The writer of the TCJ column “Journalista,” after taking inaccurate swipes at this blog, announced that I could have “the last word” on the subject. This is a popular on-line gambit in which one person actually endeavors to have the last word himself by trying to present himself as above whatever rebuttal could be offered. The usual hope is that the other party will then want to show that he’s as above-it-all as the first guy, so he refuses to avail himself of the opportunity. I don’t know whether that’s the intent here. But I–who Gary Groth has referred to as one of Fantagraphics “favorite whipping boys”–do know I want to say something.
It’s been a good long while since Fantagraphics took something I didn’t write, acted as if I did, and then offered a half-hearted, Well we meant everything we said but we’re sorry we said it apology. The time before was a fabricated letter defending some former Fanta employee that Groth utilized to produced a multi-page slam, without anyone there bothering to verify that I’d actually written it. Which I hadn’t. This time around, Journalista was incapable of reading an entry that referred to Kathleen and me in the third person, featuring such phrases as “Peter and Kathleen” and “their child,” ascribed it to me, and took me to task for it. Endeavoring to subsequently explain the mishap, the author claimed the posting carried no label of authorship…even though it said “posted by Glenn Hauman” right under it.
But hey, in the world of journalistic accuracy that passes for Fantagraphics, it’s all even-steven because I stated a decade after the fact that, as I recall it, Groth was a guest at Carol’s house even though he claims it was the other way around…while, eleven years ago, at the time it occurred, journalistic maven Groth couldn’t get the cause of Carol’s death correct (it wasn’t a heart attack, it was a brain aneurysm.)
One of the two things that Groth and his stooges has never been able to wrap themselves around is that I don’t care what Groth said about Carol. Carol was beyond his ability to hurt. What I care about is that Groth revealed himself as someone with a total lack of human decency. A young woman dropped dead. A woman he knew, that he had presumably broken bread with. She collapsed in the street, was rushed to a hospital, briefly regained consciousness, and then died. And he used that tragedy as a pretext for two things, and two things only: To bash Marvel, and to promote the Comics Journal, holding it up as the gold standard of how to do euologies correctly.
Here’s the other thing Groth et al never got: Carol always saw Marvel as a stepping stone. She was only going to be there another six months to a year. She always planned long-term, you see. She had meticulously been putting everything into place and was preparing to make the jump to her own business. To create her own publishing firm, producing work of artistic merit. She truly loved comic books, but she wanted more out of life than pushing superhero titles. She had great and lofty goals.
And she didn’t get to achieve them.
The people who mourned her didn’t know that, of course. But they were aware that, at the very least, a life with vast potential had been cut short. They got that. Criticize the effusiveness with which they did it if you must (though God knows why one would feel compelled to), but they got that. And Groth didn’t get that, making him less understanding and more devoid of anything approaching human feeling than any of them. Instead he pontificated over how he “abominated” the use to which she put her intellect in building her career.
Carol used Marvel Comics as a foundation toward a publishing career that was cut short. Gary Groth, who has published pørņ (the Eros line) and a magazine extolling the virtues of the very superheroes he despises (Amazing Heroes), all to generate revenue to keep TCJ going, doesn’t get to excoriate others for the way they build a career.
Here endeth the word.
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