Outside, through a front window that enclosed the scene as though within a panel border, up above the garment warehouse opposite, the sky was now a minimalist study by an artist unafraid of black space, with a dab or two of perfectly positioned white by which occluded forms might be deciphered. Telegraph poles. Wires and water towers. Cross-hatching in an alley’s rotten yawn.

  Amidst the yellow dazzle of the restaurant interior, a patient Jerry Binkle pushed his gold-rimmed glasses further up towards his barely there blond eyebrows.

  ‘Dan, correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be talking about Esme? Esme Martinez?’

  Dan Wheems gave two thumbs up and nodded vigorously, massively relieved that someone else could now pick up the thread of discourse and unburden him of the necessity for his slurred glossolalia. Celebrating this reprieve, the two-time Sammy Award winner (for his controversial run on Massive’s The Vindictives) stuffed a largely unresponsive mouth with three more storeys of his High-Rise Burger, and left Binkle to unpack Wheems’ unintelligible tribute to Esme Martinez.

  Given that Dan’s outburst had been prompted by Binkle’s enthusiasm for Gail Glad, Jerry was fairly certain that its topic had been Esme Martinez’s own physical attributes, which were considerable. A genuinely beautiful girl from Hispanic stock, Martinez was one of, at most, two or three women to have worked as artists in the industry as it was in the fifties and the sixties, slaving in a windowless room full of men, while getting pawed and putting up with it. Luckily, Jerry saw a way that he could get the conversation back on track without having to mention anything like that.

  ‘Now, Esme – and as your gestures implied, Dan, she was a most pulchritudinous example of the more delicate gender – Esme was to my mind the best penciller that Mr Ocean ever had. Don’t tell John Capellini that I said that, obviously, but all those years ago, when Mr Ocean was the back-up feature in World’s Best Adventure, the stuff Esme could do in those little six-page stories was incredible! I mean, come on! “The Death of Fufu”, anybody? Or the one where Mr O and Ocean Kid face off against the Mr Ocean of dimension thirteen who’s, like, seventy feet tall with violet skin? People don’t realise, all those characters still in the continuity today, like Hammerhead, or Lady Prilla of Lemuria, or places like the Oceanarium, those were all Esme’s work; Esme’s designs. I never ran into her back then, but Sol Stickman told me how he’d heard could be she was a lesbian.’

  Milton Finefinger waved his overburdened fork dismissively. ‘Sol Stickman said that about everyone who turned him down. That married woman in accounts with two kids, Linda? Lesbian. The female colourists? All lesbians. He even once said Mimi Drucker was a lesbian, which is like saying a piranha’s vegan. Hnohh-hnohh-hnohh-hnohh.’

  Everybody snickered except Brandon, who maintained his unassuming smile and his perusal of the daffodil Formica. Miriam Drucker was the VP at American, and though she clearly had enormous psychological and sexual issues, insufficient heterosexuality had never been considered one of them. Dan Wheems chewed thoughtfully on an especially recalcitrant slice of tomato, possibly from his High-Rise’s brioche penthouse, and took a long sideways look at Brandon Chuff, hunching there next to him over an untouched plate of spicy wings.

  Chuff’s quirky little grin seemed now lascivious and, Wheems thought, faintly nostalgic. No doubt ‘the respected Blue Beam and United Supermen auteur’ (Collectors’ Fugue #247, August, 1998) was reminiscing about all those famous New York comics-business orgies of the early seventies that Chuff and Binkle and their fellow fans-turned-pro had certainly attended. Gnawing with renewed determination on his gobbet of unyielding salad fruit, Dan recollected hideous anecdotes he’d heard over the years concerning these industrially lubricated get-togethers, drifting as he did so into a light trance of nightmare and arousal that was not entirely unfamiliar to the multiple Sammy recipient.

  He masticated furiously, imagining the porno-Bosch tableaux that these assemblies of hormonal toddlers must surely have comprised: Pete Mastroserio, the up-and-coming editor at Banner Comics who’d moved to American around then, a moustachioed ground sloth that Dan Wheems could only picture, naked, as a limitless expanse of coarse-pored flesh, hairy and glistening, devoid of shape, or limbs, or orifices; Mimi Drucker, pre-analysis and dressed by all accounts in Moon Queen platinum wig, crescent headband, silver knee boots and coiled lunar whip, with her ecstatic cries presumably announced in that alarmingly deep voice she had; an even back then elderly Sol Stickman, like an unshelled turtle with his skin in hanging pleats, prehensile tongue plumbing the trachea of a front desk receptionist to a shrill soundtrack of contemporary disco favourites; a copy of Exciting Comics #1, disastrously left out of its protective Mylar bag and ruined by ejaculate.

