So as Worsley whimpered in his sleep, up there over his head, over the bedroom ceiling and the roof tiles and the TV aerial, up near the moon, was where the Russian space-dog sat above the sky in judgement. It looked down on the United States and had its head on one side like they sometimes do, with eyes of caramel regret, and very likely nobody would ever know what it was thinking, because everything that it was thinking was in Russian, and in Dog.

  3. ( June, 2015)

  It was the hottest night of a hot summer, and the long-discredited phlogiston theory of heat as a fluid substance had been resurrected in New York, convincingly. Hot air was pooled six inches deep above the sidewalks so that as he dragged his hefty wooden trunk in the approximate direction of the river, Arvo Cake was wading through lukewarm dishwater that he couldn’t see.

  Hell of a night. The smearing coloured lights and street cacophonies were an explosion at the Jolly Rancher’s factory, a hurtling shrapnel of rear indicators and dim-looking girls with neon hair. Sweating and straining down the avenue, the tow rope rubbing a sore groove into his shoulder, Arvo was surprised to find himself blinking back tears, but, then, this was an awful thing that he was being made to do, to throw away something that he’d once loved, and none of this was fair.

  Cerise had given him an ultimatum, about his collection. ‘Either all this shit is gone, or I am.’ And with women, anything they didn’t happen to be interested in was shit, was Arvo right or was he right? He’d tried explaining to her – Christ, practically begging her – about how this wasn’t just some comic book nerd thing, some nostalgia thing or how he couldn’t let his childhood go; some lazy stereotype that feminists dreamed up. Now he was working at American and inking Byron James for the new Union book that Milton Finefinger was writing, his collection was all reference material now. But Cerise had just said, ‘Nuh-uh,’ a mannerism that she’d got from daytime television and she thought was cute. ‘I mean it, Arvo. It’s this shit or me.’ And here he was.

  It had to be, what, three, three-fifteen in the morning? So there were still assholes everywhere, except these were night-blooming assholes and more likely to be unhinged. One passed by him on a skateboard, sailing down the middle of the street while eating an enormous sub. Arvo hauled his trunk, scrape-bump, scrape-bump, past several hundred feet of all-night supermarkets and convenience stores, and every newspaper he saw had headlines about aliens or Elvis or some other junk that wasn’t real, like he was in an information blackspot. What looked like a second- or third-generation bag lady was shouting at a barely conscious clerk about the AIDS in bottled water, and the manholes smouldered like inactive sewer-volcanoes, and scrape-bump, scrape-bump, scrape-bump.

  Cerise, when he’d first met her, well, around that time she wasn’t issuing so many ultimatums. She was shy and insecure about her weight back then, which, Arvo thought, was maybe how he’d got to score with her so easily after a lengthy list of previous disappointments. He’d not told her she was pretty, nor let on what an exciting shape she had, until she’d probably felt he was doing her a favour fucking her and, basically, he was. But then she’d changed, through reading books and articles in magazines, he thought it might have been. She’d started criticising what he said and how he acted, and the last few weeks the business about his collection had gone off-the-meter crazy. And now this. God damn it all, this wasn’t what he wanted to be doing on a sweltering June night. Not when he’d got the last twelve pages (and a bit) of Union issue one to finish inking before next weekend.

  The spillage of a million lights was splashed all over, making night into the radioactive ghost of day, a permanent electric dusk that smelled of farts and screams and hot dogs. Giant buildings crowded in and amplified the oven heat, reducing Arvo to an ant dragging an apple pip with their demoralising scale. Jelly bean prisms, car horns yelling, lens flare where there wasn’t any lens. Getting the trunk over the street at crossings was an anxious business, just because the stop signs only gave you so much time and Arvo found himself forced to stoop down and pull the hardwood box by its brass handles, scuttling like a Universal Pictures hunchback.

