by Zack Smith

As his 73rd birthday approaches, Harlan Ellison remains as passionate and opinionated as ever. The award-winning author, activist and self-proclaimed “pain in the ass” has recently seen the release of the long-awaited second volume of Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor from Dark Horse Comics.

The ten-years-in-the-making anthology features adaptations of his work by a who’s who of comics’ greatest talents, including Neal Adams, Paul Chadwick, Richard Corben, Gene Colan, Gene Ha, Tony Isabella, Martin Nodell, Rags Morales, Steve Niles, Steve Rude, Eric Shanower, Curt Swan, Ty Templeton and Mark Waid, just to name a few of the many contributors.

We recently got to ask Ellison, who will be the subject of the upcoming documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth and whose story “The Discarded” will be adapted for the ABC anthology series Masters of Science Fiction, some questions about Dream Corridor and comics in general. Well…actually, sometimes he asked the questions in this three=part interview. Read on to see what we mean…

Newsarama: Harlan, first off, how’s it feel to see the rest of Dream Corridor finally in print?

HARLAN ELLISON: I am quietly humble and proud.

NRAMA: Have you gotten any reactions from the people involved?

HE: (baffled) It just came out.

NRAMA: I mean, how do they feel to see this work they did 10 years ago finally see print?

HE: People are…glad it’s coming out. I tell you what: How about I pose the questions, and you just take down the answers, okay?

NRAMA: (sighs) Okay…

HE: C’mooooon…life’s too short. The first question I want to ask is, “Why did you do Dream Corridor in the first place, since you have such a, uh, a solid career in other mediums,” okay?

NRAMA: Well, I heard that you were going to do it as an HBO series originally…

HE: The reason that I did it was because I’ve been reading comic books since I bought my first comic or had it given to me in 1939. It was the first World’s Fair Comics, which later became World’s Finest Comics.

I have loved comics all my life, all my life. I had been a comic book kid, and as an adult, I still had all the comics, or most of the comics, that I bought as a kid. I had all of the Fawcett comics, all of the Quality comics, uh, uh, it feels like my collection is very large, or extensive, and I always wanted to do my own comic, and originally, as I’ve explained a number of times (Dream Corridor) was supposed to have been a television series, but they wanted me to pay for storyboards, and I said, “That’s bullsh*t, you give us the money and we’ll do it.” And they said, “We don’t want to do that.” I said, “Okay, go suck an, uh, an apple,” and, uh, I figured to myself, I thought to myself, “How can I get storyboards done with not only not paying for them, but also making a profit off of them?” And of course, the answer was to do it in a graphic form.

And that’s the way we did it, and that’s how I started it. Mike Richardson was good enough to – he’s a fan of my work, and he was good enough to know what I was going for, and he liked the proposition, and we did four issues.

My chief purpose in doing the comic was to provide what any number of people are always bitching about, whether it’s in Comics Buyers Guide or The Comics Journal or online – of course, back then there was no “online” – you know, “Gee, comics are only guys in capes!” “Gee, comics are only guys in spandex!” “Gee, comics are only women with, uh, gigantic breasts!” “Why aren’t comics really good?” So I said, “Okay, let’s see if they really want a good comic.”

So we broke our ass, ah, ah, beginning with Bob Schreck, and we ended up with a terrific editor, Diana Schutz, the greatest and best editor in all the business, and we put together the finest artists, the best adaptors, the best writers on my stories, and we found a package that was absolutely singular, ah, there was nothing else like it, and there has been nothing else like it ever since. And of course it sold only well enough that we went, ah, we went into hiatus. And this last issue is a sort of sad farewell to the golden ideal that everybody yells about and says they want, when all they really want is to pull another Spider-Man costume out of the closet and read about whether, I, uh, you know, whether Plastic Man’s wife is dead or not. So, ah, as you realize, the last two words in the magazine are, “Bite me!”

NRAMA: Right. So, you mention in the book that a number of the people who’ve worked on this have gone on to become major names in the industry since they contributed to Dream Corridor.

HE: That’s right.

NRAMA: How’s it feel to be ahead of you time there?

HE: I am quietly humble and proud.

NRAMA: (sighs) Were some of these stories done more recently than others, or were most of them back-inventory from the original run?

HE: Um….there only a couple. We, we wanted to use up everything that had been turned in, and there was a lot, because I had 10 years of other projects and I didn’t get around to it. But when we came down to the wire, we had an awful lot of work we needed to close up the loose ends and, uh, update a few things, and change a few panels that weren’t quite as strong as they should have been, uh, so we wound up in the end having a lot of new material to it. But I think it’s a representative gallery of what the field would look like if it were interested in anything other than recycling the same old characters over and over again.

