the astonishing incompetence at work here.)

The Hulk story is described as "one of the most powerful battered-wife stories you'll encounter outside 60 Minutes," simultaneously placing the story into a neat little media category and comparing it to a popular weekly television show — which more or less exemplifies the dummied-up critical method at work here. But, let's look briefly at the Hulk story, whose author Ellison ranks later with Alan Moore and the Hernandez Brothers.

Each and every character — including the Hulk — is a stereotype. There is the small-town bully and wife-beater who terrorizes the town in his role as sheriff; there's the long-suffering wife who longingly remembers better days with hubby. The drawing is a bland combination of various artists who have worked in the superhero tradition, such as John Byrne and Gil Kane. The story is told in traditional comic book terms with typically overheated, melodramatic dialogue, of which this is representative: "I'm the boss here. I'm in charge and no sawed-off runt tells me what to do." Brilliant prose. The bully predictably gets his comeuppance by the Hulk and is accidentally shot by his wife, who says: "I... I didn't mean to do that," to which the Hulk cheerfully hops off and replies, "Sure ya didn't. Aw, don't cry, Banner, you should feel good after all... you thought you were alone. But you see, there's monsters everywhere." The moral of this odious pap, therefore, being that everyone — victim as well as victimizer — is a monster. Ellison considers this "a mainstream examination of the tyranny of town bullies, and the brutalization of women." Actually, it's considerably cruder than an average episode of Route 66 and bears even less relationship to art than one.

Something called The Big Prize by "the talented [i.e. mediocre] Gerard Jones" is ballyhooed, and the third specific reference is to William Van Horn's Nervous Rex, long ago canceled, but which is favorably compared to Walt Kelly's Pogo, and the Jay Ward production Dudley Do-Right. The incongruity between Kelly's brilliant pogo and claptrap like Dudley Do-Right never occurs to Ellison — though I suppose if art were like math and you were to average the two out you might wind up with Nervous Rex — but how does Nervous Rex of all things rank so high as to be the third comic singled out for praise?

Well, never mind. There are more mysteries to ponder, such as this sentence which immediately follows the praise for Hulk scripter Peter David, Gerard Jones, and William Van Horn:

"Those are a mere handful of the creations of a cadre of some of the most innovative, wildly imaginative artists and writers this country has ever produced, work-for-hire talents who have created a vast body of popular art that constantly struggled against Philistine ignorance and market-place brutality toward High Art."

What "cadre" of "innovative, wildly imaginative artists and writers" is he talking about? Are Van Horn, Jones, and the Hulk team the cadre? Is he referring to that list of names he reeled off seven paragraphs ago? If so, this is some of the most disconnected writing Ellison has ever put to paper. If he's actually referring to the likes of Stan Lee, Bill Finger, C.C. Beck, and Bob Kane, the description of their constant struggle "toward High Art" is laughable. Most of these creators were hacks who never thought in terms of High Art, Low Art, or indeed, art of any kind. (Stan Lee has probably never heard of High Art.)

The problem here may be Ellison's genuine inability to make nuanced value judgments, but more than likely it's also the need to concoct "facts" to fit a thesis. His thesis is that there's "a vast body" of brilliant work in the history of mainstream comic books that has struggled toward High Art. The idea of comics as a monolithic historic who have always been struggling toward High Art is romanticized nonsense, but Ellison insists upon this because his every statement must be hypertrophically exaggerated to fit some ad hoc thesis. Therefore, he will lump together Jack Cole and Jack Kirby with considerably lesser talents such as Bill Finger and Bob Kane. Stan Lee and Will Eisner occupy the same plane in the hierarchy. They are all the same, you see, all struggling against Philistine ignorance and toward High Art. And this is all populist sophistry designed to simultaneously impress and pander to like-minded dilettantes who share Ellison's superficial grasp of values.