  But to get back to Cerise and how she’d lately started laying down the law. OK, technically it was her apartment. Technically. And yes, when he’d moved in, he’d said the graphic novels would be in her back room for a month or two at most until he’d figured out what he was going to do with them, but, hey, not everything works out as quick as we’d ideally like it to, or perfectly the way we want. Cerise would never comprehend that, Arvo ruefully accepted. Like most women that he’d known, the only comic that she’d ever read was Blinky, so she didn’t understand the books that he liked, or why Arvo was so set on working in the industry. She didn’t get it. Sure, her job at the insurance company was bringing in most of their income now, but in a month or two when Union was out, when it was getting all the cool reviews in Comics Contemplator and Collectors’ Fugue, then it would be a different story. Then she’d see that he’d been right, but then, of course, Cerise being the way she was, he knew that that was never going to happen. She was never going to change, not now.

  His whole collection. It was like she’d never really known him, never known what those books meant to him, or she could never have just said that: ‘It’s this shit or me.’ To be quite honest, he was probably in shock about all this, now he was actually doing it. He’d put it off a day or three, after her ultimatum, but by then the state she’d got herself into with her demands, well, let’s just say that wasn’t getting any better, until it was pretty much unbearable just being in the same room with her. And so he’d at last resigned himself to trunk, and rope, and this unthinkable excursion. He loved his collection, and to him the whole ordeal had the proportions of a genuine Greek tragedy.

  He wasn’t really functioning the way he usually did. He’d known he’d be upset but, jeez, he never thought that it would be this difficult, with him not even thinking straight, and crying, and all that stuff. He was acting how he did in dreams. For instance, there’d been no conscious decision to head for the river, if that was indeed the way that he was going, and he didn’t know what he was going to do, exactly, when he got there. Maybe he should do a ceremony of some kind? Ill-humoured egg-yolk taxis struggled by, jostling shoulders, headlights frowning at the constant stop and start.

  When he got home tonight, minus his creaking burden, first he’d tidy up and then he’d get right down to finishing page twelve of Union’s premier issue, the wide bottom panel where the artist, Byron James, had pencilled the first group shot of the Union of Super Americans, these being the original United Supermen back in the 1940s. When American revived the title in the 1960s, nobody was comfortable with the word union, so they’d changed it to united. What it was, you’d got old characters like the first Streak, the Aeon, Doctor Coffin and the first Gold Eagle, plus King Bee and Thunderman when they were skinnier and didn’t have so many powers or gadgets, and a cuter Moon Queen who took minutes at the meetings. Milton Finefinger and Byron James were giving this a hard-boiled noir twist, like the panel Arvo would be inking later where the first Blue Beam and 1940s Thunderman were smoking. It was almost sacrilegious and the fans would all go apeshit.

  Nearby, like a street away, was the asthmatic wheeze of garbage trucks engaged in picking up, and the reverberant clamour of their putting down. Ahead of him were liquor stores, unduly optimistic furniture boutiques, holes in the wall where you got vapes and newspapers, these kids crossing the street, and a patrolman. Grunting with exertion, Arvo put his head down and continued in his Herculean labour, his unwavering trajectory towards a river that was largely notional.

  Feeling a need to rise above his body and his situation, he attempted to access his happy place by concentrating on the good things that were going to come out of this Union project. Worsley Porlock was their editor, and Worsley was a real sweet guy who didn’t interfere and just let everyone get on with making a great book. He was about the most well-known editor working under legendary Brandon Chuff, and was swell company around the bar at a convention. Like, in San Diego last year, Arvo had got to hang out with Porlock, Dan Wheems, and Dick Duckley, who was managing the line of porno comics that Bordello magazine was gifting to the world. They’d had the greatest time, and Porlock told this story about walking in on David Moskowitz, the publisher and top guy at American, to find him – get this – sitting in a baby stroller! Moskowitz looks up at Porlock, and without cracking a smile, he says, ‘Ain’t it a hot night to be dragging that?’ Wasn’t that just insane? This was the fricking publisher, and he—

  ‘I said, ain’t it a hot night to be dragging that?’

