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Friday, May 25, 2007

Harlan Ellison on Identity Crisis

From his Newsarama interview. Ah, candidness.

B

NRAMA: I was curious about what you thought of Identity Crisis and some of the other crossovers, because I’m guessing you were not a fan…

Harlan Ellison: Horses**t. A maximum amount of pointless s**t. Not to be too candid about it.

2 comments:

TrevorAMueller said...

Clearly Mr. Ellison doesn't know very much about you or many of the writers in the comic business, and is making assumptions. He later says [quote]It’s this generation of writers who’ve been raised on television, and not good television either. They are not writers who’ve been raised with the tradition of the stage, and theater, or even the movies that had much originality. And they’re all sort of imitating each other.[/quote]

Obviously, this doesn't relate to someone like you, who has admitted many times over to having been raised by comics and inspired by their writing - even in the way you write your novels.

I'll give him props for commenting on Alan Moore's work, but other than that it sounds like his opinions are based on generalizations about media consumption and how many writers are working cross-media (example: Brian K. Vaughn working on comics and writing TV and movie scripts, which is pretty awesome in my book, but apparently this guy does not approve). I wouldn't pay it another thought, as I know Identity Crisis was pivital to the DCU current continuity, and I haven't even read it yet (my comic store has been out of it for a little while now, and whenever they get it in they sell right out of it again - I have one on hold for me, now).

I think your fans will contest to the fact that you're doing a damn fine job of writing comics, and the fact that Wizard has you in their top 10 comic writers list would also help to confirm the amazing job you're doing.

I say keep up the good work, sir!

T

Colin said...

That's a pretty poorly written interview. Really could've used an edit of all the ums and uhs.