On December 14th, I published the following note to a DC Comics chatboard dedicated to ASTRO CITY, under my commonly used pseudonym, "John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL". :

Responses, as one would expect, came pretty fast and furious. The one that concerns us, though, is as follows:

Okay then. Why wait? My response begins... NOW.

As can be seen above, I'm eschewing my usual habit of writing under a pseudonym for this particular work. Normally, I use pseudonyms for a variety of reasons, which I'm sure I'll discuss further on. However, a primary one is to distance myself from any personal relationships I may have or have had in the past with comics pros whose work I may be writing about. It's my way of saying that these are my opinions as a fan, not as an acquaintance, or even as a friend. (I don't do this merely when I pan something, I also do it so that when I praise something by someone I might have gone to college with, people will feel the praise is serious and deserved, not simply motivated from friendship.)

However, in this case, I began with something posted under a pseudonym, for that very reason: to keep the person I was writing about - ASTRO CITY 'creator' Kurt Busiek - from feeling that my criticism of his professional ethics was in any way personally motivated. He, however, seems to believe that criticism, and any other criticism I may make of his work, is personally motivated, (what this says about the praise I've heaped on his other projects I couldn't tell you) and his response is in a similar vein. Therefore, since Kurt has made this about him, and about me, well, here I am, stepping out from behind the pseudonym.

In other words: "It's never personal. It's always business."

"But this... this is personal."

I'm also going to be writing about a lot of entirely personal stuff, and since I'm going to be using some other people's real names, it behooves me (although, honestly, I have toes just like anyone else) to use my own name, as well. Some of the people whose names I hereby list and actions and behavior I describe may be displeased by my account of such, and to them, I extend my regrets, if not my apologies, in advance.

However. Those of them who are not sociopathic, or suffused with guilt at their treatment of an old friend, said guilt which they have displaced into irrational rage, or simply in full blown denial, will most likely find some forbearance for me. Those others, if such there be, who are nuts, or feeling remorse and inappropriate anger, or who feel it's best to deal with the consequences of their actions by refusing to acknowledge them... well, I anticipate that they will not be so understanding.

Still, I don't plan to be kind to myself in these pages, so I cannot, in any conscience, plan to be kind to anyone else. It might happen anyway (I don't have the instinct for the jugular of some of the others entwined in this affair), but at this point, my purpose is to be as truthful as possible, and let the shit fall where it may.

This account is being written, in large part if not entirely, as a response to something published by Kurt Busiek, about me, and him, and his wife, at some point previous to me getting home from work on the aforementioned Friday. And, to differentiate my approach, my literary style, and my technique from Kurt's, to make sure you cannot, in any way, confuse me for him, I've decided to take an entirely different tack from his in this account. To wit: I'm going to tell you the truth.

This is what happened:

On Thursday, December 14, 2000, I posted a note on the DC Comics Online chat board dedicated to ASTRO CITY... excuse me... KURT BUSIEK'S ASTRO CITY. Don't want to not give Kurt his props, after all. The note was posted under the name "John Jones, Manhunter from Marathon, IL", a pseudonym I've used frequently over the past year or so, and that, if I were Harlan Ellison or Stephen King or Samuel L. Clemens, no one would even venture to wonder about, either. The note was also, I freely admit, written in my normal, snotty, Mr. Know It All tones, which I usually adopt to make up for all the standard geek feelings of inadequacy and lack of control, and as it did not so much imply as directly state that ASTRO CITY was little more than ongoing creative and conceptual larceny, and Kurt Busiek was, in his work on ASTRO CITY, little more than a thief, I expected it to provoke some controversy. Because I'm still a tiny bit optimistic about humanity in general, I had hoped, somewhere in the avalanche of scathing, reflexive, thought-free rebuttals I anticipated from the usual crew of devoted Astro City fans, I might find some intelligent, even insightful debate on exactly where one crosses the line between 'homage' and 'rip-off'. (For what it's worth, I think that where one crosses that line is somewhere around the point where one publishes the first issue of a series, with one's own name emblazoned in 32 point type as part of the series title, and devotes the entire first issue to a character clearly not so much derived as blatantly copied from the Classic Superman, whom one has enmeshed in a plot that is little more than a pastiche of various previous, better plots and story elements by other, better, writers, most notably, Alan Moore. But, you know, that's just my opinion. Perhaps, in some way not clear to me or any other sentient human being, all that is still firmly in the gray area of 'homage'.)

However, any discussion, intelligent or otherwise, of the specific point where 'tribute' actually shades into 'theft' isn't part of what happened. What happened is that Big Man In Comics Kurt Busiek shot off a response to that post in which he somehow neglected to actually respond to the substance of the post itself and instead launched a poisonous, vituperative, entirely personal, and, say hey and by the way, almost entirely false, attack on Our Hero and Your Humble Author.

To say that I was surprised, and even,* somewhat taken aback, would be akin to saying the Gulf of Mexico is not an appreciably arid region.

To say that this is, well, impolite, and, well, bullying, and, well, um, let's see, yeah, I think, contemptible, is the word, yes, I'm pretty sure that fits... well, sure. Let's say that.

This is what happened before all this:

In September of 1979, I was a student at Syracuse University. So were Scott MacLeod and Kurt Busiek. We were all also comics fans and wanna-be pros, and we started hanging out together. In September of 1980, I moved into the dorm they were living in, Lawrinson Hall, onto the same floor as them, sharing a room with a guy named Jeff Webb, another comics fan and wannabe pro. A little later that month, at a campus play rehearsal, I met a truly lovely girl named Ann Huntington, immediately fell head over heels in love with her, befriended her, walked her home that evening, and the next day, I believe, brought her to dinner with the rest of the Crowd.

Around ten years later, Ann married Kurt, said ceremony which seemed to be the grace stroke for whatever friendships I had had with both of them. I'll admit, the relationships had been withering on the vine for probably two or three years at that point... a little longer for Kurt than for Annie, I believe. But the wedding, and their deliberate exclusion of me from the most important day of their lives (said ceremony and event which never would have happened had not my life entwined with both of theirs years before, but, you know, let's just put that aside for the moment, too) made the point, quite effectively, that they were done with me. I'm dense, and gullible, and far too trusting, especially of my self-proclaimed friends, but, well, that was a brick wall that I could not ignore when it finally fell on me.

Some years after that, (I cannot, at present, remember the precise year when Kurt and Ann got married, although I'm pretty sure it was 1987 or 1988; I also cannot remember the precise year I saw the soon to be mentioned WIZARD interview, although I think it was 1995 or 1996, therefore, anywhere from 7 to 9 years later) I saw Kurt's picture in an interview in WIZARD and was so stunned (if you could have seen Kurt in college, you would have been too) that I sat down and wrote him an email. It was the first contact between us since a month before his wedding, when I'd called and we had had a somewhat strained but still hours-long and mostly cordial phone conversation, which had ended on a bad note when I'd asked him to say hello to Annie for me, and he'd abruptly become cold and borderline hostile and very nearly hung up the phone in my ear. (And explain that to me, if you will. I loved her and courted her for years while he was barely aware she existed; she told me I was her bestest bestest friend and the big brother she'd never had for years -- yeah... I know... but she was sweet about using the classic blow off line, and for a few years, she seemed to mean it, too -- while being barely aware he was alive; somehow, a decade down the road, he's marrying her, I ask him to say hello to her for me, at the end of a long, chatty, civil, even cordial conversation, and he nearly breaks the phone slamming it down. I mean, what's UP with that? Is this some guy thing they gave us a class on in high school when I was out with mono, or what?)

Now, I admit, this email note I sent off to Kurt, the first contact I'd initiated between us in nearly a decade, (and, thus, as Kurt had and has no further use for me, the first contact there had been in that period) was a rather rude one, in that I alleged many hilarious things about his (to me) new and astonishingly corpulent physique, among them that continental drift must surely be a slow way for him to travel to conventions, that it seemed certain to me he must be haunted by snotty fans at con panels calling out in bad Scottish accents "Captain Kurt, the floorboards canna stand the strain!", and that, in point of fact, if he wanted to learn from Peter David, that was fine, but a sane person would have stopped short of adopting Mr. David's techniques for inhaling entire all-you-can-eat pasta bars at one sitting.

There was a lot more in that general key, I admit it frankly. I believe mention was also made of housepets and small children being sucked haplessly into orbit around Planet Busiek, and there may have even been some speculation as to the multitudes such preponderant vastness might well contain (like, every Asian human being on Earth, living and dead, and any European or American friends who might be visiting them). I do not in any way debate the fact that I was mean. (I was also, I firmly believe, hilarious, but that's very much by the by.) (What's not by the by is that, if Kurt had troubled to stay in touch with me, he'd have known how much of my mockery was ironic satire, as I myself, at that time, weighed well in excess of 200 lbs... yes, you're smirking in the back, I see you, but just wait until YOUR metabolism starts to slow down in your mid 20s, skippy... and at this late date, must admit, I weigh in at considerably MORE in excess of 200 lbs than I did then.)

That admittedly juvenile, if remarkably entertaining, note was the first contact that had occurred 'twixt The Great Man (physically, if not otherwise) and myself since, well, as I said, a month before his wedding. And, while it was mean spirited and snide, I submit to whomever may be reading this that one former friend picking on another former friend is hardly unprecedented in human history, and in fact, friends, even former friends who now apparently regard each other with loathing and disapprobation, have an understood license to pick on each other when the occasion warrants, as surely, the occasion of a fellow who once weighed 150 lbs soaking wet (at around 5'10) apparently ingesting the entire population of both Carolinas, North and South, did.

Since then, I've sent him a few other notes. You could break these down into two categories: more or less personal notes, some of which were derisive, others of which were sincerely congratulatory and pleasant, signed by me, under my name. And, then there was the fan mail, where, since Kurt never responded to anything he knew came from me, regardless of its content, I would sign another name, so that I could be pretty sure he'd actually read the note (which was always about his work) and perhaps even respond. (Kurt's very good about responding to all his positive correspondence from his fans, and I want to commend him for that. He's truly warm and generous towards utter strangers who kiss his ass. It's a pity he's such a thoroughgoing piece of shit to his one *time friends.)

