The champion of the comics blogosphere, Heidi McDonald, has posted breaking news about Harlan Ellison’s lawsuit against Fantagraphics. There’s a PDF of the complaint at Journalista here. From reading the PDF, Harlan is suing over two issues: published excerpts from Fanta’s upcoming company biography, Comics As Art: We Told You So, and the cover attribution on The Comics Journal Library 6: The Writers, where he is credited as “Famous Comics Dilettante”.
I wish I had time to convert the text in the PDF to something readable here. It’s probably the funniest legal complaint I’ve read. I’m not saying it’s without merit. It’s just hilarious writing.
Here’s what’s bothering me: did Fantagraphics really “gratuitously insult” Harlan by calling him a “Famous Comics Dilettante”? Merrian-Webster defines “dilettante” as either “an admirer or lover of the arts” or “a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge: dabbler”. They list “amateur” as a synonym.
Harlan’s certainly no amateur: comics.org credits him with 115 writing credits in comics. But of those credits, 26 of them are for one comic, Harlan Ellison’s Chocolate Alphabet. Another 42 are for Harlan’s Dark Horse Dream Corridor series, and there were only 7 issues of those. Many of the credits for that series really reflect that the comic adapts original stories from other media that Harlan created. In addition, there are a few reprint credits in there. Given how prolific Harlan’s been in other media such as television and prose, it’s no insult to call him a “dabbler” in comics. I’d be surprised if his comics work made up more than a few percentage points of his total output.
Harlan is the only writer not credited with a work in comics on the cover. But the other writers named (Chris Claremont, Gerry Conway, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Archie Goodwin, Alan Moore, Denny O’Neil, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman) have done substantially more work in comics than Ellison. At the time of the book’s publication in February of this year, Harlan was doing very little work in comics- to the best of my knowledge, he had worked on the Julius Schwartz DC Comics Presents tributes, and had been involved with iBooks reprinting his Vic and Blood work. For Ellison, this is the sort of work he’d do before brunch.
Again, I’m not saying the whole of Ellison’s suit is without merit; I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not as familiar with the Comics Journal/Michael Fleischer lawsuit as others are. But I do think Ellison taking insult over being called a “Famous Comics Dilettante” is a bit of nonsense.
Oh, Harlan. Lawsuit?
How much money can you get?
Fanta’s worth Peanuts.