Hart Fisher on Comics Journalism, Frank Miller, Running Danzig’s Verotik and Life in Los Angeles
by Hart D. Fisher
In the early 90’s Hero Illustrated (Wizard’s main competitor at the time) put Hart Fisher on their Top 100 Most Important People in the Comic Book Industry. They also dubbed him as “the most dangerous man in comics.”
He then found himself doing journalism for Hero. For one article, Hart spoke with the man himself, Frank Miller. I asked Hart about Frank’s work and what it meant to him (and all us really) back then and how he felt about everything that Miller had accomplished over the past few years.
WORKING FOR HERO ILLUSTRATED AND HANGING OUT WITH FRANK MILLER
I did journalism writing for several of the old comics magazines. When I was in college I wrote an opinions column for the Daily Illini and got fired for being too controversial and outspoken, literally. I wrote for The Comics Journal (a great Rob Liefeld interview which was stunt casting. I should post the original audio tapes. He really spills the dirt after about an hour of bullshit), Fan Magazine, Hero Illustrated hired me for a few, that’s how I got to really know Glenn Danzig.
When Hero asked me to do the Miller interview, I was jumping for joy. I was a big Frank Miller fan back then. I loved his work. I loved his outspoken dedication to a truly adult and free press. I loved that he was fighting for the comic book as an adult art form. I respected how he walked away from Marvel at the height of his success to find his own way instead of selling his soul slowly like John Byrne. I grew up a Marvel Maniac. I felt Marvel had betrayed its fan base in the nineties and liked that Frank spoke out on that issue. I met him several times over the years and found I enjoyed his work less and less with time.
The interview with him for Hero, that kind of sealed it for me. That and the fact that every time I ran into Frank he acted like he’d never met me, never spoke to me before or even had a clue who the fuck I was. When you meet a guy for the 2nd or 3rd time, sure, I can expect that. But the 5th or 6th time I run into you, and this is after I interview the guy and he’s got one of my Marvel Can Suck My Cock shirts? Gimme a fuckin’ break. But that’s all my bruised ego talking. During the interview he got really cranky when I pointed out the spots he ripped Mickey Spillane off DIRECTLY from the novels. I mean, go read the Spillane books, you won’t be as impressed with the writing on Sin City after that. I was bored with all of the other interviews I read with him. They should have printed my original text. I wanted to know what beer he had in the fridge, what was the last CD he bought, real life shit like that. Some of it made it in, other parts didn’t. I should really post up all of these tapes.
I’d have to say after talking to him here and there over the years, I found him to be a cold fish full of sour grapes. I’m happy a new audience is finding his work. I’m enjoying the film adaptations immensely. 300 rocked, Sin City rocked everywhere Michael Madsen wasn’t on screen stinking up the place. Look at the way his graphic style has found its way into advertising now, look at the ads for Death Sentence. That’s all Miller there. The man was the guy who turned me onto Japanese manga which changed my art style completely. Dark Angel wouldn’t have looked the way it did if Frank Miller didn’t get Dark Horse to publish Lone Wolf and Cub. Miller was very influential on my work growing up and into college.
I only hope it puts people into comic books stores to buy comics. That’s the bottom line. Sure there are great film adaptations of Millers work are coming out, the real question is does this help the comics industry? Sales figures suck. I mean, they suck hard. You can’t make a living in comics. You make it from turning your comic into a movie or a video game. I hope that Frank’s success helps change some of that.
RUNNING FULL-TILT IN 1994, TAKING ON THE JOB AS MANAGING EDITOR FOR GLENN DANZIG’S VEROTIK COMIC EMPIRE
I know It’s a little off point, but I’m going to give you some background to this period in time. On August 16th 1994 I moved from Champaign Illinois to Los Angeles California. Why? I was deeply disturbed by Michelle’s murder and the ensuing murder trial. Anyone who’s read Poems for the Dead should know that when those poems were being written I was insane and suicidal. I moved to LA to get away from the pit I was in and to finish The Garbage Man. By the time I left Champaign I was playing Russian Roulette with a .38 special on a regular basis. It was time to leave Champaign.
Los Angeles was tough. I moved with my brother and a friend, Rob Robbins. The friend turned into a real piece of shit, not paying any rent, no money for food, and boy did he like shit talking me to all our friends back home. Told them all I’d blown the Boneyard “Riches” on drugs, hookers and partying. Not a fucking chance. I had a book that was supposed to set me up and leave me with some money. I had great pre-sales through the roof, I was going to make a killing. But the artist fucked me and blew his deadlines completely on what would have been Boneyard’s first color book. This left me with barely any rent money in my new place in LA.