As folks do who find themselves in a position where they have, or had, some sort of personal relationship with someone famous (even someone famous in as pathetically limited a field as superhero comics is) I found myself keeping an eye out for news of Kurt. (I also keep an eye out for news of Scott. I haven't sent Scott much email because, first, I have no reason to enjoy being rude to him, as he did not grow up to be an utter shit, and second, he's never written AVENGERS, which has been since childhood one of my all time favorite comic books.) So it is that I've read some published interviews of Kurt's, and of course, I've read his various Prologues and Introductions and Commentaries to his own collected works, all of which has probably added up to a pretty big chunk o' text over the years. And in all those years, Kurt's never so much as mentioned me, or acknowledged knowing me in any way. (This is okay. Kurt never mentions anyone he went to college with except for Scott MacLeod, presumably because mentioning Jeff Webb or Rob Morrison won't make you think he's really cool for knowing another Eisner Award winner, while mentioning Scott, on the other hand, helps reinforce in the minds of his fans that he has been Destined For Greatness since a very early age. Or, it could also be that comics fans, whom Kurt generally writes for, won't care about some faceless nobodies, and in fact, Kurt never had any sort of creative collaborations with folks like Rob or Jeff. This gets a tiny bit weirder when you factor me into the equation, because Kurt has had many creative collaborations with me, some of which were actually published, and none of you Kurt Busiek fans have ever heard of me, have you? But never mind, leave it aside, it's not germane.) (At the moment.)

So, having apparently been entirely forgotten by Kurt (but, of course, I wasn't, since, remember, whenever I send him mail under my own name, I instantly become The Only Avengers Fan In The World That Kurt Busiek Doesn't Reply To), I have to admit, it came as a surprise to me last week when Kurt suddenly, on an Astro City chat board, not only acknowledged remembering me, but described our past and even current relationship (such as it is) in reasonably elaborate detail. Of course, the reasonably elaborate detail Kurt describes it in is a despicable tissue of lies from top to bottom, but still, hey, what the hell. At least he remembers me, and, gosh, I'm touched by that. And if reading his account of our interactions over the past fifteen years puts me in mind of a time in college when he proudly declared that whenever he filled out 'occupation' on some form, he always wrote in 'professional liar', and I, you know, being his buddy, thought he was just kidding around, well, hell. You live and learn.

But, however resigned, or even pleased, I might be, at having the fellow whom I once ghost-wrote Marvel Universe entries for, co-plotted the RED TORNADO mini-series with, and contributed names and ideas for the concept that later became THE LIBERTY PROJECT to (among countless other bits of brainstorming Kurt and I did, back and forth, on each other's projects, over the years from, I believe, 1979 to 1983 or thereabouts) actually acknowledge that he did, at one time, know me, I think I do have to draw the line... somewhere. And while drawing lines is always a tricky business, I honestly think that, at the point where Kurt claims I've been sending threatening, harassing, bitter, vindictive email not only to him (which is a lie, but, arguably, I'd have some justification there, and if he wants to call picking on him for being a tub of lard 'harassment', well, I think he's a great big whiny sissy-baby, too, but he is The Great Man) but to the sweet, lovely, shy girl I once adored beyond all let or hindrance, and whom I certainly don't blame for picking someone else over me (even if he is a fat tub of lard piece of shit)... when in fact, I have sent no mail at all to said one-time sweetheart between 1986 and last month, and starting with last month, I have sent exactly two emails to her, one of which threatened and harassed her by wishing her a happy birthday (Annie's birthday is two days after mine, which is one reason I can always remember it, the other being, well, I was once in love with her, and I'm like that), the other of which, just last evening, I sent in the hopes she would tell me if Kurt was speaking the truth when he said she had been frightened and upset by me over the last few years (how, I don't know, since I haven't made any attempt to contact her) and expressing my regret if in fact that had, somehow (I can only think through the agency of Kurt showing her the email I'd sent to him, which, you know, strikes me as being on him, not me) occurred, and my sincere assurances that it had never been intentional.

Now, I admit, prior to 1986, I sent a reasonable amount of mail to Annie, and she to me. But, since most if not all of her letters from that time period are signed with some minor variation on the phrase "Love, your baby sister, Annie", I suspect Kurt isn't referring to any of our correspondence from that period when he says I've upset or frightened her. No, it seems only logical and reasonable to assume that when he speaks of cyber stalking (whatever the hell that is), of Annie being very upset and frightened, and how I should please, if I have any concern for her remaining, stop this nightmare, for the love of God, he is speaking of only two things: (a) my email to him, divided between hilarious insults aimed at his girlish figure, sincere congratulations on his getting assigned to write AVENGERS, and fannish feedback to his various writing projects, and (b) two extremely recent emails to Annie, one wishing her a happy birthday, the other asking if all these crazy and reprehensible things Kurt was alleging about her feelings were actually true. And, since that last was written SINCE Kurt lost his mind and posted a whole lot of toxic horseshit about me, him, and his wife, he couldn't even have been referring to that.

So, then, we are left with the concept that I have upset and frightened Ann Margaret Huntington Busiek, and apparently driven her husband near bugfunk, by sending him fanmail, her birthday greetings, and occasionally, the odd mean note picking on him.

This... THIS is what happened:

Last week, Kurt Busiek opened a startlingly surreal and reality-challenged account of what has occurred between he and me over the past two decades with the following, really quite strange, lines of commentary:

to him one night almost twenty years ago."

Now, let's pretend for a moment that this opening is actually, in any way, a sane, appropriate response to a post on a chat board alleging that a particular comic book is comprised nearly in its entirety of creative and conceptual hijacking. Well, no, let's not pretend that, because while I, like Han Solo, can imagine an awful lot of wealth, kid, I must admit, even my imagination isn't equal to that particular flight of fancy. Nonetheless, let's just, you know, deal with it anyway, even though it is remarkably, as they say on the talk show circuit, 'off topic'.

Now, let's look at the semantic construction of that very first sentence. "Don't worry," the Great Man reassures his quivering legion of thunderstruck, trembling lipped sycophants. "He's not trying to engender intelligent discussion." As if, you know, intelligent discussion is something the average Astro City fan should actually fear, might shrink away from, could well cower at the mere thought of. "Don't worry," Busiek the Benevolent seems to be stating, his arms wide, his smile pleasant and supportive. "I'll pwotect you aww fwom the bad man who wants you to actually THINK."

Ah, but I'm being mean. That wasn't what Kurt MEANT, clearly. It's what he SAID, absolutely, oh yes, but, well, he was probably angry, and not thinking very clearly, and just rattled off the first slick sounding cliché that came into his head. That's not something he does very often, after all, and if he's opened his entire pestilential attack on a former pal with a statement that indicates he's not thinking very clearly, well... we won't hold that against him. Will we?

What he meant to say was not that his fans should, or would, be afraid of intelligent discussion, but, rather, that I'm not trying to do what I'm actually trying to do. At least, I think that's what he means. It's not what he SAID, but... well. He's a Great Writer. This must be some astounding new technique I haven't previously heard of, where we say one thing, but mean something else.

Now let's look at the rest of it.

Well, now, here Kurt more than makes up for any confusion his opening sentence might have caused, yessiree. He's right back on topic with this sentence, in which, in response to a criticism of his creative integrity, he defends himself by... um... er... bringing up... some letter I wrote to the Comics Journal... about a dead woman... and how she was unpleasant to me one night almost twenty years ago.

Yeah, okay, I can't figure out what the frick Kurt thinks this has to do with anything, either, but let's go with it, because Kurt is a Great Writer, and adored by tens of thousands, and once, I esteemed him highly. Let's deal with the statement. Let's... take it seriously. Even though, you know, it's kind of like something out of Lewis Carroll.

I have to wax a tiny bit detailed here. As this deals with personal details from my past, and Kurt's, I doubt you'll mind.

At the very tail end of either 1980 or the very dawn of 1981 (I can't remember which, it occurred during a Christmas Break when I, and the Late Great Jeff Webb, and Andy Gillespie, too, were all visiting Kurt, Scott, Rob Morrison, and Janice Westlake, in Lexington MA before heading back to school... although, now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure it was in January of 1981, because most likely we'd all have spent Christmas with our own families, right?), Kurt and Scott took Jeff and I with them into Cambridge, MA, to meet, for the very first time, two near-mythic figures in fandom at that time (near-mythic to us, as Kurt and Scott clearly esteemed them all to hell and rarely stopped talking about either of them), Rich Howell and Carol Kalish. I, and I daresay, Jeff (he's unfortunately deceased, so I can't ask him) were looking forward to the meeting greatly, although I (and I daresay, Jeff) was also feeling kind of shy about it.

To sum up, Rich was what he has always been, as far as I can tell: warm, funny, welcoming, fascinating... like George Perez, a truly classy human being. And Carol... well... Carol was also what many have come to regard as her normal self, which is to say, really astonishingly rude.

(Bear in mind that even Carol's most avid and fanatic partisans, like Peter David and Kurt himself, do not deny that the Revered Ms. Kalish could frequently and easily be perceived as rude by those who did not know her well, so this assessment on my part is hardly novel or unprecedented or even particularly controversial.)

The details of her rudeness hardly matter; basically, I expressed something enthusiastic about some particular aspect of our shared hobby (comics) and she went up one side of me and down the other, not so much implying as outright stating that only an idiot without the benefit of a single solitary brain cell could possibly believe any such thing, elaborately and at length. And I admit, I probably did say something startlingly ignorant (I had just turned 18, and was perfectly capable of such, for that matter, I still am), most likely, as best I recall, about some treasured Silver Age comics artist I stupidly did not care overmuch for at the time.

Still, the fact that I was ignorant, and enthusiastic in my ignorance, does not obviate my observation that Carol Kalish was astonishingly goddam rude to someone who had been looking forward for quite some time to meeting her, and, oh yeah, was a guest in her home. And, by the way, Rich Howell, who was also sitting there at the same time, apparently felt no similar urge to verbally eviscerate me for said ignorance.

Now, having said all that, I'll also say that it's all beside the point. Kurt is bringing up this letter to the Comics Journal simply to say, without actually coming out and saying, that I'm a big meanie, obviously very petty, and any criticisms I happen to venture of his work are clearly invalid, because I once said something... um... truthful, but never mind that... about Carol Kalish, whom the witness is aware is, at present, dead.