  Wheems shuddered. He’d entered the industry some ten years after that, with AIDS becoming part of the vocabulary, and such gatherings since relegated to an unimaginable fairy-story past. He was at once disturbed and envious regarding the much greater sexual opportunity enjoyed by older hands; the easy confidence with women that, it seemed, came naturally to company employees and freelancers of that stack-heeled vintage. Brandon Chuff, for instance, had until quite recently served as American’s overstuffed casting couch, upon which an enthusiastic bounce or three might transform the successful applicant into proofreader on Omnipotent Pre-Teen Militia.

  Well, that bulbous sliver of tomato wasn’t giving up any time soon. Emerging from his horrible erotic reverie, Wheems noticed that one of the several small boys seated with a youngish woman in the next booth down – some kind of birthday party pizza treat, he fuzzily assumed – was staring at him with the ghastly and incredulous expression that Dan had become accustomed to from persons of that age range, without ever really understanding why he should elicit it. Closer to home, across the marigold veneer, Milt Finefinger was engaged in an almost indiscernible passive-aggressive struggle to the death with Jerry Binkle, who was volubly defending Mimi Drucker.

  ‘Miriam, as I think she prefers, was a completely different person at that time, before the therapeutic breakthrough. And even back then, when she was in a vulnerable state, she totally re-energised American after the Metzenberger years. All the new titles and new talent that came in with her, you can’t dismiss all that because of some behaviour that she couldn’t help. I mean, I’m not a feminist, but if a man had acted out like Miriam did, nobody would have said a word.’

  ‘Jerry, I think that if a male VP had dragged back every member of a woman’s basketball team to his office so that he could bang them on his desk, somebody might have raised the subject. Anyway, those new books and new talents, what you’re really saying is that Mimi, as she seems to call herself, cancelled World’s Best Adventure and gave Mr Ocean his own book with you as writer and John Capellini as the artist. I mean, Dan here worked with Capellini on that Junior Vindictives thing for Massive, and that’s how he told the story. Tell him, Dan. He’s … Jesus Christ, Dan! What the fuck?’

  From Finefinger’s lopsided grin, Dan understood that this outburst was meant ironically, perhaps a jibe about the faintly colourless Wheems’ utter lack of any startling unpredictability. He essayed a self-deprecating grimace in response, and as he did so noticed that the boy at the next table was still staring at him fixedly, but was now also weeping. Next, he spotted the undue amount of ketchup beaded on the yellow laminate, on his Ormazda T-shirt, on his cutlery, and on his hands. He realised that for the last five minutes, he’d been gnawing vigorously not at an unripe piece of tomato, but at his insensate bottom lip. Escaping under what his doctor later told him was unusually high pressure, Wheems’ blood had gone everywhere. Appalled, he started up a sort of keening sound.

  With all the 10 per cent red dot-screen draining from his dumbstruck features, Jerry Binkle didn’t have the first idea what was going on. He’d never seen so much gore. This was worse than the notorious double-page spread in that Rottweiler: The Blooding special that the retailers had made Massive withdraw. What had just happened? Had Dan Wheems been shot? Had he been poisoned, something in that burger that worked just how poisons did in movies, with the victim spewing blood until the audience got the point? Jerry gaped, speechless, at Milt Finefinger beside him, but Finefinger seemed to find the gruesome spectacle an entertaining joke, still wearing that sarcastic leer.

  Disgusted by his younger colleague’s callousness, Binkle appealed to Brandon Chuff. If Chuff could move and let Wheems from the booth, perhaps this could be sorted out discreetly in the washroom? The distinguished editor-in-chief merely continued his unblinking contemplation of the tabletop, perhaps reflecting on the old days when the Comics Code Authority could drive publishers from the newsstands for depicting circumstances like their current one. Or possibly Chuff was still musing on the damage he’d inflicted on the Mr Ocean brand with that Unending Brawl atrocity. Or …

  It was right around this point that everybody realised what the story was with Brandon Chuff.