I was hired by Hero Illustrated to interview Glenn for the magazine. We hit it off. I was already a fan of his anyway. At the point that Glenn called, I was three months behind on my rent, the deadbeat roommate had just skipped town owing me money, food was scarce and we were pretty fucking desperate. My brother was working in a chop shop and making just enough to keep us eating. Glenn’s call saved my ass and gave me a shot at the big time working with big names and a real budget to work with. I leapt into this position. It was a dream job in everyway except for the reality. Glenn and I butted heads plenty, and I don’t think this is the venue to talk about that.
Funny stories? Yeah, I have plenty. I think the best story out of them all is when my late father came to town and he’s got no clue who Glenn is, what he’s about, nothing.
At the time the Verotik offices were located in my house. The whole crew gathered there, Glenn, Me, the boneyard crew, Glenn’s art dealer, some of the guys from Verotik, to get ready for a night out at the strip clubs.
In front of everyone, my old man starts grilling Glenn about this leather jacket he’s wearing that’s barely held together by safety pins.
Fred “Hey, you make money, right?”
Glenn “Uh, yeah, I guess you could say that.”
Fred “Well how old is that fuckin’ coat?”
Surprised, Glenn looks down at his leather coat, the pins “It’s almost as old as I am and…”
Fred “Yeah, well, I think it’s time to buy a new fuckin’ coat.”
The room erupts in laughter. No one could believe my old man was razzing Glenn, but that was my old man. Picture Chuck Norris if he never did martial arts, had a bad perm and smoked 3 packs of Belair’s a day. I got my big mouth from him and my brass balls from my mother.
One night we had dinner with the bassist from White Zombie and some Hell’s Angels. Another night it was the Biohazard guys. I got to harass Simon Bisley for inking with a goddamn Sharpy on Death Dealer, and shoot some pool with him in San Diego. That was great. Simon was fun. Working on Go Nagai’s Devilman was cool, but the end product didn’t hold up. Talking with Glenn’s Jeet Kune Do sensei, one of Bruce Lee’s students, that was pretty fucking cool. He was a little disappointed in Glenn ‘cuz he’d lost his temper and laid a guy out that night.
He was ready to kill me when I didn’t back him up at a meeting with all of his financial people. We didn’t see eye to on the sales forecast for the upcoming releases, I didn’t back him up on his claims. He was furious. He let me have it in the elevator as soon as the doors shut leaving the meeting. But I was right when the figures came in, unfortunately for him.
Then there was the time, I forget where we were, but one night we were talking about bands, punk rock, and at the time, I wasn’t really into punk. Didn’t know much about it. Someone brought up The Misfits. I asked Glenn if he thought they were any good. He looked at me like I was kidding, but I wasn’t. I had no clue that Glenn had been the lead singer for this band, or how fucking great they are. Glenn thought I was fucking with him, but he was even more shocked that I wasn’t. Through a couple shots down my throat in a crowded bar and I’ll tell you stories all night long about just working with Glenn.
Working for Glenn was a tremendous learning experience. I made some mistakes with him and that business, but I learned from them and applied them to Boneyard.
Hart Fisher Talks about Jeffrey Dahmer and the media circus
The infamous Jeffrey Dahmer comic probably got Hart a million dollars worth of publicity judging from all of the coverage and the lawsuits that resulted. This week he recounts how he dealt with all of the media attention along with the stress that must have resulted from the court cases.
By Hart Fisher
Hart on Larry King
Hart: For most people I’m sure the weight of the press, the condemnation, the stress of the lawsuits, sure, I think it would have crushed most people. But they’re not me and what you think of as being stressful… you don’t know the half of it. Play that old Who song “Behind Blue Eyes” and that’s exactly what it was like during the storm. I was living in Champaign Illinois. This was a small college town. People saw me on the news all the time. I had death threats all the time. Written and phoned in. I had a woman stalker who was threatening to have her biker friends kidnap me and a gay stalker that lived in town. He started stalking me after meeting me at a goth club called “C Street”. He used to tell me it would be a shame for my pretty face to get uglied up like his. I’d grunt, laugh, tell’em “Yep, sure would be a shame.”