The fact is there are too few first-rate comics creators in the history of mainstream comics to support the proposition of "a vast body" of popular art struggling toward High Art. Even Frank Miller, not exactly known for his Ivory Tower standards of pop culture, referred to the history of comics as "50 years of crap. And," he added, "people talk as if we've got a heritage behind us." Yes, people like Harlan Ellison.

But, the theory must go on, and so must the sub-theory, which is that popularity-literary greatness, and it runs like this:

"If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is universal recognition, in all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman, and child on the planet. The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet; the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Djakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood... and Superman."

But, obviously, one of the "unarguable criteria" for literary greatness is not "universal recognition," however eccentrically Ellison chooses to define the term. If the widow in Djakarta knows who Mickey Mouse is but doesn't know who Don Quixote or Jay Gatsby is, it doesn't follow the Walt Disney's studio is collectively greater than Cervantes or Fitzgerald. This is nonsense, but it is nonsense with a purpose for it forms the theoretical foundation for Ellison's perspective, which is not that the expressive potentialities of the comics form are being refined and exploited to greater artistic ends now than previously, but that comics have always been brilliant, that that brilliance has merely been recognized recently by the mass media, and that said brilliance is actually multiplying because the number of comics being published has recently multiplied. The argument is less artistic than it is economic, which is why it's so artistically impoverished. Artistically, Ellison's argument is a dead end: trashy old comics have always been brilliant in their way, and now they are even more brilliant because there are more of them. Economically, the argument has two prongs: first, the mass media has finally gotten hip and is promoting all this trashy wonderfulness, and second, creators are getting paid better because, after all, independent publishers have stolen so many talents away from Marvel and DC. (The implicit absurdity of this will be made explicit presently.)

The revolution, according to Ellison, is just seven years old: "And, at last, in just the past seven years, it has become clear that intelligent adults, lovers of art, discriminating readers, observers of the forces that shape our culture are rediscovering the comic book." Note the use of the word rediscover. The comics that today represent the most mature use of the form are not derived from those comics that were discovered in the past by children who are rediscovering them today as adults. Contemporary comics that embody an adult, literary perspective are of a different nature entirely. Their creators have refined the form as well as the content. Their work is not revamped superheroes or derivations of old mainstream comics genres. Their advantage over earlier comic book artists of great talent is that they are not called upon to subordinate their talents to purely commercial ends. Their work therefore has the potential of being an integrated whole in a way previous comic book creators working under totalitarian commercial conditions were not. It is a potential that has been realized, in my view, and it points toward the future of literate comics, whereas the "freedom" of creators to reinvent old comics characters does not because such freedom as circumscribed by narrow and trashy parameters is no freedom at all.

The comics artists who are using such freedom to worthwhile artistic end would include R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Peter Bagge, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Chester Brown, David Boswell, Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, Gilbert Shelton, Jim Woodring, a number of others who are even lesser known, and others who show great potential but haven't produced enough work by which to make a reasoned judgment. Ellison would not think to mention these cartoonists (except six works accorded the Hernandezes, who were too hip to exclude) or to search out lesser known but infinitely more interesting talents because his tastes lean toward accessible, mass-market kitsch — as do Playboy's which is why Ellison's and Playboy's perspectives form such a perfect union.

Take a look at his list of characters who fit his "unarguable criteria for literary greatness": Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood, and Superman. Of the five, only Sherlock Holmes has any claim to literary stature, and it's a minor claim at that. The rest all share certain attributes. They are all intellectually unchallenging. They are all escapist in nature. They are all positively inoffensive, hence their accessibility and broad appeal. In short, they offer no resistance to and receive none from a public composed of passive culture consumers. Dan Jacobsen referred to those "readers who look to fiction simply to make them feel more secure in the views they already hold." In a word, middlebrow. Ellison is one such reader.