  To be entirely honest, this sudden collective understanding didn’t help the situation any, and, in many ways, made matters worse. Dan Wheems, still dripping like a Halloween lawn sprinkler, having by then comprehended that he was trapped in his seat by the expired United Supermen scribe, massively compounded things by suffering a panic attack, at which point the traumatised kids with their maybe-mom at the next table started screaming. This attracted Jo, their thick-limbed and assertive waitress for the evening, and right after that came Carl, who ran Carl’s Diner but was not the Carl referred to on the place’s signage. It was a long story. Jerry Binkle fainted, and the outraged woman with the ululating children’s birthday party called first the police and then, after a pause for thought, the paramedics. Dan Wheems, desperate to escape the booth, attempted to shove Brandon Chuff’s inert mass out on to the white-and-yellow checked tiles of the diner’s aisle, while Carl-but-not-the-signboard-Carl, suspecting that a body on the floor would in some undefined sense be a step too far, pushed from the other side in order to prevent this. The compression of their combined efforts caused Chuff’s spectacles to fall into his spicy wings, and Jo the waitress slapped Milton Finefinger for what she perceived as his mordant insensitivity. Seen from outside the restaurant, this dreadful moment was enfolded by the nearly square front window’s perfectly ruled frame with, presently, blue lights and lettered siren sound effects intruding from off-panel right.

  But, anyway, so that’s how Worsley Porlock got his editor-in-chief job at American.

  2. (August, 1959)

  1959, at the tail end of Eisenhower’s incumbency, society was like a big, clean car there by the kerbside with its motor turning over but not really what you might call going anywhere. The decade, though eventful, registered as somehow indeterminate and nobody was sure of anything. Aged five, Worsley couldn’t decide how he felt about Saturday. Was it his worst day, or his best?

  The reason why it was potentially his worst was it was Saturday, right after lunch, when Worsley’s dad would call by at the house to pick him up, so that the two of them could spend some time together. Worsley liked his dad OK, and sometimes they had fun, but the perennially anxious child had come to dread the weighted conversations, brief but stomach-churning, that his parents would unfailingly contrive on these occasions. The front doorbell would abruptly blurt its two-note warning chime, and then it was all Hi it’s me and I can see it’s you and that bare-knuckle timbre in their voices. Mom would grudgingly invite his father in while Worsley got his coat on, and there’d be a dogfight interchange above the radar of his ready comprehension. Is that perfume? I don’t know, you tell me; is that Scotch? And then inevitably money, is this all, and Christ, Jean, what do you expect, I’ve told you there’s no overtime.

  When this exchange ended in bitter armistice, he and his dad would go out, sometimes to the park and once a ball game, but most often to a movie where they didn’t have to think of things to say to one another. When they did talk, it was only ever, so, sport, did your mom have any visitors, and, well, there’s Mrs Stevens from the place she works came round, and, yeah, but any guys, and, I don’t know, I guess, and then a burning silence for a while.

  The reason why it was potentially his best day was that after their excursion, be it to the penny arcades or a feature at the gently faded movie house, they’d always end up at Mr and Mrs Salter’s five-and-dime store, two or three blocks from his mom’s place. This, for Worsley, was a holy wonder. It was something in the smell the place had – newsprint, candy, floorboard wood and metal polish – or its tingling, inarticulable atmosphere; the falling talcum quality of afternoon light through the storefront’s dusty glass, although back then he hadn’t thought to differentiate between these separate phenomena. To him, it was all just the store and how it felt, which was cheap heaven down the street.

  Ray Porlock, in his sandy pants and jacket and already looking like somebody in a creased old photograph, would every time approach the counter with a kind of carefree ranch-hand amble that Worsley had never seen his dad use anyplace but Salter’s, like it was important Mr Salter see him as an easy-going cowboy without any clouds on his horizon. Mrs Salter, for some reason, never seemed to be around. The fortyish assembly worker always got a Coca-Cola for his son and a fresh pack of Camels for himself. He’d then pass the mom-contoured bottle, opened and with a wax-paper straw, to Worsley along with between a quarter and a buck, depending on how work was going. Him and Mr Salter, if there weren’t too many customers, would then go to the far end of the counter so that they could talk and laugh about things while they had a cigarette together. His dad would call Mr Salter Ted, and Mr Salter would call his dad Joe, because he got a lot of customers and called them all that to save time. Their smoke hung in lassos of blue and brown and had a bitter smell that, from the parchment-coloured Camels packaging, Worsley assumed to be Egyptian. He would take his Coca-Cola and his money, seventy-five cents in this prosperous instance, to the store’s other extremity down by the door where the sun smashed through the front window, long gold bars that broke to powder on the ballpoint pens and flashlight batteries and cards of darning needles.

