Having been an Internet user for years and years and years, I’ve racked up a fair number of web results. Many of them embarrassing. Some are from the days before there was a web, let alone search engines. Had I been named Steve Jones or Bob Smith or something even mildly obscure, I could claim that there was someone else with the same name who was making all the trouble. But given that my name is double imaginary (last name invented during Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s westernization reforms, first name invented by my mom misremembering the credits on Gunsmoke) this is impossible. There’s only one Jarett Kobek in the world. Me.

A long available result for searches on my name has been the capture of a Usenet thread, wherein I started a flame war in alt.fan.harlan-ellison by contending that Ellison’s writing had fallen off ever since he’d met his most recent, and final, wife. This was an obnoxious claim that never should have been made. My only defense is that I was 18 or 19 years old and thus knew no better.

Remarkably, negative responses came not only from the regulars, but also Dave Gerrold, who threated to punch out of my teeth, and Harlan Ellison himself, who went on and on and on about young people and this, that and the other thing. For those of you not geeky enough: Dave Gerrold wrote the screenplay to The Trouble with Tribbles and Ellison was the screenwriter on The City on the Edge of Forever. This means that I managed to really, really upset the writers of the two most popular episodes of Star Trek. Much as I regret the whole affair, I admit that this abstractly remains a pretty funny thing to have done.

Okay, fast-forward. A few months ago, Ellison filed suit against Gary Groth, Kim Thompson, and their company Fantagraphics. Without going too far into the nitty-gritty, these guys have had bad blood for almost 30 years. After years of back and forth & chicanery on both sides, Ellison has decided that he’s had enough. Based on my unexpert readings of his filings, I don’t think he has a case. Am I convinced that this is the RED LETTER FIRST AMENDMENT issue that Fantagraphics wants it to be? Not entirely, but enough to think that they’re technically in the right.

The interesting part is that Ellison is wrong in a more general sense. The worst possible way to fight perceived insults is by trying to suppress them. This has always been true but is only more so in these days of the Internet, where the biggest sin is any action that is regarded as censorship. If Ellison succeeds in court– and while I hope he won’t, I certainly can’t say it’s impossible– what’s the best case scenario? What happens to Fantagraphics? And how will that result be felt? Who will be the real loser?

For reasons beyond me, a few weeks ago I decided to weigh in on all of this with an anonymous comment in a long, stupid thread on Publisher’s Weekly comics blog. This comment ended up being praised not only by Heidi MacDonald, the blog’s author, but also Eddie fucking Campbell. If you’ll excuse the burst of sycophancy: Mr. Campbell is pretty much the foremost talent in comics, both as an artist and as a writer. He’s most famous for illustrating the pictures that accompany Alan Moore’s text in From Hell. (This book, by the way, ruined my life. But that’s a story for another time.) I recommend everyone check out his Alec books, the last two of which strike me as the single smartest works in the history of comics! (I mean How to be An Artist and After the Snooter here. Sad to say, I was a bit cold on Fate of the Artist, which anyway I don’t think is classified by Campbell as an Alec book.)

So, high praise indeed. I posted anonymously because I didn’t want anyone digging up the old flame war and accusing me of having a bias in the whole deal. Which I may have. Who knows? But now that I’ve been given attention, I’ll take the credit.

Personally, I think the whole thing sums up a lot of character development: from snarky teenager to Voice of Reason. Can there be a better narrative?