NRAMA: In the book, you collaborate with a number of people who’ve adapted your stories in the past, such as Gene Colan and Richard Corben. In Gene’s story, “Moonlighting,” you include the original black-and-white pencils next to the colored pencils. Why did you make that decision?

HE: Because they were f**kin’ beautiful, that’s why!

NRAMA: He announced his retirement last year, so this might be one of the last stories he’s worked on to be seen in print.

HE: (quiet) Yeah. Gene – Gene Colan is one of the nicest people in the world. He’s a dear, good man, a, a marvelous talent, and, ah, and a very great heart. And, uh, I’ve been an admirer of his for decades, and we’ve worked together a number of times, but this was a particularly favorite, uh, uh, interlude for me because Gene liked the story, and Gene really went…it was pure Colan, which is like saying it’s pure gold.

NRAMA: And Rich – man, his stuff is just incredible in this one (“The Man on the Juice Wagon”). You’ve worked with him on Vic and Blood – what’s that process like? He seems to have a great feel for your stories, and adding to that sense of atmosphere.

HE: Yeah. Well, I – my first, um, encounter with Corben was when he and Jan Strnad had done the Arabian Nights book. And I was just knocked out by it, I loved his stuff, and then they asked me to do the introduction for it when they put it in graphic novel form, and I was delighted to do it, and that was the first time I actually looked at Richard’s work in situ, as we say in Latin, and, ah, I always wanted to work with him.

So when it came time to do some art for, um – “A Boy and His Dog” was, of course, the first part of the novel Blood’s a Rover, and, ah, I had Richard do – Jan, at that time, was doing Mad Dog Graphics, and he proposed that we do the first story in a four-issue format, black and white. I said, “Great,” and Corben just went right at it. He had it down pat the instant he did it. He got it, he just really got it!

And when we put it together as a full graphic novel, uh, we had Richard do that, and subsequently, when I had two other sections of the novel published, the section that proceeded (“A Boy and His Dog”) called “Eggsucker,” Richard did the painting for the magazine it appeared in, it was a magazine that Steranko was publishing at the time – Prevue, I think that’s what it was – and, uh, the painting was spectacular! It was four panels, which is not a triptych, it’s a – I don’t know what the hell the next one is. Two panels is a diptych, three panels is a triptych, I – god damned if I know. It was four panels, that appeared in full color. Subsequently, we used it on the full graphic novel.

Then, when I did the section that followed “A Boy and His Dog,” which is called “Run, Spot, Run,” Richard did the illustrations for it, and it was published in Amazing Stories, a digest-sized science fiction magazine, and Richard did the illustrations for that. Then, when we were going to put it together into the whole novel, which is 60, another 100,000 words and it’s never been published, that I did as a television pilot that wasn’t made for various reasons that had nothing to do with material, but was something internal with the network – Richard did the cover for the Ace paperback, which never came out, but we saved that cover, and it will be used whenever we do the book. And so Richard just became sort of associated with my work in some respects. He’s done other jobs with me, and of course we did “The Man on the Juice Wagon.”

Let me tell you a funny thing. There was only one correction – a lot of times, when you get art, you go, “Oh, we could punch this up, this line has to go, we can’t tell what’s going on in such-and-such panel.” In the final panel, the one where she’s giving the finger to the guy, you couldn’t tell what she was doing! He did it as a high aerial shot, looking down on her from behind, holding he hand in the air, and you couldn’t tell if she was waving or what! So, uh, we said, “You gotta make it look more obvious!” And Richard did it again – you still couldn’t tell! So I said, “We’re going to have to have an inset of –“ that’s what it’s called, an inset?

NRAMA: Yeah.

HE: We’d have the shot, and there’d be an inset with the finger pointed up. (laughing) And Richard couldn’t get the finger! He couldn’t get the finger! We had to do it about 1,100 times, ‘til we finally got the right finger, where it looks like she’s giving the finger!

NRAMA: Well, it looks great in the final result.

HE: Oh yeah! Yeah! We just keep doing ‘til it’s right! And I love the editing, and working with Diana Schutz, who is absolutely superlative. She’s smart, and she’s flawless, and she’s painstaking. She’s like a turtle that hangs on – even when it thunders, she will not let go of something until it’s absolutely right. So both of us were beating Richard over this one goddamn circular panel inset of someone giving somebody the bird!

NRAMA: Now, what you’re talking about there – that actually hits into something I wanted to talk about, comparing some of the adaptations of your lesser-known stories to the adaptations of your better-known material. In the past, you’ve spoken about some of the difficulties involved in getting some fundamental aspect of the story to come across in the artwork –

HE: Yeah.