But since Kurt brought the letter up in an attempt to impeach my character that even Judge Ito would rule egregiously out of order, I'll note that said attempt at impeachment is not only off topic and, well, slimy (but that is merely a harbinger of the slime to come from Samaritan's Pal, oh my yes), but inaccurate. In many ways. First, I did not write to the Comics Journal to gripe about Carol, I wrote in response to an editorial by Gary Groth about Carol, in which he talked about the flood of glowing tributes that had been written about Carol after her death, and wondered at the lack of accounts that were, well, not quite so glowing, in that that might hypothetically be, shall we say, more truthful. (Perhaps Kurt has, in some interview or published letter or article I haven't read, attacked Gary Groth viciously for daring to dislike Carol Kalish. Or perhaps, since Gary Groth has a great big pulpit to respond from and thus, cannot be easily bullied or lied about, Kurt hasn't.) It was in response to that editorial that I wrote of my experiences with Carol, and in that letter, I did not merely mention the one occasion on which I had met the widely esteemed Ms. Kalish and she had been unpleasant to me, but actually, I mentioned the three occasions on which I had met Ms. Kalish and she had been unpleasant to me. (These three occasions were the only occasions on which I met Carol, and she was a nasty bitch to me on all three of them. Which does not necessarily indicate much of anything except that I'm the kind of guy who rubs other people the wrong way, especially Carol Kalish and, apparently, Kurt Busiek.) And since I'm sure you're curious, I'll relate, briefly, the other two occasions, as well (one of which will figure hugely in our Saga of Kurt, Annie, and Darren, still unfolding even as I type).

The second time I met Carol started out well enough. She had appeared, as Marvel's Direct Sales Manager, at a mini-con I was attending in Syracuse. (That mini con was also an occasion where I met Dave Cockrum and George Perez, and was inordinately impressed with one of them, but that's by the by.) I had watched her presentation, and then been pleasantly surprised afterward when she'd come over and greeted me warmly, obviously remembering me from our meeting years before. We chatted a little bit, and then I said something like "That Generation Zero sounds great, I'm gonna buy it!" She looked at me rather derisively, and then turned her thumb down and said "Good Lord, don't believe anything you hear me say on stage, the thing is terrible!" or something similar to that. To which I, after a stunned silence, said something expressing surprise that she would so enthusiastically get up and shill a product she actually thought sucked so bad. At which she darkened perceptibly, and the ambient temperature dropped fifteen degrees, and then, in an unfondly remembered fashion, the Esteemed Carol Kalish proceeded to rip me to little feathered pieces like a canary in a lawn mower, telling me in icy, beautifully contemptuous phrases that she was a professional, she had a job to do, she did her job very well, and if I had a problem with any of that, she couldn't possibly care less. (She said it in a much more humiliating way, and at greater length, but that's the gist. I also can't reproduce her tone, but any of you who ever actually met Carol know it, as does anyone who has ever watched a movie where Dabney Coleman plays his usual Utter Unethical Asshole part and tears someone a new sphincter for having the temerity to confront him in any way.)

After she finished flaying me, I believe I actually, from somewhere, mustered up enough residual spirit to mutter something like "Well, just because it's your job doesn't mean it's right"... and she turned imperiously on her heel and stalked away. And that was the second time I met Carol Kalish.

The third time was at one of Kurt Busiek's birthday parties.

Now this party is important for many reasons, which we will get to in time, or perhaps we won't, and in fact, my interactions with Carol at the party were rather limited... she and Rich came into the kitchen where I was sitting talking with Kurt's roommate, a very nice guy named Adam, and, I think, Kurt's future wife, Annie, who had come with me to the party. (In a loooooooooooong road trip from Syracuse NY to NJ just outside NYC, and Ann hadn't even actually been invited to the party until I reminded Kurt she still existed, but, well, we'll probably come back to that.) (Actually, we didn't, which is just as well, as it's more or less off topic. Still, if you want to hear the story of Darren And Annie's Road Trip To Kurt's Birthday Party, drop me an email.) I said "Hi, Rich!" (Rich is a great guy) "Remember me?" He was pleasant but cool to me. Carol glared at me venomously, and when I said "Um, hi, Carol," to her, turned on her heel and strode manfully out of the room, the very air glowing with her displeasure at seeing me there.

Then, later on, there was a big argument about the Trivial Pursuit game which I'm not going to detail because it's all stupid and long over with, except to say that I still maintain that if the answer on the card is WRONG, and everyone at the table knows it is WRONG, then giving the actual correct answer should be considered a valid, and even, a winning, move. Exactly which other player argued like a member of the O.J. Simpson defense team that the RULES clearly stated that the answer on the CARD was the only valid answer, and therefore, my actually correct answer did NOT win the game, well, I'll leave that as an exercise for the student. (And please, don't in any way think I'm inferring that I'm a better Trivial Pursuit player than Carol. Carol was demolishing, with ease, everyone else playing, including Your Humble Author. She was a formidably intelligent woman with an astonishing memory. My incipient victory was the product of me taking over for another player in a strong position and getting insanely lucky on my next two moves. In any battle of wits or intellectual debate, Carol would have taken me apart like a canning factory shreds tuna.)

So, then. We see that, in the first place, my letter to the Comics Journal, and my interactions with Carol Kalish, have nothing to do with anything pertinent to what I posted on the Astro City board, and Kurt's bringing them up was nothing more than a viciously amoral attempt to impeach my character from the outset of his attack. Secondly, we see that he represented my letter incorrectly, either by mistake or, you know, as a big fat lie. Third, we see that all this letter says about my character is that, in response to an editorial on a certain subject, I wrote in and offered my own pertinent experiences, and while it may not be considered very nice to say mean things about dead people, she was mean to me first, Mommy, and besides, every last friggin word is true.

So all this really says about me is that I tell the truth, even if it's impolite. But in that I have something half in common with Kurt, as he lies like a Borgia pontiff, even if it's impolite.

Following that remarkably surreal opening, Kurt dug right in:

First, I want to express admiration for Kurt's facility to construct unbelievably long and convoluted sentences. Until I read this, I had nearly forgotten where I learned the art from. Thanks, buddy.

As to the passage itself, well.

"John Jones" is, indeed, a pseudonym for me, Darren Madigan, Your Humble Author, and I am, indeed, a guy Kurt went to college with. This may be the only entirely truthful sentence in his entire tirade, but, let's not judge him too harshly, it's a short sentence, and I'm sure he could have crammed a lie in there somewhere if it had been just a tad longer. Referring to the fellow who often stayed up all night bullshitting about everything under the sun with him during the first three semesters we knew each other, slept in his room for a week during a Christmas visit to his hometown, met his family and liked a few of them, shared a house with him for two semesters, collaborated with him on many projects, learned how to think analytically and write comics from him, introduced him to his future wife, occasionally looked up to him as a near-god, typed POWER MAN/IRON FIST scripts, ghost wrote MARVEL UNIVERSE entries, and co-plotted mini-series with him, as "a guy (he) went to college with" is, actually, a pretty big implied untruth, but, still, it's accurate if not honest. So we'll just acknowledge that, yeah, "John Jones" is a pseudonym, and yeah, I'm a guy Kurt knew in college.

I suppose I should say a couple of words on why I so frequently use pseudonyms, even though it's actually no one's damn business, even in an era of rampant attempts to police not just our speech, but our thoughts. Still, really, none of this is your business, but Kurt put us all on this road, so, fine, let's briefly explore why I use a pseudonym, or, actually, many pseudonyms: (a) I don't like having my real name on the Internet, which used to be considered absurdly paranoid, until the FBI and NSA started using webcrawlers to check everyone's email and websites for treasonous keywords, which, by the way, they're still doing, and welcome to Amerika, comrade, (b) being intelligent, analytical, and generally truthful, I've pissed off a lot of comics fans and even a few pros in the past, and I've discovered that my work gets a more honest evaluation if it doesn't have my real name on it, and (c) well, gee, it's not like a big name comics pro ignores my feedback and launches personal attacks on me when he knows who I really am, now, is it?

So, passing on from there to the Really Long Sentence:

Yes. After Kurt broke in, my 'correspondence'... which I believe consisted of one lengthy letter I sent to him and then roommate Adam, enclosed with a script I'd done for an original (and, I admit, dreadful) character named "Dynamo" (clearly inspired by Archie Goodwin and Steve Ditko's lovely work on Atlas' THE DESTRUCTOR, which I'd have paid more tribute to by leaving alone) and in which I asked Kurt about maybe joining Kappa Alpha, the apa he was then on the waitlist for... certainly became 'increasing <sic> angry and bitter'. No doubt. I myself recall that letter as being long and chatty and friendly, and I recall his and Adam's response similarly, (Adam's sections were especially hilarious, in which he advised me to improve my writing through the use of various techniques like 'pretend you weigh 8000 pounds' and 'fight rain') but I don't have copies of them any more. Anyway, it occurs to me that this wasn't 'after (Kurt) broke in', this was 'while Kurt was trying to break in', during the lengthy period when he was suffering miserably in and just outside New York City, hanging out in Denny O'Neil's outer office waiting for his big break, while his father supported him. But I recollect a reference to Kurt's period of piling up debt and sleeping on friend's couches a bit later on in his epic fantasy, so I'm sure we'll come back to Rich Daddy And The Travails Of Breaking Into The Comics Industry When Someone Else Is Paying Your Rent And You Have No Friends Except Marvel's Direct Sales Manager... later.

In the meantime, though, we have this allegation that my correspondence became 'increasing <sic> angry and bitter' after Kurt broke in, so let's get back to that.

Well, for the first year after Kurt broke in, he had moved back to Syracuse and was living just across the Big M supermarket parking lot from me. He was writing POWER MAN/IRON FIST and making very little money, and I was working as a part time dorm security guard and making less money, which is why when I ate over there, we frequently had Kraft macaroni & cheese and Bisquik, unless one or the other of us (or Jeff, or Brent, the other two guys we hung with back then) had some actual money, in which case, we'd order a pizza. During this year, after Kurt broke in, since he was living across the parking lot from me, I don't recall there was very much correspondence between us. I could be wrong, I suppose, or, since said correspondence is most likely entirely hypothetical, Kurt can characterize it any way he likes. So, fine, I'll stipulate, during this first year after Kurt 'broke in', when I typed stuff for Kurt, suggested plot ideas and story titles and character names to Kurt, and even wrote a few things for Kurt, as well as ate with Kurt, gamed with Kurt, went to movies with Kurt, and just generally, hung out with Kurt, any and all of my entirely mythical and imaginary correspondence to Kurt was angry and bitter. Yes sir.