There was the copy shop I did all my fliers and promo stuff at that stopped doing business with “my type of person.” There was the the protest march where the police came to my house and told me to leave town for the weekend. My landlord echoed those sentiments, but these colors don’t run. There was the time in 1993 right before shooting The Garbage Man, I was in Los Angeles for a big Fangoria convention. While I was gone, the news outlets in town were all broadcasting that I was out of town. Gee, wasn’t long before someone robbed my house. A camera crew from CBS came to my house and found the front door kicked in and all of my stuff gone, like, all of it. Six months before that a bunch of Junkies robbed my house.
When I did talk shows, I was the villain. When I did my first talk show appearance, it was stunning the level of hate directed at me by total strangers when I walked out on that stage. I was 23 years old when the press came gunning for me over the Dahmer book. I was naive. I learned so much about the manipulation of truth by the mass media, or news as commodity. I got my clock cleaned the first six months of it. I was getting killed on Entertainment Tonight. At first I thought it was fun. The camera crew would come out, shoot at my house, or I would do the interviews at my father’s house. It was a brutal learning experience. They would ask me questions, and then re edit my answers. They would match up the answer to one question with another.
Hart Fisher on DAYONE
That did not occur to me and it was embarrassing the first couple of hatchet jobs. I went to my father when it first hit and I had an appearance on A Closer Look With Faith Daniels. That was the last time I ever asked him for advice on dealing with the media. I went on the show with my hair slicked back, wearing a fucking suit… it was horrible. I thought doing the talk show format would be better because they couldn’t re edit my responses. I was never paid to appear on ANY of the shows I did. They brought me on the shows to be the villain. That was my role. But I saw these talk show exchanges as verbal combat and I prepared myself accordingly.
At this point in my life, I had been training in Tae Kwan Doe for four years and took that training to the shows. After the Faith Daniels debacle I sat down with the sharpest guys I knew and we sat in a room and picked apart my appearance. We watched the show a couple times and brutalized myself. Then we formulated a plan on how to manipulate them all to do what we wanted. The protest march on my house? We baited them into doing it on the Sally Jesse Raphael show. We plotted all of their tired arguments that held no water and just shot the shit out of them. I turned the audience around so much on my Jerry Springer appearance that they turned the volume down on the audience applause to my answers when they aired it.
When my girlfriend, Michelle, was murdered during shooting of The Garbage Man… that was what fucked me up. I was handling all of the press, best I could. To me, it was just another fight in the ring in a lifetime of fighting. That’s all it was to me. But when Michelle was murdered, the wheels came off and I went nuts. I was a functioning maniac. LIterally. I drank myself to sleep every night and fell apart. I gave my guns away to my friends because I couldn’t trust myself around them. I went insane and the press pushed it further. In Champaign, this whole thing was a rating bonanza. Michelle was raped and murdered at the Charter House Inn by a 20 year old Black Male named Eric Daniels. My horror film was about a black serial killer obessed with killing white women. Strange, right? The media loved it and the news got ugly.
And I have been a take no shit kind of guy my whole life. I don’t back down unless it’s stupid to fight. Now I was an enraged, hurting, highly aggressive anger sorrow machine. Now if the media fucked with me, I bumped dicks right back. I stormed into the studio’s of the local CBS affiliate and threatened to maim the news director if he didn’t make some changes in his coverage. That earned me a stop over from the police. They talked to me, said there were plenty of people who wished they could kill the news director. I laughed about that and told them I never threatened to kill the guy, I threatened to have him maimed. I told them he didn’t anger me enough to kill him. They really didn’t know how to take that, but that cocksucker changed his news broadcast so her mother would not have to see what they were broadcasting again.
After 1993, things get blurry and really, really ugly. I sought out good times, good laughs, good people, and raised as much hell as I could. I was angry, so goddamn angry. I still am. And it didn’t end. I went through 3 different murder trials trying to keep that piece of shit off the street. This is what made me crazy. Forget about the stress of news coverage. I could write a fucking novel and you still wouldn’t quite know the weight of it all. From 1993 to 1994, crazy, crazy, crazy.
Still with us? There’ll be more next week. It’s just as crazy.
In the meantime you can find out more about Hart on his MySpace page, his company page,
Crime Pays Inc., his comic company Boneyard Press and his You Tube Channel
Hart Fisher Tells Us Crazy Stories: In The Beginning
As a publisher and co-owner of a burgeoning start-up, I wanted to pay homage to some of the veterans of indie publishing. Back in 2007 Hart D. Fisher was on my shortlist of people to talk to. He contacted me a few months later about another matter. I suggested an interview with him. I wanted to know the stories behind the stories at Boneyard Press.
He warned me that I was going to be in for a hell of a read. He wasn’t kidding.
