I know everyone is hot and bothered, but the server is very busy, so please don’t keep hitting send when you post! We are getting tons of double posts! PATIENCE.

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  1. As an aside to this aside–over the past couple weeks the Beat has gone from something I glanced out in my feed to absolutely essential reading. Keep it up!!

  2. Announcing: The Friends of Groth and Ellison

    To all friends and supporters of Harlan Ellison and/or Gary Groth: As a long-time friend/acquaintance of both Harlan and Gary, I am making a plea to you, their friends, and to all people of good will who respect the work of either or both of them. Please join me in asking them to shake hands at their upcoming mediation and end this silly, wasteful pissing match. End it. End it now. If not for their own sakes, then for ours, yours and mine.

    Harlan, you know full well that if your lawsuit is successful, it could very well be the ruin of Fantagraphics. You won’t admit that possibility in public and Gary’s certainly not going to, but it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain. Is that really the kind of legacy you want to leave the creative arts community? You have been such a champion of everyone’s right to free expression over the years. Do you really want to be known as the guy who strangled–out of pique–the last best hope for struggling writers and artists? Because if you should win, that is how you will be remembered.

    Gary, Gary, Gary. Give Harlan the space he needs from your poking and snickering. Admit to the good things he’s written over his career and acknowledge the good fight he’s fought for the rights of creators. Is this the legacy you want to leave? That of throwing pies in the face of an aging writer you once admired?

    Even if you two can’t see it, the rest of us can–you guys are on the same side! You’re on our side. And we’re on yours. It burdens our hearts to see you two going at it in a cruel, mutually-destructive parody of the old Fleisher lawsuit you both fought so valiantly against–and won together!–20 years ago.

    It would be nice if you would both just shut up about each other but no one who knows either of you expects that to happen. We do ask that you restrain yourselves just a wee bit–enough, at least, to end these lawsuits.

    And get over yourselves. Neither one of you has said anything about each other worth going to court over. You don’t like what the other guy said about you? Tough. You’re a grown-up. Take it like a man and move on with your life. What kind of perverse power are you giving to the other guy to hold over your life, anyway?

    Call this an intervention if you like, but Harlan and Gary, you both need to own up to your own stupidities, act like the mensches we know you both to be, and walk away from this fight. Neither one of you can ever really win this thing. And there’s no prize to be claimed even if a victory were possible.

    Please, for the sake of yourselves, your admirers and supporters in the creative arts communities, your readers today and your readers yet to come, _the people whose rights you’ve defended in the past and will in the future,_ put this incident behind you.

    By going to court, you have taken a private spat public. So it’s not just between the two of you anymore. It’s our concern, now. We could lose Fantagraphics or we could lose the last good works of Harlan Ellison. Instead of a penetrating essay or inspiring story, how will it look if Harlan’s last public words are a deposition in dippy little lawsuit?

    Please, boys, call it off. You’re both better than this. And we deserve better from the both of you.

    With love and hope,
    Vastator 2007

    [Please add your name to the list and pass it on. By doing so, you automatically become a member of The Friends of Harlan and Gary.] [If someone wants to make this an online petition, please do. The sooner the better.]

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