sdelmonte | Not a Red Letter Day, and More...

On Thursday, DC Comics announed that the letter column, a staple of comic books for something like fifty years, was no more. With the advent of the online message board, where fans can communicate quickly and without editing with other fans and with creative talents, the letter to the editor had become outmoded. Which is true, but only part of the story as DC has long since stopped running critical or intelligent letters, and since the letter page shrank from two pages to 2/3rd of a page.

So the letter column, birthplace of Simon DelMonte, is gone. And while I have posted elsewhere about this, I think I will do a few entries about who Simon DelMonte is, who he came to be, and about the letter column in general. I'm feeling nostalgic for when the only way to communicate with the pors was by mail and when the thrill of seeing your letter was still fresh.

But I will start with the ultimate Simon DelMonte story, the Harlan Ellison Story, which cut-tagged due to length...

Back in my youth, Fantagraphics Books - makers of Love and Rockets and other non-superhero fare - published a magazine called Amazing Heroes. The magazine, despite Fantagraphics's dislike for costumed heroes, focused on such and welcomed letters on a variety of topics. I wrote one such letter. It was a critique of The Dark Knight Returns; Frank Miller's follow-up/prequel, Batman Year One; and Watchmen, written in light of an article in New York Newsday about the trend towards darker super-hero comics. My argument was that these works were too dark, too depressing and pessimistic. I compared these with Dennis O'Neil's dark but never entirely hopeless first issues of The Question, and I challenged the writers to inspire me rather than to depress me. I wrote it with the black-and-white worldview of a college sophomore, but I wrote it with some respect for comics in question. (I liked and still liked TDKR, although I find Watchmen too heavy to re-read in less than several weeks.)

The letters editor of Amazing Heroes didn't agree with my assessment completely - he argued that Watchmen was actually hopeful by stating how what happened in the real world in Vietnam was important for America's maturation and that we see in Watchmen what could have been. He also dismissed the politics in TDKR as being rather silly, and I think he was right. But he was civil.

Harlan Ellison wrote a nasty letter in response, comparing me with, among others, John Byrne, Ronald Reagan and Spiro Agnew (in that I was echoing Agnew's infamous "Nabobs of Negativism" speech). He ended by stating that I wouldn't know art if it gnawed on my leg in the middle of the night. (Which probably was true back then, and is an ironic statement given that I now work in a museum.)

The letter was responded to by Kim Thompson, the number two man at Fantagraphics back then, filling in while a new editor settled in on the magazine, and he let Harlan have it for his diatribe. Kim didn't defend me so much as castigate Harlan for his tone, asking, "what, was Cotton Mather on vacation when you wrote this letter?" Kim's feeling was say what you want but don't bite someone's head off.

I wrote a response to Harlan's letter, saying that I felt honored that I moved him to write a letter - something I think he has not done since in reagrd to comic books - and defending myself in a mild tone. The headline on this letter - something Amazing Heroes always did - was "Harlan's Victim?"

At the time, I claimed that his letter didn't bother me much. I have learned since that being insulted by Harlan Ellison is something of an honor in fandom and that he tends to put on a curmudgeon act. But my mother saw how hurt I was. A famous writer - one who wrote the best episode of my favorite TV show (Trek), to boot - had insulted me. To this day, I cannot make myself read anything written by him.

I know that he is a good member of the human race. When I mentioned on my board that I had gotten Harlan to write, without elaobrating at first, someone asked what I said. Someone else suggested that with Harlan, my name and address would have been enough to get him angry. Tony Isabella and my friend Sam Tomaino both spoke up to defend Harlan as a fine man and a charitable one at that. This is absolutely true. I've heard much the same thing over the years in fandom.

But I have to say that I really, really, hope that I'm never at a con with him. I simply do not want to be in the same place as him as at some level, that one letter hurt and left just a bit of a scar.

And yet, when I tell people this story, I think of it as my claim to fame. AFAIK, I was the only person Harlan Ellison ever insulted in print in the comic book community. And now Simon DelMonte was a name with just a bit of cache in comic book fandom. After that, the letters appeared in just about any comic I liked. I suspect some of it was because 100 or so people wote all the letters. But I always had the sense that my name, the name I chose as a pseudonym, now meant something. I was the guy who took for Harlan Ellison and came out standing.

But how and why Simon came to be is a story for another time.