His story is one of the most unique in American comics publishing history. He came under the gun of his peers, the media and a lot of the comics industry for the controversial books that he published along with pulling off some pretty ballsy stunts. It was guerilla marketing at its’ finest and most shocking.
A lot of what happened occurred between 1991-1995. 12 years later, Hart was ready to talk about what went on behind the scenes. We ended up with 10,000 words that have to be broken up into several installments. It’s a long harrowing, heartbreaking, sometimes funny and always incendiary read. Hart has lost none of his passion. This is NOT easy reading. Discretion is advised for the faint of heart. Here’s the first installment.
By Hart D Fisher
On starting the comic company, Boneyard Press.
You can blame one man, and one man only for inspiring me to go it on my own – Mark Beachum. I was home from college driving a mosquito spray truck for the summer. Mark Beachum was working for Northstar Studios (the original home of Faust, and yeah, I was there for the beginning of Faust) and living there. Dan Madsen, the publisher and high school friend of mine, told me it was the only way to get any work out of Mark. You practically had to chain him to a drawing table before he would produce. I crashed my truck (long story) and lost my job two weeks before the end of summer and I started hanging out with Mark. Mark was like “Why do you want to spend all of your artistic energy on something someone else owns?” and I just kind of shook my head. He said why work on Spiderman when I could create my own Spiderman.
No one ever said that to me before. Dan was doing it and making a living. Why couldn’t I? I’d been doing my own comic books since I was five. I used to have my mother Xerox them at work (she worked for the department of public aid. She was the welfare lady in some of the worst projects Chicago had to offer) and I would sell them at school. Bill the Bull started out as something I drew in Freshman Algebra. One of my buddies was sitting next to me in class, it was boring, I turned him into Bill the Bull and he was more of a super hero private eye thing then. Nowhere near as dark as the character is now. Dark Angel appeared in 5th and 6th issue of this run of Bill the Bull books when I was a junior in high school.
Inspirations
My comics were more lighthearted and funny growing up, but as my life become more and more violent, the comics went to a much darker place. My work wasn’t a product of the books I was reading, it was a product of my environment and my life experiences. My father was a nut for Mickey Spillane and Ian Flemming. Spillane created Mike Hammer and Flemming created James Bond. My father was enamored with the writer’s lives and those of their literary creations. This influenced me greatly. My father spoke often about Mickey Spillane, pounding out books when he needed some cash.
At the same time he was filling my head with these stories, my friends were getting into drugs, my uncle killed himself, my cousin drowned in Florida on a church trip, I lived on the south side of Chicago which meant when I got into a fight, it was normally with a group of people, not one on one and that was never pleasant, a friend’s father shot himself in the head, another friend od’d, several of my friends in high school had been molested (male and female) or were still in the situation of being molested actively. One of my friends had been molested by her step father repeatedly and got her pregnant. She had to leave for awhile to go have the baby in another state. Her father was a cop.
As I got older, I found myself in deeper and deeper. In college, things grew more and more dark. I was dating women that had been molested when they were young. One poor girl had a problem being photographed. My artwork in college was always under assault from instructors. They wanted to know where my violent art was coming from. They didn’t know I knew people that had had their heads beaten in between two phone books with a bat. My work comes from the world around me, but I have never been able to explain it much more explicitly than that.
When I created Dark Angel, it was coming from a dark pit. What most people, or non creative people, don’t understand, is that the artist creates to survive. I didn’t decide to create Dark Angel, he walked right out of my head and introduced himself and let me get to know him. At the time I was reading a lot of Eugene Izzi
I was also a movie freak. I watched movies. Tons of them. Horror movies, crime movies and action movies. I bought comics by the truckload in those days. I’d been reading comics since I was 5 and I had an appetite for it all. Legion of Super Heroes? If Keith Giffen
When I started Boneyard Press, the first issue of the company was Dark Angel. I wrote and drew the book from my basement apartment in Champaign Illinois. It was so cold I had to duct tape newspapers on the walls in the winter time to stay warm. My landlord lived above me and was a religious midget. He collected little religious figurines and they covered every flat surface of his place. I had a big ass stereo that I would crank whenever I was working. I had visions of his figures rattling around on the tables like those old vibrating hockey games. Boneyard Press at that point wasn’t meant to be anything more than a one shot. But I felt the only way to truly test it out was to do a series. So I borrowed a chunk of change from my grandfather and went forward with it. The rest is just another old scar.
Head on over to American Horrors for Hart’s latest antics.