Hey, I just realized that The Great Man left a 'ly' off the word 'increasing' in that sentence. It should be 'increasingly'. Damn, Kurt. Conjugate your lies correctly there, big guy.

No one out there in our audience at home will have seen this, naturally, since you don't have mine or Kurt's memories to draw on, but to me, this sequence is a big 'gotcha'. See, despite the near comprehensive lack of any or all correspondence between Kurt and I 'after he broke in', and prior to the email correspondence we've already covered (and, will doubtless come back to), there is a piece of communication between us that this rather irate little fragment of a sentence seems to very specifically apply to. And I have mentioned it in passing before. Namely, that very last piece of communication 'twixt The Mighty Busiek and myself, which is to say, a phone call I placed to him about a month before he and Annie got married.

As I've mentioned before, this phone call, while seemingly strained at times (Kurt certainly wasn't expecting it; I'd had to track down the number by calling Annie's parents, and getting it from her brother, who, I will point out to the jury, surrendered it promptly, because he remembered quite clearly that I was close friends with both his sister and future brother-in-law) was cordial, and lasted a couple of hours, and in it, we chatted, as two old friends are wont to do, on a wide variety of subjects. Did we chat about movies? Yea, verily. Books? Absolutely. TV shows? Um... well, I don't think so, because at that time, I didn't own a TV, and hadn't ever owned one, and therefore, I don't think I could honestly have told you what the hell was on. But, we absolutely did talk about movies, and we absolutely did talk about books. In specific, we talked about BACK TO THE FUTURE, which I did not like, and EXTREME PREJUDICE, which I loved and Kurt sneered at haughtily, and STREETS OF FIRE, which Kurt told me an interesting anecdote about. We also talked about Robert B. Parker's latest Spenser novel, PALE KINGS AND PRINCES, which we both agreed was kind of an aimless mess, but which Kurt noted about "If you want to see what's working in detective fiction and what isn't, you have to read Parker, even when he isn't very good". And so our conversation went, with me sometimes saying something negative, to which Kurt would always say, in that tone where you want to be able to claim you're joking if you have to, but you're hoping the other person will really understand you mean it, "Oh, I don't like you any more", or him sometimes saying something negative, in that flatly authoritative, 'no one dares argue with The Voice Of Busiek' tone he always had (which I, infuriatingly, often argued with, after around 1982).

And that last, I think, is a very pertinent point. My friendship with Kurt did not dwindle and die because of any fictional correspondence that was angry and hostile and negative and critical. My friendship with Kurt began to dwindle and die the night he first got back from a semester in England and he heard me actually say to him (quite respectfully) "Well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree". You see, prior to that, when Kurt and I had been good friends, he had been the undisputed Mentor, and I had been the obvious Pupil. It must have been deeply satisfying to him to have a little toady like myself following him around, especially since I was young and obnoxious and stupid and incredibly opinionated, so he and I would argue for half an hour on virtually every conceivable subject, at the end of which, I would realize my error and admit that he was right, and from then on, go around parroting whatever opinion he had put in my head. God, he must have loved that. Wouldn't you?

If you could have seen the look on his face, that night in... the summer of 1981?... when he got back from being away for half a year and after our usual half an hour of arguing about something, I actually said, without even giving it much thought, "Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree..."

Thus, when Kurt says my correspondence became increasingly angry and bitter and critical, this is Kurtspeak. What he actually means is, over the past several years, I had become infuriatingly more and more inclined to think for myself, form my own opinions, many of which differed from Kurt's, and then, stick to those opinions, even after Kurt had been at great pains to explain to me the error of my ways.

Oh, my.

And, just so you know, as Carol Kalish's bitchiness is not something in dispute by anyone who ever really knew her, even those who really loved her, so too is the absolute necessity for agreeing with every single thing Kurt says if one wants to get along well with Kurt not even remotely in dispute, at least, not by any of the other members of the Lawrinson Crowd from our college days. We all knew it. It just took me a long time to realize what it meant. Kurt has gotten much better at not throwing monster tantrums like the ones he used to on the rare occasions that a roleplaying referee actually found the balls to rule against him and not be argued out of it, but, well, it's only a surface change.

A couple of examples of the old Kurt, and then, the modern Kurt:

Something none of you know about Scott MacLeod is that he ran a killer roleplaying campaign. Because Scott was by far the most studious of all of us, and had the most demanding curriculum (being in Visual and Performing Arts, and taking it seriously) he rarely had time to game with us. I recall only one time where he ever roleplayed with us, and rare occasions when he would agree to dust off his own roleplaying 'dungeon' and referee a run were avidly enjoyed by all participants.

Well, mostly.

On one occasion, we were all playing, and Kurt's character, Welkin, had picked up a Star Trek type phaser from somewhere. We were walking by a room and we saw some Star Wars storm troopers in it. Naturally, Kurt leaned around the doorway and blasted them. (Actual 'roleplaying' was not at a premium in these long ago games. Enacting as much random, senseless, gratuitous violence, while perfunctorily trying to fulfill some arbitrary 'quest', was pretty much the deal.) Scott rolled dice and determined that Kurt's phaser beam had struck a Storm Trooper's blaster rifle, resulting in a huge explosion that did rather a lot of damage to Kurt, and my character, Donnybrook, who happened to be standing in the doorway.

Kurt was furious, and promptly began to argue with Scott that "Star Trek phasers don't work that way". Furthermore, "everyone knows" that physics didn't work that way, and it was all ridiculous, and if it DID work that way, then his character should have known it, and wouldn't have done it.

Scott, for a wonder, actually overruled him. In fact, Scott, very unusually for him, actually got a little angry, and told Kurt to shut up and stop arguing. This hardly ever happened, but then, Scott hardly ever refereed. Usually I refereed, or Jeff Webb, or Andy Gillespie, and Kurt was very used to molding our judgments to suit his whim, regardless of established precedent, anyone else's superior knowledge of how some aspect of reality actually worked, or the way the dice had come up.

As an exercise for the student, I'll let you pick the correct answer:

Kurt fumed about that 'unfair ruling' for:

(a) a few more minutes, then relaxed cheerfully, realizing it was only a game

(b) the rest of the game, whining sulkily on and off about how 'stupid' it was and 'it just doesn't work that way'

(c) the next several years, occasionally bringing it up in future games up to and including the Champions campaign he, I, Jeff Webb, and Brent Burford alternated refereeing and playing in in, I believe, 1983, referring to it as 'that time Scott made that incredibly stupid call'.

The correct answer is (c), and it's hardly the only example I can call immediately to mind of Kurt sulking for an inordinate length of time when someone else refused to allow him to be in control of a game session, or, you know, some aspect of his immediate surroundings. There was the time Jeff Webb's character Matrix surrounded Kurt's character Challenger with a big block of solid purple energy, to keep Challenger from screwing up a delicate negotiation, and Kurt told me afterward that he never, ever, wanted to play with Jeff again. (He got over that, but he never let Jeff play Matrix again in any game with him.)

However, that's all Kurt from around twenty years ago, and he's probably grown up a lot since then. Right?

When I wrote an email to Kurt once, I don't know, maybe a year ago, from a pseudonym, and expressed that I loved his work except for that awful Valor thing, expressly praising everything he had written to that date except for that awful Valor thing, he wrote back to tell me if I couldn't be polite I shouldn't bother writing him at all.

So, apparently, in Kurtspeak, disagreeing with Kurt's opinions on movies and books and comics and, especially, his work, is the equivalent of being bitter, angry, critical, and impolite. And, as we will see, on Planet Kurt, it's grounds for dropping an old buddy like a hot brick, too.

But, still, and in summation of this section, I have to say, that first, there was little or no correspondence after Kurt broke in, other than a brief flurry I'll get to, and second, none of it, not even this phone call, was anything any sane person could remotely call 'bitter' or 'angry' or even 'critical', and anyway, so what if someone is critical? Kurt taught me to think critically, for God's sake. I'm only allowed to be critical when I'm not talking to him?

This bit I love. First, I have to assume when Kurt refers to his 'co-workers', he's talking about fellow comics pros, because, to the best of my knowledge, other than working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and writing comics, he's never had a job in his life, and I certainly wouldn't have been criticizing anyone else who worked for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, for the good and simple reason that I didn't know anyone else who worked for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, in fact, I couldn't, at gunpoint or on pain of having a crazed Lithuanian whack my dinger off with a butter knife, so much as name a co-worker of Kurt's at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. (Kurt, during this phone call, regaled me with hilarious stories about all the feebs and morons who sent in completely lousy rotten manuscripts, like the woman who wrote an endless series of romance novels inexplicably set on Venus, and the guy who had written a horribly violent horror novel about vampires who went around raping people before they killed them. If that has somehow been twisted in Kurt's mind to me being negative and critical of his co-workers, well, please imagine me at this moment twirling my finger around my ear and rolling my eyes in the universal sign language that indicates my feeling that such a belief would be profoundly deranged.)

Assuming, then, that when Kurt says I was bitching in a distressing fashion about his 'co-workers', he means fellow comics pros, then there are two things I have to say here. First, isn't it nice of him to stress in this subtle way that HE is the big shot professional and I am the pathetic, drooling fanboy? I think it is. I think it's wonderfully mature. And second, there has never been a fan of comics born who didn't on occasion have something unpleasant to say about some idiot comics writer or artist who was, in that fan's opinion, rigorously screwing over that fan's favorite characters. And when I say there has never been such a fan, I am distinctly referring to former fanboy and letterhack supremo Kurt Busiek, who spent nearly his entire first year after breaking in seething to me and to others in utter frustration at the aggravating, nearly intolerable ineptitude of his then editor who frequently and for no discernable reason just seemed to randomly change words in Kurt's scripts, the irritating unprofessionalism of the assistant editor who tried her darndest to steer all available freelance work to her husband, and the spectacularly godawful non-artwork of the bungling so-called artist who apparently had mastered the art of drawing with his feet, assuming you redefined the word 'mastered' to mean, 'insisted on doing it anyway even though the results were appalling and would make any writer forced to work with him cry and seriously contemplate killing himself whenever he tried to actually write dialogue over the photocopied artwork'.

