Michael Fleisher

Michael Lawrence Fleisher (November 1, 1942 — February 2, 2018) was an American writer known for his DC Comics of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly for the characters Spectre and Jonah Hex.

Biography

Early life and career Fleisher was raised in New York City. His parents divorced when he was four years old, and Fleisher developed the foundation of his later Western writing by spending Saturdays with his visiting father at Western movie double features. "I saw two Westerns every Saturday for years," Fleisher recalled in 2010. "So it wasn't very hard to write [Westerns] at all." Collaborating with Russell Carley, who provided art breakdowns for Fleisher's scripts, Fleisher wrote seven stories for those titles and Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion late in 1973. Fleisher made several contributions to the Batman mythos in the early 1980s. He reintroduced the Crime Doctor in Detective Comics #494 (Sept. 1980), co-created the Electrocutioner in Batman #331 (Jan. 1981), and wrote the origin of the Penguin in The Best of DC #10 (March 1981).

The Spectre After becoming, variously, an assistant editor and an associate editor under Joe Orlando on the DC humor series Plop! and the superhero anthology series Adventure Comics, Fleisher, with Carley's script-breakdown assistance, began writing the feature "The Spectre" in the latter title. Fleisher and artist Jim Aparo went on to produce 10 stories of the supernatural avenger through issue #440 (July 1975) (without Carley's assistance toward the end)

Jonah Hex Fleisher wrote DC Comics' Jonah Hex character for more than a dozen years, beginning in 1974 in Weird Western Tales (taking over from the character's creator, John Albano), then from 1977 to 1985 in the character's self-titled comic. A sequel series, Hex (1985–1987) transported the character into a postapocalyptic setting, making him the lead in a science-fiction feature.

Controversy and later career Writer Harlan Ellison in a 1979 interview praised Fleisher's comics work, while also describing Fleisher and his work as "crazy", "certifiable", "twisted", "derange-o", "bugfuck", and a "lunatic". He also claimed that a Publishers Weekly review called Fleisher's novel Chasing Hairy "the product of a sick mind", and that Fleisher's Spectre run on Adventure Comics had been discontinued by DC Comics because the company "realized they had turned loose a lunatic on the world." While Ellison stated that some of what he was claiming was said "in some humor", Fleisher, saying his "business reputation has been destroyed" and believing he was falsely portrayed as insane, filed a $2 million libel suit against Ellison, publisher Gary Groth and the magazine in which the interview appeared, The Comics Journal. The case came to court in 1986 and resulted in a verdict for the defendants.

Afterward, Fleisher attended college at Columbia University in New York City, from 1987 to 1991, while also writing for the British comics magazine 2000 AD. Leaving the comics field that year, he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for graduate school He then spent a year in New York writing his dissertation and earned a doctorate in anthropology.