  Worsley’s Coke was one homogenous experience – the fruited coffee taste, the sneezy carbonated sting behind the nose, the elegant sky-written white swoops of the lettering, the ghostly green tint staining the voluptuous glass hips – and was fulfilling physically, emotionally and psychologically, a vital part of his young life there in America. But for all that, it was the seventy-five cents that thrilled him to his crew-cut follicles.

  The magazine rack rose away from him, cliff-face of an impossible new continent, its glossy journals and their marvellous calligraphies ignited to stained glass by pouring sunlight and made a religious vision. In the top-shelf dazzle at the crest were the unnerving catalogues of adult mystery, with names like Spank and Cad and Spicy True War Stories, covers wriggling with ladies who were coloured photographs or drawings but were always in their swimsuits or their underclothes, smiling with beach balls or else torturing the sweat-beaded GIs they’d taken prisoner. Beneath this mystifying and salacious pinnacle, in the display stand’s middle reaches, was a scree of periodicals like Saturday Evening Alert, Embittered Mechanic, Centrifugal American and an issue of Nutcase with its mentally impeded mascot Wilbur T. Floyd dressed up as a beatnik on its beautifully painted front, these being less alarming than the magazines above but no more comprehensible. And then, down in the foothills at the bottom and thus perfectly positioned for the paediatric line of sight, there were three whole shelves which, electrifyingly, were totally devoted to that month’s new comic books.

  If the store’s door was standing open on its cleverly devised brass elbow, if the breeze fluttered a colour-saturated cover, then they were like big exotic butterflies pinned for a natural history exhibit. Almost certainly by chance, the vertical arrangement of the books by different publishers, for Worsley, made the rack a smoothly graded spectrum of disinterest and barely understood desire: towards the store’s front window on his left, Mr or Mrs Salter had arranged a stripe of jokey pamphlets from both Blinky Publishing and Bullseye Comics, with the former being the adventures of partially sighted high school student Blinky and his friends in Blinky’s Blind Dates, Blinky’s Trips ’n’ Tumbles and Blinky’s Haunted Asylum that had gags about voodoo and werewolves. Bullseye, on the other hand, from Worsley’s five-year-old perspective, seemed to just put out a lot of stuff for little kids. There was Obese Olivia, Stripe-Crazy Sue, Armed Combat Laughs with Gloomy Grunt and Aubrey Avarice the Tiniest Tycoon, along with the infant mortality genre that seemed unique to Bullseye, like Cardew the Spectral Child and Dead Stuff, the Tuff Little Zombie.

  Slightly to the right of these there was a three-shelf band of titles from the smaller companies that Worsley was inclined to take more seriously but still didn’t really like: comics about everyday real things like cowboys, war and monsters. There were Banner Comics, turned out on a press normally used for cereal boxes and in consequence almost unreadable, printed with a potato on a fibrous, unrinsed dishcloth. Their insipid list included Fighting Men in Love, Space Vet and A-Bomb Squirrel for the less discerning younger reader. Under Banner came a line that didn’t seem to even have an imprint, but upon inspection turned out to be from a company that had been called Punctual Comics in the 1940s, then became Goliath, and within a year or two would change its name to Massive. These, in 1959, were westerns such as Tombstone Kid, Kid Derringer, Kid Cody and The Cactus Kid, who seemed to shoot a lot of guys considering they were only kids, and then there were Goliath’s mystery comics – Journey into Strange, Tales of Astonishing, Abnormal Tales and like that, that had giant monsters made of weirdly textured things like coal and wool and gas, with names like Zim Zam Zub or Klorg the Mushroom that Walked like a Man. They looked sort of intriguing, but the artists used a lot of black, so Worsley nursed a general suspicion that they might be meant for older boys than he, for unshockable nine- or ten-year-olds hardened by life, who wouldn’t find Klorg sinister or harrowing, nor face his gilled, collagen-based monstrosity in their next several weeks of dreams.