And all that, of course, is after Kurt was a pro; we won't even discuss how, when he was still a mere fan like the rest of us, he nearly drove Chris Claremont off the stage at one particular con, heckling him about how if the X-Men were going to do morally ambiguous things, wouldn't it be good if they did something actually morally ambiguous, instead of just cold bloodedly killing unsuspecting guards and annihilating entire planets full of sentient asparagus.

So, was I, during this phone call, critical of Kurt's co-workers? I don't remember. I might have said a few mean things about Cat Yronwode, whom I've never been overly impressed with. My point is, this is something fans do when they talk, and with Kurt, being critical of comics pros was not exactly unprecedented.

But, y'know, now we're getting to the good stuff.

Oh, my. Life's Rich Pageant, indeed. There's just... so MUCH bullshit here. It's hard to know where to start.

Well, let's start with the fact that I have never, in my life, at any time when Kurt and I were still in any kind of two way communication, however sporadic, indicated in any way to him that he should be helping me get into the industry. Do I think he should have been? I suppose some part of me does. Do I think it would have been reprehensible manners on my part to say so? Sure. Am I so terrified of rejection that it is a major act of trust for me to ask a woman I'm living with, or a family member, to loan me $20? Absolutely. Is it then very likely that I'd ever have asked Kurt to do me a favor like this? Not the least in the world; in fact, I honestly think I'd rather have eaten glass than even ventured to do so.

Now, if our positions were reversed, would I have tried to help Kurt, or Jeff Webb, or any of my other talented friends who wanted, more than anything else, to work in comics? BOO yeah. But that's just me. And have I, in the past, when fellow fans and correspondents have asked me "If you were buddies with Kurt Busiek, why don't you ask him to help you get into comics?" replied "because Kurt's an asshole"? Oh, sure. And do I THINK Kurt is an asshole for not helping his friends? Absolutely.

But did I ever ask? No effing way.

Now let's get to this whole implication that Kurt is so cleverly setting up, namely, that when we were still in some way friends, he couldn't possibly help me, and when he could have undeniably helped me, we were no longer friends (and it was all my fault, too). First, I suppose it's difficult to believe that, at a time when Kurt was having trouble getting enough freelance work to pay the rent and let him eat something other than Kraft macaroni and cheese and Bisquick, he could have helped me or anyone else. And I'll concur with that statement. But what Kurt's rather carefully not mentioning there, and what he will screech denials of at the top of his lungs (or just say "I don't know, maybe, I really can't remember") when he reads this, is that, back during his first year in comics, in the early 80s, it was hardly unprecedented... in fact, it was very nearly customary... that when a comics pro got some help from a friend, they acknowledged that help in the credits or on the letters page. And, well, I'm not necessarily saying that any such acknowledgement would have helped me get some sort of start in comics. On the other hand, I'm pretty damn sure that, had Kurt's text piece in RED TORNADO #1 or LIBERTY PROJECT #1 said something along the lines of "And I want to thank and acknowledge my good buddy Darren Madigan, who brainstormed endlessly with me on this and many other projects, and without whose help these titles would not exist", it sure as hell wouldn't have hurt. (If that text sounds familiar to you, it's because you've heard and read similar things in probably a billion different places. However, you have never ever heard or read them coming from Kurt Busiek; at least, not as applied to someone who might at some point compete with him for assignments, money, and prestige in the industry.)

Just for the record: Kurt and I were sitting on the front porch of a house I shared with a couple of guys on South Beech Street, in Syracuse, NY, when Kurt specifically asked me to help him come up with ideas, because Mike Gold had mentioned to him that he was looking for miniseries featuring members of the JLA that did not have their own series. We ran down the list of available characters. When we got to Red Tornado, Kurt initially rejected him as 'too boring'. Since I was a big fan of Steve Englehart's run on JLA, I promptly suggested Kurt bring back the Construct, and since the Red Tornado was the only known entity, human or machine, that the Construct couldn't control, have RT end up saving the world from him. This fired Kurt's interest, and over the next few minutes, we hammered out the rough plot, including coming up with the scene that Kurt said Rich Howell would probably buy the original art for and frame, in which a mind-controlled JLA threw the Red Tornado out for being 'not good enough'.

That's just one example. There are literally endless examples of input and suggestions I made to Kurt's various projects back then, and please don't think I'm saying that he always used whatever I suggested, or that the brainstorming was a one-way street, or that Kurt was in any way a mouthpiece for my brilliant ideas. Kurt gave as good as he got in terms of brainstorming, and many of my own creative concepts have distinct Busiek touches all over them even now.

No. All I mean to say here is that, when Kurt talks about how he could barely get himself into comics, and therefore, couldn't possibly have helped anyone else, well, he's just not telling the truth. I don't know if it would have helped me at all if he'd given me credit in print as a creative contributor, but I will say two things: (a) it wouldn't have hurt, and (b) it would have been a tiny bit more honest, wouldn't it?

(As an interesting aside, I am now recalling an anecdote Kurt once told me, long ago, back in maybe my freshman year, about how Roger McKenzie got everyone in the Marvel Bullpen pissed off at him by walking around and asking everyone what they thought Daredevil should do in certain situations, and then taking their ideas and basing his DD scripts on them, without giving anyone any credit. Apparently, the Marvel Bullpen found this extremely annoying, and as best I can recall, Kurt seemed to agree with them. But that's entirely different from Kurt asking me for ideas to submit to Mike Gold and then never giving me any credit when he used them. Right?)

Now... let's talk about this crap where Kurt is rolling up debt and occasionally sleeping on friend's couches for weeks at a time.

First, as I say, I know this wasn't happening in the first year after he broke into comics, because he was back in Syracuse and we hung out a lot. I'm not saying he was doing well, but he wasn't in debt and he wasn't sleeping on any friend's couches for weeks at a time.

In terms of his 'debt', I'm honestly clueless what he means by that, unless he means that his father expected him to pay back his college tuition, and all the money he spent supporting Kurt, when Kurt was schlepping around New York City looking for his first break. If so, well, I've met Kurt's father and I wouldn't want to owe money to him, I grant you, but on the other hand, I doubt he's going to break Kurt's kneecaps, and anyway, owing your dad money isn't the sort of thing that shows up on a credit report, which is the general implication assumed when one reads of someone 'piling up debt'.

If Kurt was actually 'piling up debt', as in borrowing money from a financial institution in such a way as to possibly negatively affect his credit history... well, I never heard a word about it. I have never, to date, heard a word about it, through any of the acquaintances Kurt and I have in common. In all honesty, I find it difficult to believe, given the relative wealth of Kurt's dad, his past generosity, and the fact that Kurt's then-girlfriend--or, at least, soon-to-be girlfriend--came from a family which was even richer.

(Kurt, in any hypothetical reply, could well claim righteously that his financial history and credit statement are none of my, or your, damn business, and he'd be right, except I submit to Your Honor and the jury that Kurt put them into evidence by trying to get pity from his adoring audience when he mentioned, with a little chin quiver, how he was 'piling up debt'.)

As for sleeping on friend's couches for weeks at a time... again, I have no idea what this refers to. Perhaps there was a period when Kurt was sleeping on friend's couches, after he lost the gig on POWER/FIST and was working only sporadically in comics for a few years. I don't know, because we weren't in touch, but, oh, by the way, that would kind of indicate that my bitter and angry correspondence during this period was pretty much nonexistent too, don't you think? Whatever he's talking about, and whatever he was going through, I was not, as he clearly is trying to indicate here, badgering him to help me get into comics while he was sleeping on people's couches or piling up debt. I'm sure of that, because, well, gee, I never actually badgered him to help me get into comics, regardless of his personal circumstances.

As for Kurt's last crack, that he isn't aware of me ever actually submitting a proposal to a publisher, well, that would also stem from the fact that he hasn't made the slightest effort to stay acquainted with the details of my life for the last fifteen years or thereabouts. In point of fact, I've submitted lots of proposals, finished a novel, submitted the novel to publishers, and submitted many short stories to various places. I admit, I've tapered off a bit on comics proposals in the last few years; that's going to happen, after the fifth or sixth time you get a proposal back unopened with a cute little card showing the Thing saying "sorry, True Believer, we don't read unsolicited submissions!"... which is what happened to ALL of my comics submissions, from the mid-80s onward. (Sometimes the cute card had Superman on it. You haven't been rejected until you've been rejected by the Last Son of Krypton, let me tell you. Especially when he won't even use his X-ray vision to read your proposal before shoving it back in the outgoing mail slot marked "Return To Sender". )

Back when Kurt and I were still, in some way, friends, he once solemnly advised me that there were only two ways to get into comics if you were a writer who couldn't draw -- go to New York and badger editors incessantly until you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or, know somebody already on the inside. He seemed to feel, and apparently, still does, that there's something basically wrong with me, because I never just picked up stakes and moved to New York City so I could follow plan A, which, of course, The Great Man had. Of course, I don't KNOW anyone in New York, and I don't have a well-off father willing to support me while I schlepp around editor's offices, and I don't have a good friend who is Marvel's Direct Sales Manager.

Anyway, Kurt is not aware of any proposals I have submitted, because Kurt has absented himself from my life since, oh, I'm gonna say, around 1987 or thereabouts. The fact that he doesn't know about them doesn't mean I haven't written and submitted them.

(It occurs to me that I should mention here that in my first, hasty, very nearly overwrought response to Kurt's hurtful diatribe, which I posted on the Astro City chatboard, I erroneously stated I had not had snailmail contact with Kurt since 1985. Looking back through piles of letters I still have, I find that's not true, and checking the date THE LIBERTY PROJECT was published, I've confirmed it. The letters are all from Annie, Kurt's present wife, but since I have friendly, even loving, letters from Ann dated as late as summer of '86, that tells me she wasn't dating Kurt then, or at least, they weren't married yet, and since my last flurry of contact with Kurt was inspired by THE LIBERTY PROJECT - and was quite cordial, regardless of what The Great Man states otherwise - I must, then, revise my estimate upward to 1987, or maybe even 1988. To be honest, I don't know how other people's memories work, but mine works by association. I remember calling Kurt for our last ever contact, prior to Jeff Webb's suicide in 1993, around a month before his wedding, and I was living in one particular apartment. I remember realizing, with a shock, that it was Kurt and Ann's wedding day, while living in another apartment. I just don't remember, at the moment, what year that was. Sorry. But having gone through Annie's very sweet letters from just before that time period, it can't have been 1985, so I apologize for the error.)

