by Benn Ray
Twenty five years ago, I worked for Gemstone Publishing on a magazine called Overstreet's FAN. It was a competitor, for those who remember such things, of Wizard Magazine and Hero Illustrated.
It was a job that brought me and my friends who worked there into regular contact with a number of our heroes. There would be arguments in the editorial pool over who was going to do the Alan Moore interview, who was going to call Frank Miller to let him know of a changing deadline for his artwork, who got to see KISS with Todd McFarlane (I won that one), who was going to proof a Neil Gaiman story after it went through layout, etc.
One day, the phone on my desk rang and the receptionist said, "Benn, Harlan Ellison is on the phone for you."
I was not a science fiction fan. I was not a Star Trek fan. But I still knew the name Harlan Ellison and his reputation as a particularly difficult and argumentative person.
So I answered the phone with a cheery, "Hello, Harlan.…
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