  It was the cop. A frozen nothingness announced itself in Arvo’s stomach, and he didn’t want to be there any more. He wanted the whole thing to be a dream, a hoax, or an Unlikely Story.

  ‘Oh! Oh, you were talking to me. Sorry. Miles away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a hot night, sure enough. Wouldn’t you know it? Right when you’ve got stuff you’re taking to the dump, and it’s this, like you’re saying, it’s a hot night. Boy, tell me about it.’ Oh fuck. Fuck, shut up. Shut up.

  ‘So, what you got there?’

  Simplest just to tell the truth. In his peripheral vision the word SONY flashed repeatedly.

  ‘Aw, look, I know you’re going to think I’m a real doofus, but, see, it’s my girlfriend. She said how I’d gotta get rid of my comic books, or she was leaving me.’

  The cop did something sympathetic with his forehead.

  ‘Comics, huh? Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. When I was a kid, I was a Massive head, with Beetle Boy, the Brute, Ormazda and all those guys. My mom made me burn the lot in our back yard, and after that, I guess I sort of hated her. That’s some tough breaks you got, pal.’

  To the contrary, this was a better break than Arvo could have hoped. The cop had been a fan. He understood about the kind of night Arvo was having. It was like a miracle.

  ‘Um, actually, I sort of work in comics? I’m an artist, well, an inker. And I’ve never drawn Ormazda or the Brute, but what I’m working on right now, it’s got King Bee and Thunderman in, if you’ve heard of them?’

  Arvo was being disingenuous. He knew full well that everybody had heard of King Bee and Thunderman. The cop beamed like an eight-year-old.

  ‘You’re kidding! King Bee, are you serious?’ The cop began to sing, in a surprisingly sweet baritone. ‘King Bee! King Bee! Watch out criminality, here comes King Bee! He’s a prince amongst protectors, and of bees he is the king, and with his partner Buzz, the crooks are sure to feel— ah, God!’

  The very little breeze there was had evidently changed directions and it was, as mentioned earlier, the hottest night of a hot summer. So, the cop was retching, and the subject of their conversation changed rather abruptly from a spirited rendition of the King Bee and Buzz TV theme tune to stuff more along the lines of, ‘Sir, you – Jesus Christ – you need to get down on the sidewalk with your hands behind – hhuch – hands behind your back.’ And then, well, a whole lot of things.

  This could have been a crisis for American, but by an almost unbelievable stroke of good luck, Todd Permian, who was the colourist on Massive’s Freak Force, got picked up that same week taking underage boys back to his apartment so that they could see his ‘sketches of the Rottweiler’, by which it turned out that he meant his penis. While in normal circumstances either company would gleefully have used this ammunition to besmirch their rivals, in this case there was a tacit understanding that it was in everybody’s interests to pretend that June had never happened. Officer Barnard received a commendation and a modest pay raise, which at least financed his boxset purchase of King Bee and Buzz, with all five seasons finally available on DVD.

  4. ( January, 1952)

  CAESAR ON THE COUCH

  (A transcribed session of psychoanalysis with Julius Metzenberger, as recorded 2 January 1952; reprinted in The Comics Contemplator #339, October, 2013, with permission from the Metzenberger family.)

  (…)

  JM: Yeah. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. No, I guess that’s fair. I guess that most of my, my, my acquaintanceships, let’s call ’em that, that’s going to be the people that I know outside of work, outside the industry. I keep those areas apart, if you know what I mean. I don’t got friends inside the business, that’s for sure. I know that. I know that I got a reputation, but a lot of that, I think that it’s resentment, what you’re seeing. What I’ve done with Thunderman, they couldn’t do that, what I’ve done since I took over. Thirteen years that fucking thing has lasted, and with this TV show that we got on the horizon, it can last another thirteen, too. You think that little Sammy Blatz at Punctual could do that? The fuck he could. Or that son of a bitch Jim Laws at Scientific? Sorry, at Sensational, they call it now. You think that he—

  (…)