I think we've mostly covered this material, but I do want to comment on the "all my attempts to tell him" bit. This is a masterful bit of misdirection, as Kurt implies to the reader that he, a caring, concerned pal, has made many, many efforts to communicate with me, while I, a self-absorbed bastard, have insistently ignored them.

Folks, Kurt has never once, to my memory, made the slightest attempt to communicate ANYthing to me about why our friendship petered out and died in the late 80s. I have been left to surmise it had something to do with his marriage to Ann Huntington, and we'll get to that, but he's never actually said so, nor has she. There has been complete and ringing silence from both of them on the subject of me, directed to me or anywhere else, as far as I know, for over ten years. The clearest message either of them has ever given me was in not inviting me to their wedding... which, given the givens, was pretty clear. But as far as it being anything like an 'attempt' to tell me that 'these gouts of hostility and bitterness' were not his 'idea of enjoyable correspondence'... that, like virtually everything else in this statement of Kurt's, is a flat and unequivocal lie.

It's also an interesting lie. Apparently, Kurt, whom I'll admit is an absolute master at manipulating the perceptions of others and his own public image, honestly feels that it's perfectly acceptable to ditch a friend, because that friend sends something that he considers to be less than 'enjoyable correspondence'. I'm hearing Joe Pesci here, in the background, wondering if, to Kurt's mind, a friend is merely some sort of clown to amuse him. (I would hasten to correct Joe in this; as far as I can see, Kurt's idea of a friend is not merely someone who amuses him, but also includes anyone who can help his career.)

As for that direct statement that I ever said to Kurt "You're my friend, you should be supporting me", well, I'm just sounding repetitive when I call these statements a lie, but that one is a damned lie. Hell, that one is practically a statistic.

However, Kurt has, at this point, only dabbled his little toe in the waters of contemptible, loathsome, vicious untruth that he is about to plunge headfirst into.

Now we're getting to the good stuff. Now, not only is Kurt lying about me - arguably, no one he much cares about, or should reasonably be expected to be honest about, for any reason beyond common human decency - but he's going to start lying about his wife.

I've already mentioned that Kurt never once, in his life or mine, ever said any such thing, or anything else that would have indicated in the slightest why he and I simply stopped being friends shortly before his wedding. However, it's here where he first brings in Annie, and although he'll get even more loathsome and despicable later on regarding her and me, I have to say, when I first read this little phrase, I was shocked.

First, the way he puts this implies that he and I were still in touch after he and Annie were married, which is, like virtually everything else he says, a flat and explicit lie. Second... well, forget second, it's a flat lie, and therefore, everything else is a flat lie, too. How correspondence that didn't exist, and would not have been negative if it had, could possibly have been starting to worry Annie, I have no idea.

For what it's worth, after quite a long silence once he moved away from Syracuse again, Kurt and I did have one more brief flurry of correspondence, over, I believe, the summer of 1987. (I could be wrong, but I'll stick with that for now. It might have been 1988, though.) It came about in an odd fashion. I'd written a rather funny letter to LIBERTY PROJECT, whimsically suggesting that they should turn Johnny Savage into a rock star. I wrote it as if I were a Hollywood agent, addressing it to "Kurt, baby! David, sweetie!" and continuing in that tone, suggesting that Johnny's signature hit could be a sweet little ditty called "But Officer She TOLD Me To Eat Her", that Savage Horn Hats would outsell Beatles wigs or Mickey Mouse ears put together, that Johnny's back-up band should be called "The Leatherneck Raiders", and various other pieces of, well, silliness. (I'm like that. Still. Sue me.)

Apparently, Kurt was charmed by the letter; anyway, he wrote back and told me that it had been passed around the Eclipse office extensively and nearly everyone had cracked up over it. I should mention that his note was very brief, written on notepad sized Scott Meredith Literary Agency stationery, nicely typed, and contained no personal material at all. Still, it was a note from my buddy Kurt! So I wrote back, and he wrote back, and while all his notes continued to be short and entirely about his work, still, we were in touch again, for a brief while. He never mentioned Ann, whom I knew he was dating/engaged to at the time (not from them, neither of them ever said a word to me about their relationship, but through mutual acquaintances) and in fact seemed mostly to just be getting some enjoyment, or at least, some sort of release, from having some kind of interaction with a guy who would regard his gig writing an obscure series for an obscure alternative publisher as a 'big professional success'. (I did, too. In fact, I think LIBERTY PROJECT was probably the last thing Kurt ever wrote that he really enjoyed or believed in.)

For all that, I don't think there were more than four of those notes on either side. Still, it gave me enough sense of contact with Kurt that I placed that phone call to him, that fall, about a month before I knew he and Annie were getting married. And that phone call was the LAST contact, to my memory, between us. Certainly, it was the last mutual communication.

It's a bit of an ache to bring all this up, but it's also essential to the actual truth for people to know: once Kurt and Ann's wedding came and went, and I had clearly been snubbed by both of them (and it was clear; they invited everyone else they'd gone to college with, as well as every family member on both sides, and various other acquaintances, too), I NEVER made the slightest effort to get in touch with either of them again, until I saw that mid-90s issue of WIZARD with Kurt's astoundingly corpulent picture in it. There was NO correspondence for close to a decade, much less any correspondence that could have made Kurt's 'wife' become worried. As far as I was concerned, if we were ever going to speak again, they'd have to initiate it, and they'd better damned well grovel if they did, too. (That this sounds pathetic, I'm well aware; as if Kurt was ever going to. Still, it's how I felt.)

The important point: Their wedding is a point at which I am absolutely certain all contact between me, Kurt, and Ann ended, if not forever, then at least, for very nearly a decade. Any statements, implicit or explicit, to the contrary, are lies.

Now, as for that bullshit about 'my wife, whom he'd had a thing for in college'... well. I did not 'have a thing' for Annie. I fell in love with Annie. She did not return my romantic feelings, and that sucked, especially given whom she eventually chose to share her life with. However, Kurt's casual denigration of my feelings for Annie, and the attendant implication that she and I never had any sort of friendship but that, in fact, I simply had a one-sided fixation, is contemptible and vile. Sorry I can't show more of a sense of humor about it, but, well, it's just a shitty thing for him to say.

::sigh::

I think, with the outlines of the timeline I've laid out, even the most petulant MARVELS fan in the audience can now begin to grasp the innate problems with any statement that indicates that a correspondence had continued, and eventually tapered off, while Kurt and Ann were married. However, in case people still haven't grasped it:

My two closest friends from college did not invite me to their wedding, to which they invited all our mutual acquaintances. I did not make the slightest effort to contact either of them for years afterward. Anyone who says otherwise is, at best, misinformed, and at worst, deliberately lying or badly in need of anti-psychotic medication.

And, you know, here we start with the public image massage, as Kurt, kindly Jedi master that he is, begins to softly spin (not that he isn't spinning like a Battling Top by now anyway), letting his audience know that, oh my, he and his wife, well, they aren't without compassion, it's not that they don't care, it's just, you know, they can't be friends any more with someone who sends them a lot of mail.

In fact, let's take a good look at what we've got so far. Basically, Kurt has told us that the reason his friendship with me died is that I sent him correspondence which he found unpleasant. I mean, even leaving aside the fact that this is a complete and utter falsehood, still. An old college buddy sends you bitter, angry, critical correspondence and asks for your help. And what do you do? Well, according to The Great Man, what you do is, you tell him that his being bitter and angry and critical, and his reaching out to you for help... isn't your idea of a pleasant correspondence.

One more time, and let's remember, Kurt is lying now, start to finish, top to bottom. Yet I think it says something about his essential soullessness, when we stop to consider exactly what lie he has concocted here, that he thinks makes him look good and me look like shit.

In essence, according to Kurt, he and I were friends. He succeeded. I did not. I became angry. I became negative. I became critical.

I asked him for help.

Over and over again.

And he... he told me to stop bothering him. And why?

Because, to a successful man like him, an angry, negative, critical friend, asking him for help, again and again and again... was... what was that wonderful phrase? Oh, yes... "not my idea of enjoyable correspondence".

Gee.

And this is Kurt Busiek's idea of a lie that makes him sound like a NICE guy.

This, apparently, is Kurt Busiek's idea of a good, valid, credible reason to ditch a friend.

Some pal, huh?

Hard to believe it gets worse. But... well...

Actually, I have no real major objection to this passage. I mean, it's Kurt-spin, sure, but, what the hell. I did send him a few mean, insulting emails. He makes it sound like I was being serious, bitter, deeply angry, when in fact, I was poking fun at him, mostly for being a huge fat tub of lard. And that was childish and mean-spirited and immature, I know. And he's also leaving out the very sincere note of congratulations I sent him, when I read that he'd been picked to write AVENGERS and IRON MAN, because I knew that was a childhood dream of his, and I was psyched for him (and selfishly, for me, too; I love the AVENGERS and IRON MAN, and I wanted him to write them well, and, at least on AVENGERS, he generally has). But, still, for the most part, if he wants to call the couple of emails I've actually sent him that were addressed to him, from me, and were written in the context of our personal relationship "rambling, bitter, insult-filled", well, I can actually sit back and say "sure, that's his perspective, I understand it". He's exaggerating, distorting, and leaving things out, of course, but in fact, he's, for a change, not overtly lying. I suppose I even probably referred to him blowing off old friends, although, gee, since he WAS blowing off an old friend, and had been... has been, actually... for over ten years, I don't see how me referring to that reflects badly on me.

Oh, wait. I do have one objection. I didn't 'express (my) ire' that Kurt didn't get me into the business. Again... this is not something I'd ever have been comfortable asking Kurt for. To me, you just don't ask for favors like that if you have any self respect. (Similarly, though, if you're in a position to offer a favor like that to a friend, you certainly do, again, if you have any self respect.) Kurt sure seems to dwell on it, though. A few of my regular email correspondents, having seen Kurt's post to me, have pointed out that, in fact, Kurt seems nearly obsessed with this concept of him helping me get into the business. As I've never brought it up to him (other than once, I think, when I closed an e-note with a sarcastic reference to him helping me get an editor to look at my SERAPHIM 66 precis, which was not a request, but more a comment on just how ridiculous the thought of him helping me do anything, much less compete with him, would be), and Kurt clearly indicates that in fact, I was bringing it up constantly over the course of his early, mid, late, and current career, apparently incessantly and constantly harping on the fact that he wouldn't help me get a foothold in the industry... well... gee. I'm wondering if my old college buddy doesn't have a guilty conscience about something.

