Hey, I just received email noting that Chasing Hairy by Michael Fleisher, former writer of the Spirit Spectre 70s revenge stories, has come back into print.
Gossip folks will recall that this book was described by long-time friend of the blog Harlan Ellison as “bugfuck” in a Comics Journal interview, thus sparking a lawsuit which would ruin relations between Ellison and Journal publisher & editor, Gary Groth.
Publisher’s description:
CHASING HAIRY is a brutal, profoundly disturbing portrait of two young men who meet as college students and develop a close, complex friendship whose underlying basis is the shared but unconscious hostility they bear toward women. Thrown together in the dormitory, they become friends as they try to cope with the freedom that comes from living away from home for the first time. The novel depicts their wild college days as their friendship grows, nurtured by their mutual devotion to the “pursuit of the elusive hairy,” which leads them into frenetic episodes that are both reckless and hilarious. As they grow older, each surprises himself by settling down with one woman and begins to experience the gritty reality of a day-to-day relationship. The unresolved sexual tensions inexorably boil to the surface and generate remorseless, unrelenting momentum that sends both characters hurtling toward one of the most traumatizing climaxes in modern fiction.Written in a taut, naturalistic style evocative of the best of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, CHASING HAIRY unflinchingly explores some of the frightening undercurrents pervading—sometimes dominating—our sexual lives and will leave the reader stunned and shaken.
And now for something completely different:
UPDATE: Special correspondent Dave Asselin points out in the comments that I’m crazy– Fleisher did the Spectre, not the Spirit, which I swear I knew. But pardon the error.
October 31st, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Correction: He didn’t write Spirit stories, he wrote the late 60s run of The Spectre.
October 31st, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Correction to the correction, he wrote the Spectre stories in Adventure Comics in the 70s.