Harry Harrison: The Interview

For this edition of our exclusive guest interviews, Paul Tomlinson goes to Brighton to interview the legendary Harry Harrison about comics, George Lucas and... did he just say something about a big secret book?

This interview took place on the 31st August 2009.

Paul Tomlinson: Before you became a full-time writer, you were a full-time comic book artist…

Harry Harrison: This was right after the War, when we came out of the army. If you went back into education on the G.I. Bill, you got $75 a month or something. I’d done some illustration in high school, so I signed up with Burne Hogarth – I knew him from his artwork on Tarzan, and I really liked it. Hogarth had one little room and there were only two or three guys there to start with, but it became so popular it moved out of the one room and into a building mid-town and became the Cartoonist’s and Illustrator’s School. Ross Andru was there, and Mike Esposito, and Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel. All of these guys went on to make a name for themselves in comics. Then Wally Wood showed up. We started working together – really rotten crap, we were so incompetent, we were just learning to draw. He couldn’t ink at all then, I was beginning to ink a bit better. 

In school we did some samples of lettering and artwork. Wally was a very shy guy who hated to talk to publishers; I would take the samples out. We got some really rotten accounts – but we were totally incompetent, so it was all we deserved. Fox Publications was the first one I remember – $25 per page, when others were paying $40 or $60. Also we had to kick back $5 to the agent to get him to buy it, so that’s $20 a page. They got what they deserved.

The two of us, with Roy Krenkel as an assistant to erase and noodle backgrounds, would do ten or twenty pages a week over five or six days. There were 6, 7, 8 even 9 panels a page, ten pages a story. At 12 inches by 18 the sheer effort of covering it, getting the ink down, takes time.

I once worked on a 64-page comic over one-night, I think, twenty of us on a rush-job. We had a race to see who could ink the fastest and I won: I inked a page in 12 minutes! Comics were so bad when I was doing them, we’d grind the things out. There were, I think, over 600 titles monthly then.

As we got better and better we were a little bit slower, we were actually caring about the art. And finally we did work for Bill Gaines at E.C. Comics.

And it all fell apart when they investigated horror comics.

PT: You moved on from comics to become a freelance writer…

HH: I’d moved into packaging comics, and I ended up writing a lot for them, and moved on to writing whatever editors wanted. Westerns and men’s adventures, which paid a lot, and true confessions – I had a lot of experience writing and selling before I wrote my first science fiction story. And I was illustrating science fiction magazines for a year or two before I submitted a story.

PT: Very early on you wrote a story about a character called the Stainless Steel Rat…

HH: It was my first short story for John Campbell, my sixth or seventh published science fiction story. And when I finished it I realised there was another short story in it for this character. Then I thought there was a novel in it…

I can tell you where the idea came from too. I was writing narrative hooks. In the pulp days you’d type the manuscript double-spaced on 8” x 11” paper, with your real name (who the cheque went to!) in the upper left-hand corner, and in the right-hand corner the number of words. Half way down the page was the title, then ‘by’ and your name or a pen name, and then you were left with about four lines, and you had to write a hook so that you got the editor to turn the page and say: I turned the page, I’ll buy it! Because there was a lot of crap being turned in to the pulp magazines.

And I wrote a hook that even I was hooked by – and I can almost remember it:

I was sitting at my desk when the door opened and the policeman came in and said, “Jim diGriz I arrest you on the charge…” And on the word ‘charge’ I pushed the button and the black powder blew in the ceiling and a five-ton safe dropped on his head. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

Then what happens on the next page…?

PT: And Jim is still around 52 years later.

HH: I just finished number 11 in the series, which will be published next July in America.

PT: You can’t have imagined back then that this character would still be going strong…

HH: Oh, no. I didn’t think it was more than an idea for a short story at first. But every few years I’d have a mad idea, a complicated stupid idea, that would make a good Rat book.

PT: The Rat was also a character which got you back into comics, when they were adapted for 2000 AD…

HH: Hopefully those will soon be coming out again as a graphic novel. I’m in discussions with the publisher. The artist, Ezquerra, is a very good artist.

PT: Do you still read comics books?

HH: If I buy one, I buy it for the artwork. I bought a few graphic novels by Moebius – the best comics artist in the world, I love his stuff. Robert Crumb is funny – witty and dirty.

PT: Who did you admire when you were drawing comics?

HH: Will Eisner, who wrote and drew The Spirit.

PT: How about science fiction writers today, who would you recommend?

HH: The best original book of the last ten years that I’ve read is a short story collection by Ted Chiang – very original stuff, great stories: he’s a very witty guy. There’s one story, the title of which I forget, about building the tower of Babel up to heaven, written in great detail – very witty. It really is a worthwhile collection of short stories.

PT: And what about movies – what was the last great movie you watched?

HH: The last great movie I watched was the original King Kong: I watched the DVD for a piece I wrote on the science of King Kong.

A really good movie is Defiance with Daniel Craig, who played Bond. He plays a Jewish man fighting back against the Nazis in Belarussia – it is very witty, but very deadly too. And for a change we see the Jews fighting back and killing Nazis! It’s a very intelligent, worthwhile movie, there’s a lot of action and humour, with Jewish intellectuals with guns having religious arguments about killing Nazis. And Craig is a very gifted actor.

PT: You’ve been a judge at film festivals a few times over the years…

HH: Science fiction film festivals, yes.

PT: What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen at a festival?

HH: I’ve seen a lot of boring films. And I’ve seen some impossibly bad films. Probably the worst was at the Trieste film festival: an avant-garde film from France shot with a filter, all in dark purple. About a character carrying on his shoulder an almost life-size statue of a lead soldier. And he walks through Paris for 20 minutes. That’s the film.

The absolute worst one, a really disgusting film was a German one that had a coroner performing an autopsy on a real body… That was just gross.

PT: What do you think makes a good science fiction film?

HH: Originality to start with. But Hollywood will not hire science fiction writers, because they don’t have any screen credits – instead they hire bums who know nothing about science fiction, who put all the parts together, they put in rocket ships and time machines – and vampires! They make no distinction. And the films are rotten. Once in a while a science fiction writer is involved, like with Arthur C. Clarke and 2001. Or you get decent directors who like science fiction and have a good feel for it, and you’ll get Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Forbidden Planet. H.G. Wells did the screenplay for Things to Come, still head and shoulders above any other science fiction film.

PT: And George Lucas didn’t do too bad a job…

HH: With the original Star Wars. It was nice science fiction with things happening and ray guns going off, and a certain amount of imagination. He borrowed ideas from the right places!

PT: He said in an interview that he was a fan of yours…

HH: He said he didn’t like authors like – he mentioned Asimov, but that he liked writers like Harry Harrison. Call me up, George, I’ll be happy to work with you!

PT: So 2010 brings us a new Stainless Steel Rat book – what comes after that?

HH: I can’t talk about it! I’m working on an idea for a book – but I never talk about a book that’s ‘in the works’ until it has been contracted and sold. It’s a big secret…

PT: A big secret book – we’ll look forward to more news on that one. But for now, thank you very much.