After a tendentiously dishonest historical interlude that inexplicably appears in the middle of this essay and destroys what meager focus and momentum it achieved up to this point and about which more later — Ellison finally represent the "best" comics available, that "have as much emotional and intellectual clout as the best movies, the best novels, and one or two items on television." One is, by now, unsurprised at the provinciality of such as list: Omaha the Cat Dancer, Lone Wolf and Cub, The Spirit, Hellblazer, Watchmen, Concrete, and — I kid you not — The Fish Police. Not a terrible list when you stop to think about it. The titles are better than average; they are probably about as good as those one or two items on television, but they are, one hopes and prays, by no means as good as the best contemporary fiction and film. It is the second best — and it is stretching matters to call Hellblazer and The Fish Police even the second best that Ellison is shamelessly championing. Well, he's not hustling Mercedes on television commercials, either.

Two things are striking. The first is the capriciousness of the list. When one eschews the best in favor of the second best, the quantity of entries multiplies. There is no real reason why so much space was given to The Fish Police and barely a nod given to Dave Sim's Cerebus — when come to think of it, Cerebus is a much better and more significant book. Why Hellblazer over Nexus? Why not Elfquest as well as Concrete? Elfquest is dear, too. The caprice gives a new, perverse dimension to the old adage, de gustibus non est disputandum.

Second, one is struck by how desperate Ellison's encomiums sound. The critical language is thin and hackneyed, the literary allusions pathetic. Rimbaud Baudelaire, Proust, Hammett (twice!), Auchincloss, Chandler, Willeford, and Melville are all conscripted into service. My favorite — and it was a close call — is comparing Alan Moore's Watchmen to Marcel Proust. This is the proof, in case you were wondering, or Ellison's coming critically unglued.

Taste this abysmally awful accompanied by such purported sophistication can't survive without historical verification. Ellison's warped historical perspective completes the picture, and makes for a consistent if preposterous overview of the comics profession. Here's how the growth of adult comics came about, according to Ellison:

"But seven years ago the creator-owned comic came into existence, and the all-powerful interests that ran the Gulag [Marvel and DC] 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 to traditional newsstand distribution methods."

This is complete, or at least incomplete bullshit. First, the "best talents" at Marvel and DC did not go to work for the independents, no matter how you define best — or independents for that matter. A mere handful of creators started producing work for the independents and this work was by no means "offbeat and original." It was, in fact, the same adolescent sludge that they'd been producing for Marvel and DC for years — junk like Mike Grell's Starslayer, for example.

Second, direct-sales shops did not spring up all over the country "in a matter of months"; the direct-sales system was already established and the number of stores had been continually growing since the system's inception in 1974-5. Nor were direct-sales comic shops selling "many times the units being sold by traditional newsstand-distribution methods" in a matter of months. This shift took some ten years to develop, but I suppose to someone who thinks Alan Moore is as good as Proust, ten years isn't much different from "a matter of months."

Finally, the creator-owned comic didn't "come into existence" seven years ago; it came into existence 20 years ago. Ellison may not have been paying attention at the time, but while he was serving as "gadfly to the Establishment" and making a name for himself on the fast track as the enfant terrible of televisionland by praising Laugh-In and excoriating the "squares" for watching The Beverly Hillbillies, cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson, Spain Rodriguez, and others were publishing underground comics, which was a breakthrough for creators' rights as well as a revolution in the content of comic books. They owned their work lock, stock and barrel. They wouldn't work for the robber barons dominating the comics industry because they couldn't stomach their business practices or their idiot aesthetic. They took economic advantage of the non-corporate counterculture booming at the time and were published "underground," wrenching comics out of their heretofore unchallenged adolescent context and, perhaps inadvertently, changing public perception of comics as purely juvenile in nature.

End of History Lesson #1. Ellison continues: "Companies such as Comico, Kitchen Sink, Eclipse, First Comics, Quality and Vortex [who's missing, boys and girls?] were stealing away the artists and writers who were producing the books that made them the most money."