This is a very strange mixture of utterly despicable, reprehensible, contemptible lie -- in that I NEVER sent any emails to Annie, I never had an email address for Annie until a month ago -- and semantically twisted truth -- in that these fictional emails were indeed the same thing as it had been before, i.e., nonexistent, and if something that doesn't exist can then not exist at a higher volume... well, these abstract philosophical issues are beyond me, but Kurt is a Great Man, and I will take his word for it.

I swear, this is breaking my heart. Leaving aside the fact that this is utter fantasy from the opening capital 'H' to the closing period, it's just making me all weepy. Those poor, beleaguered Busieks. Blocking that hateful fellow from their email addresses, only to have him CHANGE EMAIL ADDRESSES AND SEND STUFF TO THEM AGAIN. Good Lord. How DID they bear up? They must be so strong. Let us admire them even as we weep for them.

Sarcasm aside -- I never sent email to Annie. I did send email to Kurt, and some of it was mean and picked on him, and some of it was nice and congratulated him. If Kurt ever blocked me from any email addresses, I honestly couldn't tell you. I did change email addresses on frequent occasion, for various reasons, some of which were simply my instinctive feeling that if my old friend Kurt knew an email was from me, he'd probably delete it unread, and what point was there in writing one and sending one if he wasn't going to read it? I mean, geez.

Now, I know. It's not nice to send people mean email that picks on them. What can I tell you? Unlike Kurt, the Great Man and noble Jedi Master who abandons his friends because all that asking him for help just gets so anNOYing, don't you know... I'm not perfect. Given that Kurt makes a whole lotta money, is admired and respected by lots of people, and gets to do what he wants for a living -- I don't know, but I'm thinking that, what with the life he's got, his crying about a few insulting emails from someone he kicked to the curb like an old beat-up sneaker ten years or more before is... what's the word? Whining? Sniveling? Crying like a little sissy girl? (Well, that last is a phrase, not a word, but I think they all fit admirably.)

Well, first, yes, as someone who shells out his couple of bucks every month regularly and avidly for AVENGERS, and who was an equally fervent follower of AVENGERS FOREVER, and IRON MAN when Kurt was writing it, I really think, if I want to write LOCs about those comics to their author, I'm entitled to, and I think if I want to use a pseudonym to see to it that their author doesn't delete them unread, I can do that, too.

As for 'within a few messages, he'd be back to the bile', well, the only time I can remember any of these pseudonymic correspondences going even mildly bad with Kurt was one time when, in a note otherwise filled with praise, I mentioned not liking Valor very much. Now, mind you, I didn't say I didn't like Kurt's WORK on Valor, I just said I thought the character, and DC's post-Crisis treatment of the Legion as exemplified by the existence of Valor, pretty much sucked, and I was disappointed with Kurt's participation in it. Kurt responded, promptly, by ignoring the entirety of the rest of the letter and saying, regarding my comments on Valor "You know, if you can't be polite, just don't bother to write me at all!"

That's the closest any of my pseudonyms came to 'spewing bile'. But, wait, what am I saying... that Captain Kurt might have told a FIB at some point in this long, pointless, unprovoked, utterly irrational and completely unprofessional attack on a guy who posted a professional criticism of a professional creative work on a public chat board? Oh, my. How could THAT be?

I admit, most of those pseudonymic correspondences did peter out after a few exchanges, but that's on Kurt. I answer all my email. He tends to just let things drop after he feels he's done the cursory minimum necessary to keep people feeling happy about buying his work.

First, I don't know where Kurt's head was when he typed this paragraph, as this most recent letter, signed under my real name and sent from my real AOL account, was sent, as usual, to KurtBusiek@aol.com. That's a minor point, but, well, it just makes me think Kurt is not only lying like a rug here, but, well, maybe not actually in touch with the same reality the rest of us share.

(Rereading this sometime after first typing it, it occurs to me that this is just more Kurt spin... he thought, perhaps, that to some hypothetical reader, it would make me look a tiny bit worse if he mentioned that I'd sent a 'nasty' letter regarding AVENGERS FOREVER to the apenation.com website. "Look!" Kurt trumpets triumphantly. "Not only does he send me mean email, but he sends it to a website that ISN'T EVEN ABOUT AVENGERS FOREVER!" Truly, I am vile. Stop Me Before I Email Again.)

As for the rest of it, well, again, it's interesting. Kurt is basically telling all of you that I sent him an email critiquing a story he did... and somehow, he's making this sound like I did a Very Bad Thing. I mean, go figure. He wrote a story, Marvel printed it, I bought it and read it, thought about it, and wrote him a letter saying "Dude, you screwed this up big time". And... I don't know... I'm the Bad Guy. Which is, of course, an interesting and perhaps even essential insight into the Mind of Captain Kurt. As long as you send him nice email telling him he's a god, you're a fine, fine person, but dare to point out he made a mistake, and suddenly, you're 'nasty' and 'excoriating' him.

(Kurt's list of Very Bad Things is kind of interesting. Sending Kurt 'nasty' email is a Very Bad Thing. Using pseudonyms is a Very Bad Thing. Telling one's truthful impression of Carol Kalish is a Very Bad Thing. Asking a friend for help is a Very Bad Thing. Impugning Kurt's professional ethics in regard to a book that is, to all intents and purposes, little more than the superhero comics equivalent of an automobile chopshop, is a Very Bad Thing. Writing to an old, one-time very close friend and wishing her a happy birthday is well beyond a Very Bad Thing, it is, apparently, an Utterly Evil Thing.)

The rest of the paragraph is about comics continuity, not me, which makes it a pleasant break, so I'll respond to it. Kurt claiming that the idiotic plot nonsense he regurgitated in this one issue of AVENGERS FOREVER was actually an established piece of continuity is a stupid and utterly pointless piece of reasoning, since much of AVENGERS FOREVER was devoted to Kurt correcting various established pieces of continuity that he felt were contradictory. If the idea that the Kang who went after the Celestial Madonna was actually merely a 'variant Kang' is an established piece of Avengers continuity, or was before AVENGERS FOREVER, well, it was a bad one, and Kurt had a chance to fix it, and he didn't.

But still, the paragraph is mainly a lie, because the real point of my letter to AVENGERS FOREVER was not to 'excoriate' Kurt for invalidating the good Kang stories and validating the stinky ones (although he shouldn't have), but to point out that Kurt had made a very plain and simple error: namely, by stating that the Celestial Madonna Kang, who later died fighting Thor in the Old West, was merely a variant, and then later telling us that the REAL Kang (the one in AVENGERS FOREVER) had gone back and become Rama Tut and lived through that whole adventure, remembering being that same Celestial Madonna grabbing Kang (I know, this is convoluted)... well, it makes no sense. It's contradictory. If the Englehart Kang is a variant, then he's dead, and he can't be the Kang in AVENGERS FOREVER. If the AVENGERS FOREVER Kang remembers being the Englehart Kang/Rama Tut, then he's not a variant, and he's not dead.

Unless, of course, Immortus used the Forever Crystal to create a fork in the timeline where Kang both is and is not his own variant, and, also, the Vision was actually created from the components of five separate androids named Bill, except that he actually wasn't, either.

(I know you're not following this, but the gist is, the real point of my letter was, I caught Kurt in an inarguable mistake, and he hates that, so he's lying about it.)

This is kissin' close to the truth, except for that weird little pain in the ass word, 'again'. I did send Annie an email, last month, wishing her a Happy Birthday, because I'd stumbled across an email address for her, at the apenation site. In the course of the email, I did mention that Kurt seemed to have gone rather off the deep end on the subject of me, but I hoped she and I could still be friends. On Planet Kurt, it seems, This Is Evil. However, I did not start sending Annie email 'again', for the good and simple reason that I had never sent her email before.

Now, as to Kurt apparently forming an irrational dislike of me... well. Gee. I wonder why I'd think that?

I also want to note, wryly, before passing on, that I never complained that 'maybe Kurt apparently' did anything. I'm honestly not that bad a writer.

Again, we must weep for the Great Man, even as we admire him for his staunchness in the face of such terrible, terrible persecution. Let's see... he's the third most popular writer in comics, has a loving wife, a new kid, a job he loves, makes a ton of money, gets awards, probably has teenage fans lined up to suck him off at every Con (even female teenage fans, I mean, gimme a WHOO, gimme a HOO, here)... just an apparently wonderful life even George Bailey would envy... but... oh no! Here's that darned guy from his college years again, posting on a public chat board, under a pseudonym so Kurt won't think it's a personal attack or anything, leveling a professional criticism of Kurt's professional ethics. How... HOW does he bear it? That monster, Darren Madigan. He... MUST... be... STOPPED...! How... DARE he... post MESSAGES... about a comic book that he bought, and read, and formed an opinion of? DAMN HIM!!!!

Frankly, as I believe his response makes amply clear, he can't do either. Bad reviews are 'nasty' and 'excoriating'. Chat board postings criticizing his professional ethics are met with lengthy, personal, vituperative, libelous responses that completely avoid addressing the original topic. 'Venomous emails', from what I've seen, are any emails in which the sender does not, to paraphrase Aaron Altman's immortal words, press their lips tightly against Kurt's buttocks and SMOOCH. He can take bad reviews in stride? He can ignore venomous emails? Good Lord. I must be hallucinating this entire thing, then. My God. Watson, no more of that seven percent solution for ME, nosireeBOB.

Well, I think it might be an even better idea to, like, not make up cool sounding phrases that don't actually mean anything. I mean, 'stalking', now that, as far as I know, is presenting the appearance of a threat through insistent and unnecessary physical proximity with the specific intention of frightening your victim. 'Cyber stalking'... well, I'm not sure you CAN stalk someone cybernetically. I mean, am I making Kurt afraid, by sending him occasional emails that call him 'fat fat the water rat', that point out he's stolen the entire lives' work of several much better creators and put his name on it all in KURT BUSIEK'S ASTRO CITY, that mention he's made a mistake in the plot of one issue of AVENGERS FOREVER, or that even (gasp) tell him I think he's doing a great job on the Hank Pym characterization in AVENGERS? Good Lord. Kurt's a timid man indeed.

