The Great God Pan
"The Great God Pan" implied sexuality caused a scandal upon its original release and hurt Machen's reputation as an author. Reviewing the novella for the magazine "Literary News", Richard Henry Stoddard criticised the story as "too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind". The art critic Harry Quilter's review of the book, titled "The Gospel of Intensity", and published in "The Contemporary Review" in June 1895, was even more harsh. Quilter declared: "The Great God Pan' is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared no endeavor to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words." Quilter warned that Machen's books were a dangerous threat to the entire British public and that they would destroy readers' sanities and senses of morality. Quilter went on to attack the story's publisher, John Lane, as well as Machen himself: "Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?" Quilter added that works of fiction like Machen's should be unanimously condemned by literary critics and newspapers: "If the Press was so disposed it could stamp out such art and fiction in a few months: And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced." He was particularly harsh in his denunciation of sexual ambiguity and polymorphous androgyny in the book. He expressed revulsion at Machen's description of Helen's sex changing immediately before her death and concluded his review with a comment of distaste regarding the "nasty little naked figure of dubious sex and humanity with which Mr. Aubrey Beardsley has prefaced the story". A positive appraisal of the novella came from Oscar Wilde, who called it "un succès fou."
Nick Landau
Landau first saw the opportunity to distribute American comics in the UK in the 1970s, when only a small range of US comic books were available in British news agents. In the late 70s he established Titan Distributors, which was a wholesaler for comics, science fiction and other genre materials, with partners Mike Lake and Mike Luckman. In 1978, the three also opened the first Forbidden Planet shop in Denmark Street, London (also known as 'Tin Pan Alley'). They then set up the publishing company Titan Books, which in 1981 produced its first title, collected reprints of Brian Bolland's Judge Dredd stories from 2000 A.D. This was one of the earliest high quality, book format publications of comic material in the UK (the term graphic novel was not in widespread use at that time), and Titan Books followed the first title with numerous other 2000 A.D. reprints. Subsequently the publishing company expanded operations and now publishes both new and licensed graphic novels and film and TV tie-ins.