This, too, is completely wrong. Virtually none of these companies published creators who were then working for Marvel and DC, and certainly none of these companies published the creators "that had made them the most money." Comico didn't, Kitchen Sink didn't; Vortex didn't. Quality published no American creators because it's a British firm that reprints British creators in the American market. (If Ellison had ever seen a comic published by Quality, he would've known this.) Eclipse published Alan Moore's Miracleman, but this was when Moore was writing Swamp Thing, which was not a big seller at DC. First published Howard Chaykin and Mike Grell, but Chaykin wasn't working for Marvel or DC at the time and hadn't for quite a while. The only artist with any clout, as Ellison would put it, was Mike Grell.

Even Ellison's proof, meager though it is, to support this assertion is misleading. After mentioning Grell, he refers to Sergio Aragone's Groo. But Aragones wasn't working for Marvel or DC, so couldn't have been "stolen" away from them. (And Ellison conveniently forgets to mention that Groo is now published by a member of the Gulag.) Next, he says that Timothy Truman wrote Eclipse's Airboy. Not only did Truman never write Airboy, but he never worked for DC or Marvel either, so he couldn't have been "stolen" away. And that's it. That's his proof for this silly, discredited historical thesis. But of course, there's more.

The Fish Police, he says, was "copping reams of critical praise" (it wasn't) and he continues, obviously ignorant, Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was "a gag parody of the profusion of X-Men comics flooding the market" (it wasn't; it was a parody of Frank Miller's Ronin).

One of the more absurd themes that runs throughout his essay is that the backs of Marvel and DC have been broken. Ellison writes that Frank Miller ("the ass-kicking, indefatigable spokesman for a new, adult outlook on funnybooks," wouldn't you know) "wouldn't produce for anyone simply with a work-for-hire contract anymore, so DC lured him away with a royalty deal, and he created the astonishing multileveled six-book 'graphic novel' Ronin; and then The Dark Knight Returns... and it was all over for the plantation mentality."

This is all wildly deceptive revisionism. Contrary to Ellison's implication otherwise, Miller's Dark Knight was done under a work-for-hire contract; DC (as well as Marvel, from whom Miller was lured away) had already initiated the practice of offering royalties (or "bonuses" as they're slyly referred to); and most important, it was not all over for the plantation mentality.

But Ellison actually seems to believe this. Elsewhere, he writes: "It was The Watchmen following Dark Knight's opus, that kicked the Gulag's door off its hinge." And again: "[Miller] opened the door and, because there were now alternatives to work-for-hire, work-at-command, other restless creators kicked that door off its hinges and the Gulag began to empty." How wrong can one man be, you might wonder. In fact, the Gulag is alive and well. There has been no mass exodus. The Gulag has not begun to empty. If anything, there are more creators working for the Gulag than ever before. Insofar as independent publishers have increasingly adopted Marvel's and DC's business practices and begun publishing licensed "properties" (adopting their "artistic" practices as well) the Gulag — it's lack of integrity, its hack ethos, its work-for-hire requirement — has expanded its franchise. Most creators love this because it means an expanded market. And expanded market means more money. And the money in the Gulag is quite good. (Ellison fails to mention how happy the creators are to take the Gulag's money; needless to say, the analogy between Marvel and DC and the Gulag Archipelago — offensive on the face of it, an insult to Russians serving time there, and a trivialization of their plight — breaks down almost immediately.)

Not only did Miller's Dark Knight and Moore's Watchmen not break the backs of Marvel and DC as Ellison claims, they actually succeeded in popularizing the glamour and status of working in the Gulag, making the Gulag that much more attractive. They also showed young creators where the money was. Miller's success on Dark Knight could hardly have served to inspire young creators to seek independence, originality, or alternative publishers; rather its most probable effect was to "inspire" young creators (not to mention older creators on the make) to revamp worn-out old superheroes and aim for a potload of money and media attention. Miller's and Moore's success at DC is DC's success. The media attention, the economic windfall to the creators, the adult-ization, all rebounded to DC's benefit, legitimizing DC in the eyes of gullible young creators who always dreamed of working in the big time. Far from deflating DC, Miller's Dark Knight only succeeded in inflating the company's reputation. Moore, much to his credit, renounced the whole racket and began publishing himself. Miller has, predictably, moved over to Hollywood.

