"For a While I Was Here"

"And for a while I mattered."

That is what Harlan Ellison would like on his tombstone.

Before he has use for such, he would also like you to read his new book.  Because, as Jaime Lowe points out on Vulture.Com, "Harlan Ellison Isn’t Dead Yet":

In spite of his dire warnings, Ellison is alive and well and living in Los Angeles. This week he is releasing his first book-length work in almost a decade: 7 Against Chaos, a graphic novel from DC Comics. It is a vision of a future on the verge of apocalypse, but saved by a dream team of oddballs and freaks of nature that pick a fight with a monomaniacal lizard who rules an alternate universe. Ellison, never one to shy away from hyperbole, says of the book, “I hope it will leave a giant footprint on the arid plain of my life. This book is something — as I get closer to the edge of the abyss — I’m enormously proud of. It’s my Lawrence of Arabia, my Gone With the Wind.” He told me this recently on the phone, shortly after recording a guest spot on The Simpsons. (When he got the call requesting his cameo, Ellison’s response was: “Well, it’s about goddamn time.”) He did his spot in one take (his version of events), then joined the Simpsons’ writers and assorted crew for lunch. Producer and showrunner Al Jean had described it to me like this: “We had lunch with Harlan afterwards, where he was brilliant, hilarious and unprintable.”

There's a bunch of other stuff too, all available here in easy-to-read form.