  JM: Who, Jim Laws? He’s the guy puts out those SP books that they got everywhere. Scientific Publications, as it was when James Laws Senior was running things, before that awful business with the, you know. With the piss. God rest his soul. He was an OK guy, you know? He was OK. But sonny boy, Jim Junior, he always was a deadbeat, my opinion. Now he’s publisher, they dropped all the worthwhile and wholesome stuff, The Life of Thomas Edison and books like that, and now it’s all things that are aimed at beatniks, at neurotics. It’s unmanly, how I see it. I mean, just the titles that they got, Sarcophagus of Murder, Cemetery of Death, and then there’s Nutcase …

  (…)

  JM: Nutcase, that’s their so-called humour title. It’s unhealthy shit, is what it is. See, what they do – this is what makes my blood boil – what they do is, they make fun of things. Things everybody knows and likes, things they respect, like TV, movies, strips from out the newspapers such as your Bitsy and your Flatfoot Floyd, and then there’s comic books. Oh, boy, do they like making fun of comic books.

  (…)

  JM: Yeah! Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying: they’re a comic book, and yet they’re making fun of comic books? Of ordinary, decent comic books that are for kids, for healthy boys, and not for juvenile delinquents. You know Blinky? The short-sighted high school kid who’s always walking into things? Yeah, well, in Nutcase what they did was ‘Blanky – America’s most featureless teenager’, where, like, they’ve drawn the kid so he’s not got a face, like he’s a nothing, you see what I’m saying? Like this ordinary kid is boring, then they show him hanging round with kids that Jim Laws and his hophead writers think are ordinary, so they’re making out and smoking reefer and all that. And this they think is funny? And then finally – you’re going to love this – finally they get around to Thunderman. They call it ‘Blunderman’.

  (…)

  JM: Damn right, I do. Damn right I see it as a personal attack. It’s an attack on me, and on American. What those pricks did … OK. OK. So, like in the real book there’s Thunderland that gets blown up by spacemen, you know all this, right? So what they do is, they got Blunderland, this crazy-looking thing, they got it blowing up because it ran into a stop sign that’s just floating there in space, like that could ever happen. Then they got this little Blunder-baby, coming down to Earth, it gets adopted by this pair of hicks, these sharecroppers, I guess, from Delaware. Now, Delaware, that’s where Si Schuman and Dave Kessler come from, the two kids who … well, I should say, they first came up with the rough, unformed idea of Thunderman. Basically, just the name and a few drawings of the purple union suit, you know? So then, there in this Nutcase thing, they got these what you might call city slickers showing up, who get these country boys to sign away their rights to Blunderman, so that he can work and make money for these city guys. And these three guys, there’s three of ’em, I swear that this is no word of a lie, one of them’s meant to look like me, this angry guy, looks like an ape and spitting when he talks. One, he’s like Solly Stickman, guy who edits all American’s science fiction books, and one, he looks like poor old Hector Bass who does the war books, Our Unshaven Army and all those. You see? You see what Jim Laws and those bastards at SP are doing? What they’re doing is, they’re raking up that stuff where they, Schuman and Kessler, where they started talking about lawsuits. This is humour. This is how they get their laughs. So yeah, damn right I take it as a personal attack. Damn right.

  (…)

  JM: Well, it’s because of jealousy, like I was saying. It’s resentment. May they burn in hell. They couldn’t do what I’ve done, at American. You name one other publisher still putting out these long-underwear characters, still making money on ’em. Just ten years ago it was like you could hardly move for all these costume guys. There was the National Guard, Fishman, Silly-Putty Pete and Mr Wonderful – all big names, and where are they now? The Thunderman books that I do, the King Bee books, these are the only masked-man titles anybody reads. Yeah, yeah, there’s Moon Queen that Sol Stickman handles, but I’m editor-in-chief so I see all the figures and – between us? Moon Queen sells a quarter of the copies that I do on Thunderman or on Exciting. Nobody knows how I do it. Nobody.

  (…)