Here's history lesson #2. Ellison should pay special attention.

The direct sales market began around 1974-5 when Phil Seuling started distributing mainstream comics directly to comics shops. Presumably there were enough comics shops nationwide at the time to sustain Seuling's distribution company, Seagate Distributing. Comics conventions were still going strong. Underground comics, though past their heyday, were still being published by Rip-Off Press, Last Gasp, Print Mint, and Kitchen Sing. Arcade, edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, started publishing in 1975 and continued though 1976. Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest and Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark started publishing in 1978. The Comics Journal began publishing in 1976.

What became obvious was that a legitimate economic market was developing. To some of us it was an alternative to the mainstream market; to others it was another market with more precise demographics — a marketer's dream come true. But Marvel and DC were the economic backbone of the direct-sales comics shops. Underground publishers were able to take advantage of this market. So were self-publishers like the Pinis and Sim; so were a growing number of small publishers such as Eclipse, Pacific, and Fantagraphics Books.

Here's the important part; artistically, there were, broadly speaking, two factions. One was the Marvel-DC aesthetic. Superheroes, action-adventure, traditionally attenuated comic-booky genre material, EC rip-offs, etc. The division of labor was broken down into its component parts — penciler, inker, writer, colorist, etc. The format was full-color standard comic book size. Pacific Comics, now defunct (and more or less resurrected as Blackthorne) was the first company to exploit the consumer preferences of the comic shops by publishing imitation Marvel-DC comics. (Others were to follow: First, Eclipse, Comico, et. al.) Pacific Comics, the first "independent" to publish imitation Marvel Comics, is the hero, according to Ellison, who challenged "the exploitive 'plantation mentality' of the traditional comics publishers" and paved the way for the renaissance described in all its fatuous glory.

But, the second faction evolved from the independent spirit of the underground comics. The predominant aesthetic of the underground was diametrically opposed to mainstream comics. They were politically shrill, excessive, sexual, personal, autobiographical. They were what mainstream comic were not, could not be. Underground comics artists had greater freedom than any comics artists preceding them; at their best this freedom was combined with values that disdained the standards of mass culture and the synthetic, arbitrarily-dictated tradition of mainstream comics. This freedom often became license, but the context allowed for diverse talents the caliber of Crumb, Shelton, Spain, Spiegelman, Griffith, and others to publish. (The underground head shop distribution network began disintegrating in the early-to-mid '70s, but the advent of the comics shop gave undergrounds a new, if comparatively tiny, market in which to sell.)

Three things happened in the '80s, one of which is artistically significant, two of which are interesting for sociological reasons. One, the number of comics shops had grown to such an extent that Marvel and DC felt compelled to pay attention to the fan cult who previously represented an insignificant percentage of their readership and was consequently ignored. This gave Marvel and DC their first opportunity to pander directly to a recognizable consumer category. Two, the Marvel-DC audience was large enough to inspire entrepreneurs on the make to try to tap into it by publishing Marvel-DC type comics (Pacific, First, Eclipse, Comico, et al. — and the list of opportunists grows daily). But, third, and most important, there was a flurry of artistic activity that broadly mirrored the principles, ideals, and values found in the underground comics: freedom taken seriously; attempts to confront issues of human relevance; a broadening of content, away from the juvenilia of mainstream comics and into realistic, naturalistic, satirical, and formalistic modes of expression: diverse and highly individual drawing styles.

Harvey Pekar deserves recognition in this regard because while I identify him with the burgeoning adult aesthetic of the '80s, he'd actually been publishing American Splendor since 1975 during a particularly bleak period in comics publishing and in virtual anonymity for half a decade.

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly started publishing Raw in 1980. R. Crumb's Weirdo began in 1981. Love and Rockets started publishing in 1982. William Messner-Loebs's Journey started publishing under the Aardvark-Vanaheim imprint in 1983. Rip-Off Press and Last Gasp continued to publish. Kitchen Sink broadened its editorial perspective and started publishing material outside the strictly underground tradition. European comics were imported and published in translation. The combined efforts of a handful of cartoonists and publishers committed to the mature, intelligent use of comics was finally yielding concrete results. And it could not have happened as it did without the liberating influence of underground comics.

