Everyone please stop misspelling “sycophant”! It’s driving me nuts.

I’ve exchanged a few friendly e-mails with Clifford and hope to lay this matter to rest by proving to his satisfaction that the “they secretly have libel insurance” claim is 100% bogus. I’m sure he can still find at least six or eight other reasons to hate us unimpeded even once that one goes away.

I’m always amazed at how a certain group of people are willing to tarnish their own reputations to defend Harlan Ellison’s more questionable activities. We saw it after Worldcon, and now this.

Cliff Meth seems like a fairly intelligent, reasonably accomplished guy, and here he is, frying his own credibility as genre journalist to make ad hominem statements about a defendant in a very dubious lawsuit. There are other ways to support a friend, that don’t require one to compromise their own integrity.

(Along those lines, I’m a long-ago contributor to Amazing Heroes who thinks Ellison is an asshat.)

Sorry, the damn thing just posted my response in mid-composition.

“Anyone can be anonymous” doesn’t get it: It’s not a fact that Gary slandered (or libeled) Ellison, it’s the matter under dispute. Most people who’ve taken the trouble to read the actual court documents realize that, in fact, Gary has enormous factual backup for both statements that are at issue. But most people commenting on this case can’t be bothered to actually read the public documents and are going purely by gut instinct, personal bias, or a lazy reading of what other people have said.

INFORMED opinion. It’s worth a try.

Or take this paragraph toward the end: “So, again, why is Groth begging alms for the poor? Answer: This appears to be a PR coup for the publisher who once thought his Comics Journal would make him the Hunter S. Thompson of the comics industry. Sadly, TCJ has become irrelevant, publishing porn has dubious merits, and it seems the only way Groth can virally promote his company is by manufacturing controversy.”

The implication is that this is a company on the way out: Its magazine sucks, the porn isn’t selling and promotion is tough because no one covers Fantagraphics unless there’s some controversy attached. Fantagraphics’ Peanuts and Popeye reprints are mentioned earlier as “licensing deals,” but it’s as if all the great contemporary cartoonists that Fantagraphics has published – Los Bros Hernandez, Charles Burns, Jim Woodring, Linda Medley, etc., etc. – never existed.

It’s a bit like describing Ellison as a former girlie-mag editor while ignoring the fact that the magazine in question had an amazing list of contributors or not making any mention of Ellison’s many other notable achievements.

As for the whole issue of why we don’t have libel insurance: It’s very expensive — it is, in fact, particularly expensive when the company has a history of being sued for libel (which we have, three times — all silly lawsuits, all eventual defeats for the plaintiffs), for the same reason that hurricane insurance is a lot more expensive when your house has been knocked down three times by hurricanes in the past. Moreover, if you’ve relying on your libel insurance, you have to then accept the insurance-company laywers, who are not necessarily the best and whose prime loyalty is to avoid costing the insurance company money, not helping you defend the case — OR you can, as we did with the original Ellison/Fleisher case, insist on hiring your own counsel and paying for that.

So with libel insurance we’d have gotten to pay a very high premium for the last 20 years, and then when we got sued by Harlan, pay a high deductible and then hire our own lawyers of which the insurance company would likely pay only a fraction. Sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? Yeah, we’re real

But he’d risk a libel suit by slandering a respected author. And he solicited funds for the Fleisher suit and admits to having had insurance then, too.

Conficts of interest aside, I still find it hard to believe that Groth would risk alienating his company’s supporters (not to mention a fraud conviction) by soliciting money for a defense fund that he didn’t need. I find it much more believable that he either has a low-grade errors and omissions policy that covers damages and not legal expenses (note that his Feb. 25 post says nothing about not having the insurance, just that all legal expenses were being paid out of pocket), or he decided not to carry the insurance for whatever reason (cost? stupidity?). So I’m choosing slightly inept businessman over evil schemer, but I’m guessing that in the well-mannered spirit of Tony Isabella, we’ll have to agree to disagree, since, really, who the heck knows, other than Gary Groth?