NRAMA: -- such as Alex Nino’s surreal take on “’Repent, Harlequin!’” in Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, or Neal Adams’ cover for his adaptation of “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich” in Twilight Zone. In reading Dream Corridor, I noticed that with the adaptations of lesser-known stories, there’s a greater sense of visual freedom. I really love, for example, Steve Rude’s splash panel at the end of “The Discarded,” where he’s doing his Nexus thing, it’s adding an almost improvised jazz element to it. So what I’m getting at is, do you agree or disagree, do you feel adapting your lesser-known stories gives more freedom to the adaptor?

HE: Well, every piece of art has its proper – the word isn’t “provenance,” it’s proper – um, um, “landscape.” Something that is a piece of sculpture is not adaptable in truth to – let me rephrase that, because I’m climbing over my own syntax – there are some stories that should never be made into movies. There are some novels that should never be made into television shows. There are some paintings that, ah, you cannot write a story around, because they’re too abstract. Anything can be written, but is it good art or bad art? When, ah, when you take a story that everybody knows, you already got a set, ah, an in-place mindset, and, ah, trying to picture it anew only conflicts what you saw in your head, so there’s the likelihood of someone saying, “Well, I didn’t like that because it wasn’t what I thought it was.” You run that risk.

With a lesser-known story, you have a good deal more freedom. Now, in every story – with the case of one exception, from my earlier editor who wanted to give something to an artist I didn’t care for, and it was never used – I picked the artist, I picked the writers who did the adaptations, and I was hands-on with my line producer, who would be Diana Schutz, or, in earlier cases, Bob Schreck or Anina Bennett. I was not an absent landlord. It is my book, with these other people in collaboration.

And so I had an idea of what I wanted things to look like. And very often, because I like to think I have some – because I cannot draw, and I have no artistic ability myself, but I’ve designed all my book covers – I like to think that I have a sense of what the envelope is, and how far I can push it. For instance, on “Djinn, No Chaser,” I saw it in my mind as an antic kind of humorous – remember that television series Love, American Style?

NRAMA: Oh sure, yeah.

HE: Well, it was that kind of thing. It’s a, a funny sitcom idea. So I don’t want it to be mimetic art, I don’t want it to be representational. I would never have used somebody like Gene Ha, or Shawn McManus, or, ah, Jim Lee. I wanted somebody who can do not cartoony, but a lot more antic. I thought of Jay Lynch, who has that kind of broad sense of exaggeration, absolutely perfect, and I love the panel with the genie kind of bending over with his hands on his knees, talking to these two little humans. I just love that. Ah, and so I picked Jay Lynch when it to doing that story.

The story that Gene Colan did, that’s a fairly noir, hard-boiled, ah, ah, suspense, mystery-suspense story. Now, Gene, he works in shadow, and his pencils have a lot of perspective, so I picked Gene to do that. I was going to write it in black-and-white originally, because his pencils are spectacular, as you can see, but then, by mistake, it was sent out for coloring! And when the colored pages came back, we looked at what Dave Stewart had done, and went, “It’s gorgeous!”

Most editors would have said, “We can’t waste five pages to run them twice,” but the coloring was so good, I didn’t want to waste it. Diana – it became a genuinely collaborative gestalt that a whole group of people put together. If you look at the book, from one end to the other, it plays straight on through, as if it were a story collection of mine, with me as the, you know, the omniscient author, or the overseer, the straw boss, commenting and making wry observations, and it plays straight on through from beginning from where we have been to where we’re going, and the last words, “Bite me.”

It’s all a piece of me, because Diana Schutz is such a smart editor. Whatever bizarre idea I would think of, she would go along with it, up to and including publishing upside-down the latest bulletin about the TV version of “The Discarded.” Right up until practically the day they sent it off to press, we were refining, trimming, sanding it out a little bit, making sure that it, ah, had the proper, ah, movement through the air.

It’s a, ah, – I’m enormously proud of this comic. And if I were a kid, or I were a comic book reader, I would think this was just a terrific comic. Which I – it’s probably not right to do a review, but what else am I supposed to say? But I don’t believe in blowing smoke – if I were dissatisfied or unhappy with it, I would probably cop to it and say, “Yeah, we screwed the pooch here,” but – this is such a labor of love, and a demonstration of professional expertise on the part of everybody, that I just puff up like a powdered pigeon with how pretty this book is.

And it’s selling out like it was made of, you know, sterling silver! I got a call the day this came out – I got three phone calls from three different stores from different parts of the country. One guy said he sold out 40 copies before noon! And I said, “Oh my god, that’s wonderful, what are you going to do?” He said, “Order another 40!” And if it sells well, it will be a great reward. If it doesn’t sell – the hell with everybody, it exists. It exists, and it’s like a piece of, of, Rodin sculpture. Two hundred years after he did it, or a hundred years after Rodin did the statue, there it stands. The wind can come and go, and it doesn’t hurt it any. And the comic is real.

End of Part One

Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor is available in shops and bookstores now.

Tomorrow: Ellison’s thoughts on the comics of today...