All of this activity stood — and stands — in stark contrast to the institutionalized adolescent perspective of Marvel, DC, and their independent clones; their infantile artistic status quo; their pathetic marketplace acceptance of a degrading cultural norm; and to the "creators" who were — and are — complicit in the corporate driven opportunism and economic exploitation of hip trends and debased appetites.

Which is more or less what Harlan Ellison celebrates in his extended tribute to the joys of junk culture.

Weary readers will remember that several thousand words ago I mentioned that Ellison launched into an egocentric history of comic books in the middle of his essay. It's time to separate fact from fiction once again. Hang in there. This won't take long.

Most of this history is actually another variant of the old indignant frothing-at-the-mouth set-piece over Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's mistreatment at the hands of DC. Indignities and inequities are duly chronicled. Hysteria is kept to a minimum, melodrama to the maximum. (One might question the judgment of rehashing this well-known story when the space could be better used by writing about adult comics. But, I won't because I have bigger fish to fry.) All of this is tolerable until Ellison tells a couple of "authenticated" stories "that wallop you in the heart." They're straight out of Dickens. The first involves a "shabby old man" standing outside the Broadway premiere of the Superman musical, too impoverished to buy a ticket. You guessed it. The shabby old man turns out to be Joe Shuster. (Even for the sake of walloping the reader in the heart, it is grossly insensitive to refer to Shuster as "a shabby old man." Particularly when you stop to consider that this gut-wrenching characterization of Mr. Shuster is nothing more than a device meant to dragoon sympathy from the reader.)

The second story involves Shuster working as a messenger in New York City. "Broke, going blind, unable to get work in the industry he had helped bring into being, he was delivering parcels to midtown offices." As the story goes, he delivers a package to DC's offices and ends up confronting DC's publisher Jay Leibowitz — but this "authenticated" story has four endings! "One version has it..." Ellison blithely writes, apparently unaware that even by the slackest journalistic standards an "authenticated" story, the sole purpose of which is to indict a corporation as unfeeling brutes, cannot have four endings! It places one's credibility in jeopardy, and frankly, Ellison can't afford it. There's a suspicious turn of phrase a few lines earlier that smacks of hedging one's bets when Ellison writes "[Shuster] started to leave — so the tale goes — and Liebowitz, the guy who who'd gotten the boys to sign over Superman for $130, came out of his office." Look at the bracketed phrase "so the tale goes," and note the use of the word tale. As usual, no sources are id, though he earlier refers to "historian Steve Gerber (who, incidentally, is the creator of Howard the Duck)." This is a little like referring to "ace polo player Edward Teller (who, incidentally, is the creator of the atom bomb)." The fact is Gerber is not an historian.

Three more anecdotes cast doubt on Ellison's credibility.

Ellison strongly suggests that the comic book industry was directly and exclusively responsible for Wally Wood committing suicide. ("They didn't find his body for three days, there in that squalid little room.") The fact is the comic book industry had not been kind to Wally Wood, but Wally Wood had not been kind to Wally Wood either. Wood had serious problems throughout most of his life, and it is possible the lousy working conditions in the comics industry exacerbated them. It would require, at the very least, a detailed thesis and some offer of proof that to suggest the comics industry killed Wood, and Ellison offers nothing of the kind. Wood's extreme case is isolated. Consider that no other artist of Wood's generation bottomed out the way he did: Frank Frazetta went on to become one of the most successful fantasy painters in the world; Al Williamson went into newspaper strips and continues to work in commercial comics with no apparent suicidal tendencies; Bernard Krigstein went on to become a teacher and fine artist in New York City; Jack Davis went on to become one of the most successful commercial cartoonists in the country; and so on.

