This episode’s guest has intrigued me ever since I first encountered him in the pages of the New York Times, one reason being that in an alternate universe, I could have been him. George Gene Gustines has worked at the paper for more than a third of a century, and during that time, he’s written hundreds of articles about comics books and comics-related pop culture events alone.

And the thing is — when I was a teenager attending the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked on the student newspaper, I continually tried to convince my editors to allow me to write about comics in addition to my other assignments. At the time, my plan was to be a journalist, with no inkling of my eventual career in comics. But if I’d continued on my original path, I can imagine I’d now be doing what Gustines does, and hope my editors would allow me cover the things I love for a mainstream audience as often as I could.

Gustines, like me, started out as a fan, and got his first letter published in an issue of The New Teen Titans when he was 16. He’s even gone on to write comics of his own, with an autobiographical graphic novel in the works. We talked about all of this over dinner at one of his favorite spots near the New York Times headquarters.

We discussed the reason what he’s pulled off would have been impossible a generation ago, why he calls himself “the Forrest Gump of the New York Times,” how he determines which potential articles are right for the paper and which are too inside baseball, what moved him to write his first letter to a comics editor (and his secret to getting them published frequently), why he loves superhero team books, the grace of George Perez, what defines a fan, the story he regrets being the first to report, what he does when not writing about comics, who he wishes he could have interviewed before they passed, what it takes to get an idea approved by his editors, when he rather than another writer gets to write comic book obituaries, his upcoming autobiographical graphic novel about how comics changed his life, the voicemail Stan Lee left which matches what you’d imagine “The Man” might say, how he intends to reach his goal of 1,000 bylines, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Ollie’s Szechuan restaurant in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen (where I did not spot Daredevil) — (more…)

Jack C. Harris may not be the Eating the Fantastic guest I’ve known the longest — that honor belongs to Paul Levitz, whom I met in 1971 during the 4th of July weekend Comic Art Convention — but I met Jack two years later at the same con where he famously cosplayed at the masquerade as the Batman villain Two-Face, and knowing someone for 52 years is no small thing.

More than half a century later, we got together for dinner the weekend of Ditko Con, which Jack attended because of his many collaborations with the legendary Steve Ditko over the years, including on titles such as The Creeper, Shade the Changing Man, The Demon, Wonder Woman, Legion of Super-Heroes, The Fly, and others. Jack wrote about their relationship in his 2023 book Working with Ditko.

While I was working in the Marvel Comics Bullpen during the mid-’70s, he was one of DC’s Junior Woodchucks, as their assistant editors were called. He worked for a time under editor Murray Boltinoff before becoming a full editor himself. Among the additional titles he wrote were Kamandi, The Ray, Isis, Karate Kid, Metal Men, and others, plus he edited Black Lightning, Firestorm, Madame Xanadu, and more.

We discussed why he decided to abandon his original plan of becoming an artist and chose writing instead, the chance comics shop encounter which led to him being offered a job at DC Comics, why he was astonished when he first saw the colors of Superman’s costume, how his working relationship with Steve Ditko began, an intriguing comparison between Julie Schwartz and Stan Lee I’d never considered, the greatest compliment he ever received during his comics career, the idiosyncrasies of editor Murray Boltinoff, which comics pro was responsible for the flowering of comics fandom, how he felt about the Marvel/DC divide during the time we were both assistant editors, what it was like working with the legendary creators who preceded us, the legacy character he regrets never having gotten the chance to write, his Human Torch story which took 17 years to get published, the contrasting ways Marvel and DC treated their Golden Age characters at the beginning of the Silver Age, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Laurel & Grouse — (more…)

This episode, I invite you to wander off from the Maryland convention Capclave for dinner with one of this year’s Guests of Honor — the multi-award winning writer Naomi Kritzer.

How multi-award-winning? Naomi’s a seven-time Hugo Award nominee (winning twice for short story and twice for novelette) — a three-time Nebula Award nominee (winning once for novelette) — a three-time Lodestar Award nominee — (winning once) — a four-time nominee for the WSFA Small Press Award (winning once) — and has also won the Asimov’s readers poll. Plus she’s been a two-time Andre Norton Award nominee, as well as a finalist for the Eugie, Dragon, and William L. Crawford Awards.

The stories which won her those honors were published in such magazines as Clarkesworld, Analog, Asimov’s, Uncanny, Apex, F&SF, and others, and in such anthologies as Infinity’s End and The Reinvented Heart: Tales of Futuristic Relationships. Many of those stories have been gathered in her collections Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories (2011) and Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories (2017). Her novels include Catfishing on CatNet, Chaos on Catnet, and Liberty’s Daughter. Her novella Obstetrix, published by Tordotcom, is coming in June 2026.

We discussed why a friend stepped up to start submitting stories for her, the question she asked Madeleine l’Engle when she was nine, why she spent years not reading reviews (even the good ones), her surprise at the way “Cat Pictures Please” went viral, what it’s like when you’re on “that” panel at a convention, why she wishes she’d told the early editors to whom she’d submitted how young she was, the many writers time has passed by (and how we hope neither of us will join them), what she was told by her mentor after confessing she wanted to be Ursula K. Le Guin, the story she sold to a market by deliberately writing the sort of story that magazine said it didn’t want, the inability of writers to know which of their stories will resonate most with readers, whether the stories she’s written in response to prompts might have existed in some other form without those prompts, how our writing has been affected by the times in which we live, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Silk Road Choyhona — (more…)