But wait, wait, I forgot. It's not himself he's concerned with. He's only going to look into statutes regarding a non-existent word he just made up, because:

Now, I see two possibilities here. First, Annie is really, truly upset about this, because she honestly believes that a guy whom she and Kurt used to know sending her husband occasional email about what a big lard butt he is, and how good his writing is when it's good, or how bad it is when it's bad, actually poses some sort of physical danger to her. Oh, and, she's really frightened by the fact that I sent her one email, after about fifteen years of utter silence, and in it, I threatened her by wishing her a happy birthday.

Or, second, Kurt is... what's that word... oh, yeah... LYING... again.

I don't know. Given his track record to date, well... you call it.

Still, I honestly don't know. Not having heard a word from Annie in fifteen years, I really can't tell if she's dumb enough to actually be frightened by any of this. I will tell you this, though... if Annie is upset, it's because Kurt has been showing her the email I sent him, because until last month, I never sent HER any. Now, Kurt could have been showing her the email I sent him because, you know, he's the sort of guy who shares everything with his beloved, even if he knows it will frighten and upset her (uh... run that by me again?) or... he could be showing her the email I sent him because, for some bizarre reason, even after years of marriage, he's still irrationally insecure about me and wants to prove to Annie what a jerk I am. (And, good buddy, I'm here to tell you that I'm pretty sure Annie figured out what a jerk I am years and years ago and didn't need your help to do it, either.)

Either way, if Annie's upset, it's on Kurt, and if she isn't, then, well, isn't he a swell guy, lying about his wife in front of a bunch of strangers in order to make a former buddy look bad?

Actually, I'm nowhere near even remotely amused by this bit. Frankly, I think it's vile. Either Kurt has been showing email I sent specifically to him to his wife, just to make me look bad, even though he knows it upsets her... or... he's lying about it to manipulate the perceptions of other people, about me, and about himself. Lying. About his WIFE. In front of a bunch of strangers.

I'm honestly not sure which is more despicable. Oh, wait, yes I am. The Nazi concentration camp commandant thing... THAT's more despicable. Still, either of these other options is pretty goddam low.

And, from here on out, it's all just self-serving horseshit. Well, not that it hasn't all been self-serving horseshit up to now, but I mean, the rest of this... the impassioned pleading... the pretense that he and/or Ann actually care if I 'have love in (my) life' (as long as, you know, it isn't theirs)... the whole unctuous, Movie of the Week, 'oh Lord look at us we're so compassionate, please, please, stop tormenting us' tone... this is all just CRAP.

Sorry to be so blunt, but, really, that's all this is. Self-serving codswallop. Balderdash. In the words of everybody's favorite villain, Henry S. Potter, "sentimental hogwash". Kurt is trying to play his audience like a big violin and, chances are, it's working, too.

Still, it's interesting to watch the master at work. Waaaaay up, Kurt laid the first tile in this little mosaic, saying that I was bitching at him to help, back in a time when he could barely help himself. Now we see the rest of that little piece of circular logic: according to MARVELS Man, I've "scorched to ash" our friendship, "before 1990". That's a deft piece of work. Why "before 1990"? Well, because "before 1990", he can convince people he couldn't possibly have helped me. If we were friends AFTER 1990, well, that gets a little harder to swallow.

In addition to being interesting, it's also a relief. Since I now am safely reassured that I had 'scorched to ashes' any remaining friendship I might have had with Kurt 'before 1990', apparently, all those mean, nasty, vindictive, insulting emails, where I solemnly advised Kurt to beware of tar pits and mad, one-legged sea captains with harpoons, actually had no effect on our 'friendship' whatsoever. In fact, since Kurt and I haven't been friends any time in the last decade, well, then, it would seem that all my opinions of him can't possibly be personal. I can't tell you what a relief this was. Here, you know, I thought he'd just lost my phone number.

Let's sum up, shall we? First, very nearly every word Kurt wrote is calculated, vicious lies. However, even if we accept Kurt's calculated, vicious lies at face value, what do we have?

We have a guy who opens by trying to make people think I'm a bastard, because I truthfully recounted some experiences I'd had in a letter to the Comics Journal.

He then tells everyone that I'm just "a guy (he) went to college with", although, later on, he forgets this rather blithe dismissal, and admits that we had been friends, but I had "scorched to ashes" our relationship. (Before 1990, remember.) He even tells us exactly what heinous deed I committed to force him to terminate our friendship: I became angry. Bitter. Critical. And I asked my friend for help. Over and over and over.

In his own words, folks: that wasn't his idea of an "enjoyable correspondence". So he blew his 'friend' off.

Just to be clear: I NEVER asked Kurt for help when he 'first broke in'. I NEVER, until last month, sent his wife -- my one time self-proclaimed 'baby sister' -- email. I don't know what cyber-stalking is, and I suspect no one does. I rarely corresponded with Kurt, for the simple reason that most of the time we were friends, we lived near each other. I have never threatened Annie in any way, and frankly, anyone who knows me at all well and isn't positively demented with irrational jealousy and insecurity over a relationship that's been over for fifteen years, could possibly imagine me doing so.

In all the years I've felt hurt and, yes, angry, with Kurt and even with Annie, for the way they casually, treacherously, even cruelly, and certainly unjustly, dismissed me from their lives, I have never seriously wanted to hurt either of them. And I've always thought, or hoped, somewhere deep down inside, that somehow, this would all turn out to be just a misunderstanding. Living in the past? Or just an unwillingness to truly believe the worst of two people I used to love? I don't know.

Either way, I guess it was stupid.

"This is not my beautiful wife..."

"And the days go by... and the water rushes in... and the days go by... and the water rushes in... once in a lifetime... water flowing underground..."

"Now ain't it good to know that you've got a friend

when people can be so cold?

They'll hurt you,

Yes, and desert you...

They'll take your soul if you let them...

Oh, but don't you let them..."

Just to make sure we're straight here, folks: I never asked my friend Kurt Busiek for help.

Good thing, huh?

* * * * * * * * * * * *

• * * * * * * BELOW! SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE! IN THIS ISSUE ONLY – THE ‘SCARY’ EMAIL I SENT ANN HUNTINGTON BUSIEK, and the ‘NASTY, EXCORIATING’ EMAIL I SENT AVENGERS FOREVER! * * * * * * *

Below, in all it's glory, is the very first email I have ever sent to Ann Margaret Huntington Busiek, my one time close friend and self proclaimed 'baby sister', current wife to apparently whacked out award winning writer Kurt Busiek, and current editor for Gorilla Comics.

Scary, huh? It's worth noting that, after I first read Kurt's profoundly deranged post to me, in which he alleged that not only had I been sending Annie email for years, but that my email was 'scaring' her -- both utter fabrications, as far as I can see -- I sent her another email, at the apenation.com address, inquiring if I had scared her, and apologizing. That one I don't seem to have had the forethought to copy to myself, so I can't reproduce it here, but, well, it was just as unscary as the one above.

As with the one above, there was no reply, but Kurt's post gives ample evidence that at least the note above got through, and at least, HE read it. I myself have to wonder if Ann ever read it, since I honestly think Annie would have responded to it, if only to tell me she didn't think it would be appropriate for us to correspond.

However, all I know is, Kurt certainly read it, and later, he described it as 'scaring Ann'.

Come on, folks. Read that note again if you really need any more evidence that Kurt is nuts, lying, or (c) all of the above.

My second note also went unanswered. A few days later, when I sent a copy of FUNERAL FOR A FRIENDSHIP to both KurtBusiek@aol.com and ann@apenation.com, the copy to Annie was mailer-daemoned back.

I find this interesting.

I first got online in 1994, and I like many people, the first things I did were (a) register my email address with as many search engines as possible (I later rethought this and changed email addresses, deciding I didn't want to make it quite that easy for cyber-snoops to track me) and (b) check those same search engines for email addresses of old friends.

Kurt's, I will note for the record, turned up instantly, as did about half a dozen others of old college and high school buddies. Ann, however, never had a publicly listed email address. Until November of 2000, I could find no mention of Ann Huntington Busiek on the net at all... which is odd, when virtually everyone else I've ever done a net search on turns up at least ONE hit, and Annie, at the time she married Kurt, was planning to write.

Or, anyway, it seems odd to me.

For a brief instant... days? Weeks? Ann had a publicly listed email address.

I sent her two emails. Two emails. After thirteen years of silence. And her email address... vanished.

Boy, Kurt sure nailed that window closed fast, didn't he?

Now, a few friends I have discussed this with have told me that if anyone seems to be displaying obsessive, controlling behavior here regarding Ann Huntington Busiek... well, it ain't ME. In fact, they seem to think there is some evidence to indicate that Kurt seems almost insanely afraid of what might happen if Annie and I actually managed to get in touch, through whatever medium, at whatever distance.

Now, I'm pretty sure that my former buddy Kurt Busiek is a fine husband and a great father and all that stuff. I mean, honestly, no irony, I believe that.

Of course, I never would have thought he'd go insane on a public chatboard and tell a lot of vicious lies about me, either.

If anyone out there can get an email to Ann, ask her how she's doing, and drop me a line letting me know, okay? If she doesn't want to talk to me, that's cool, really. But... I'm a tiny bit concerned.

- Darren Madigan, January 1, 2001

docnebula01@juno.com

martianmanhunter2@juno.com

My 'nasty' and 'excoriating' email re AVENGERS FOREVER. I think it speaks for itself. Kurt handles criticism well, doesn't he?

Now, I ask you, was that 'nasty'? Was that 'excoriating'? Well, okay, yeah, it was, probably, both, but geez, was it DESERVED? Did Kurt Busiek screw up big time trying to straighten out Kang the Conqueror's convoluted continuity, or what? And, um, gee, aren't professional creators who publish their work for money kind of understood to be legitimate targets of criticism?

What I guess I'm saying here is, isn't Kurt Busiek kind of a big whiney crybaby for making such an issue of an email that pointed out he made a mistake and that a fan who paid for his work didn't care for one aspect of it?

Well, I think he is.

- Darren Madigan, January 1, 2001