Ellison strongly suggests that Joe Maneely's tragic death was a direct result of working conditions in the comics industry, Maneely "having gone days without sleep to complete work unceasingly thrown at him by a publisher, rode a commuter train out to Jersey. He stepped between cars to clear his head — some say he'd been drinking, but so the hell what? — the train took a sharp curve, the cars jostled him and he slipped between them and was crushed to death." I like that bracketed remark, — some say he'd been drinking, but so the hell what? Well so the hell a lot, I'd say. Again, the story requires considerably more proof than Ellison offers (i.e. none) in order to prove his obvious conclusion that the comics industry killed Maneely. (And why doesn't he mention that the man throwing so much work at Maneely was none other than Ellison's good buddy Stan Lee?)

Jack Cole is the most repulsively and ingeniously exploited member in this grisly litany of death and tragedy. Ellison likewise implies that the comics industry killed Cole, but this doesn't hold up any way you look at it. ".... after 20 years of backbreaking labor in the comics Gulag," Ellison writes, "[Cole] said 'Ah, to hell with it' and pulled the trigger."

In fact, Ellison knows nothing but the bare-bones facts about Cole's death; he knows none of the circumstances nor the motivations behind his suicide. No one does.

Cole had quit comics in 1954; from '54 to '58, he became a successful gag cartoonist appearing regularly in Hefner's new magazine Playboy; he had also sold a syndicated strip, Betsy and Me, to the Chicago Times Syndicate, which was successful during its brief run. He was, in short, at the peak of his career, out of the comics industry he hated, and by all accounts a happy man. There was no known and no explicable reason for his suicide. Ellison's attempt to link his death to the comics industry is nothing less than a sleazy historical revisionism concocted to serve his own image as a tireless muckraker and rabble-rouser, and to support his tenuous thesis.

This is what I meant when I referred to the cunning and manipulative intelligence at work in Ellison's essay. All of this conniving and historical wheedling is all the more amazing considering that the comics industry is indeed guilty of treating its artists criminally throughout most of its history. The facts should speak for themselves. Why, then, can't Ellison state the facts straightfowardly without their being exaggerated, aggrandized, altered, fiddled with, dressed up, falsified — in short, Ellisonized? Must an economic injustice be treated like a tawdry melodrama merely for the sake of conforming to the sensationalistic standards of magazine journalism? Why must Steve Gerber's credentials be inflated to that of historian? Why must 50 years of crap be transmogrified into a "vast body of popular art that constantly struggled against Philistine ignorance and market place brutality toward High Art?" Why must Alan Moore be favorably compared with Proust? Why must Jamie Delano be id as better than Rimbaud and Baudelaire? Why must Frederic Wertham be likened to Cotton Mather?

It is not just that this is all intellectually defective; there's a more deeply rooted dishonesty at work here. All the name dropping, the literary language, the hip phrase-making represents the writerly equivalent of sound bytes or MTV. But there's an intellectual veneer to this technique that appeals to the pseudo-educated who would sneer at the more obvious attempts to pander directly to their emotions. It's an impressive tight-rope walk on Ellison's part: his rhetorical posturings are blisteringly elitist, but the content is pure middlebrow. It's dishonest because it's a strategy based upon intellectual superficiality and rhetorical excess, providing the kind of vacuous entertainment that Ellison professes to abominate. No one seriously interested in art, culture or politics expects to learn anything from Ellison. Basically, he appeals to the weekend intellectual, the upscale liberal who keeps up on civil rights issues by reading Playboy, and who catches a little tit at the same time. It's a shell game of sorts in which he's taken seriously only by readers who are themselves fundamentally unserious.

I have just enough stomach left to i one last instance of vindictive imbecility.

In the front page article about Ellison's Playboy contribution in the September 9th Comics Buyers Guide, Ellison is quoted as saying "What's the use of having power if you can't misuse it?" This was meant be taken as a joke, but the joke is on us.

At the end of his essay, Ellison plugs his friends at WAP! and the Comics Buyers Guide (predictably, he gives the wrong price for a subscription to WAP!), and can't resist taking a shot at The Comics Journal. He refers to the Comics Buyers Guide as place where "the new, strong voice of an art form coming to maturity can be heard." He refers to the Journal as "a critical journal... in the same way that the National Enquirer is a critical journal..."

Think about this for a minute. Let it sink in.

It should be obvious to anyone that CBG has no serious commitment to comics as an art form. Pick up any issue and you'll be confronted with front page stories about Spider-Man's new costume, and what's coming up in The Punisher, who's drawing The Avengers or She-Hulk next month, ad nauseam. It is a repository of useless up-to-the-minute-ephemera. They rarely go to the trouble of actually writing news stories, preferring to cobble them together from press releases. They emphasize the most artistically and intellectually bankrupt aspects of the status quo. Basically, they are an inordinately spineless shill for the largest financial interests (i.e., most well-heeled advertisers) in the comics industry, the companies Ellison would grandiloquently refer to as the Gulag. Whenever there is an issue of significant moral concern, Ellison's newspaper where "the new, strong voice of an art form coming of maturity can be heard" digs its head as deeply into the sand as it possibly can.

Earlier in his article, Ellison wrote that "only recently, after a public crusade, has [Jack Kirby] managed to regain a fraction of his originals [from Marvel Comics]..." Where were Ellison's pals at CBG when Kirby was trying to wrench his original art from Marvel? Buried in the sand, of course, though they would pop up occasionally just meekly to remind fans that there were two sides to the story. Who devoted time, energy, and resources to launch a national campaign to aid Kirby in his dispute with Marvel? That's right: The National Enquirer of critical journals. Where was CBG during the ratings-censorship controversy? In a recent CBG, the Thompsons practically boasted that they never took a position on this issue — though they were happy to print every half-baked know-nothing opinion from readers and professionals. The National Enquirer of critical journals took a position; it published investigative articles on the relevant issues; it interviewed the major protagonists involved, from both sides of the debate.

CBG, where you can hear the new, strong voice of an art from coming to maturity, encourages debate over whether Michael Keaton can play Batman well or not, or if John Byrne is ruining Superman. Important subjects like that. When the editors actually screw up their courage and take a stand on something, it's usually about something entirely harmless, inoffensive, and trivial — such as the Batman movie or convention etiquette — or they will go out on a limb and support an accepted industry practice, such as the work-for-hire contract. This was their classic editorial stand where they compared the creative act to hauling coal.

Eight and a half years ago, Ellison praised the Journal as "an exciting, contemplative, controversial journal that angers you, causes you to consider the status quo, ask troubling questions, and also provides basic news. It is a muckraking journal in the time-honored tradition of adversary journalism."

Why the switch? One, personal vindictiveness. My relationship with Ellison deteriorated (to put it mildly) during the Michael Fleisher litigation, and I fell from favor. Two, Ellison and CBG editors Don and Maggie Thompson have a relationship based on what could best be characterized as mutual ass-kissing. This particular dig at the Journal has less to do with judgment based upon the integrity of objective merit than it has to do with personal rancor, just as his praise of CBG cannot (one hopes) be based upon a genuine respect for an insipid, pusillanimous editorial point of view, but rather out of perverse loyalty to those who suck up properly.

Given this insidiously privatized perspective, how can Ellison's judgment ever be trusted? How can one separate evaluations based upon personal animosity and weird loyalties from those free of such distorting influences? The first answer is that it's impossible to do so, and the second answer is that it doesn't matter, because Ellison offers only the superficiality of prejudice, not the scrupulous reflection of judgment.

I've managed to come up with a way in which Ellison's essay could be made useful, however. Colleges and universities all over the country are now teaching courses in history and aesthetics of comics. Ellison's essay could be used by the instructors of such classes as a final examination of sorts. Any student who couldn't find at least 50 errors would automatically flunk. Students who unearth 80 or more errors of fact or fatuous statement would get an A, and so on.