JM: My secret is, I can think like a child. I know the way they think. What I do is, when I’m not in the office, I hang out at schoolyards, soda fountains, any place like that. And if I spot a bunch of, you know, healthy young kids who are out there having fun, fooling around, maybe I’ll start a conversation, let it slip that I’m the big boss at the company does Thunderman. The way their eyes light up, you ought to see it. Then I’ll ask ’em about what they’d like to happen in the book, and maybe they’ll say Thunderboy should have a dog like they got, so I give that to my writers, and next thing, we got Zando the Thunderdog. Or maybe they’ll say – and these are good-looking, normal, healthy kids is what I’m saying – maybe they’ll say how they’d like if Thunderman got in a fight with somebody the same as him but opposite. That’s how I came up with Demento-Thunderman, and Thunderman’s time-bottle, and all kinds of stuff. I think it’s that I kind of have a little boy inside me, in my heart. That’s what I think.

  (…)

  JM: Well, yeah. It’s my job. It’s what I’m doing all day. What else should I talk about?

  (…)

  JM: Thunderman? You’re saying all I talk about is Thunderman? No, no, see, I don’t think that’s true. I talk about all kinds of stuff. Is that true, that I always bring it back to Thunderman?

  (…)

  JM: Huh. Well, put it like that, I guess … yeah. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Maybe I do.

  (…)

  JM: Hold on … do I identify? With Thunderman? No. No, of course not. Thunderman’s for little kids, and I’m a grown man. Why the hell would I identify with …

  (…)

  JM: Yeah. Yeah, I did say that just now, didn’t I? About the little boy thing, but … I don’t know. You threw me a curveball here. I got to think about this. Thunderman, do I identify …

  (…)

  JM: Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking. I guess … one thing that I always liked with Thunderman was how he came from someplace else that got destroyed, and landed in America. So, he’s an immigrant. Right there you got a thing where I identify. I never thought of that.

  (…)

  JM: My family? We came here from the Ukraine, it was more than fifty years ago now. Fifty years, can you believe that? I was just a small child, three or maybe four years old. I don’t remember much about it, just what I got told. We had this little shtetl, little village, we were a respected family, by all accounts. My grandfather, he was the rabbi. Everybody, everybody came to him. Not that it made a difference. When the time came, we left just like everyone.

  (…)

  JM: That was the fucking Cossacks, the White Russians. Personally, I got no memories, but what I heard, those bastards were just raping, killing, burned the whole place down so that we had to … hey. Hey, I just thought of something: that’s my Thunderland, the shtetl. That’s, like, that’s the place I came from to America, the place that got destroyed by … Holy crap! The Cossacks, that’s the super-criminals, the pirate space-nation that blows up Thunderland. I never realised. I edited the book for all these years, I never realised. How about that? This is really something. This is something right here.

  (…)

  JM: No, no, I think that this is real important. I’m just trying to think if there was anything … I guess there’s Thunderman’s time-bottle. You don’t know that? What it is, is Thunderman’s got this thing that he keeps at Thunder Mountain – that’s his secret headquarters out in the desert. What it is, it looks like it’s this big glass bottle, but inside it, Thunderman’s got all of the collected light and sound from Thunderland on just one single day back in the past, before it got wiped out. It’s just this one day that replays over and over, every time the same in every detail. And Thunderman … excuse me. This is quite emotional. This ain’t like me. His folks, Thunderman’s folks, are there in the time-bottle, still alive, and Thunderman himself when he was just a little baby. They’re still there, you know? All of his … all his memories he can’t let go, I guess. That’s like me. I do that. I think about the shtetl, just the little things that I remember, and the memories that I got of my grandfather, just one or two, you know, like little photographs. You’d see the guys out in the grain fields, working up a sweat when it was harvest time. I think about that stuff a lot. My memories, you see, because that place has gone, they’re very precious to me. I feel like … I guess I feel that while I keep my memories safe, not everything’s destroyed. So, that’s it. That’s my time-bottle, like Thunderman’s.

  (…)

  JM: Anything else? I’m … I don’t know, I’m trying to think. This stuff is very new to me, you know? I’m right now making these connections. I mean, this makes sense, these similarities, my life and Thunderman. It’s got to be that way, because … see, all these things that make up Thunderman, the stuff that kids can know about him, these are my ideas! Well, what I mean is, I’m the guy who chooses which ideas get into Thunderman. They’re my ideas in that sense. How it works, I’ll get some writer coming up to me, let’s say it’s Artie Leibowitz, and he says, ‘Mr Metzenberger, I got this idea: Thunderman goes back in time and fights the dinosaurs.’ So, I say, ‘That’s a bum idea. I got a better one. How about Thunderman, he builds himself a base inside a hollow mountain in the desert? Write that story for me.’ Then, day or so later, there’s somebody else, let’s say Heinz Messner, he says, ‘I got this idea where these chunks from Thunderland when it blew up have turned into these things called Thunderstones that can be dangerous for Thunderman.’ And I’ll say, ‘That’s a bum idea. I got a better one. How about Thunderman goes back in time and fights the dinosaurs? You go away and write that story for me.’ See? It’s me, the guy who’s choosing the ideas. That’s why you’re going to get these similarities. I just thought of another one. Thunderman can summon up a thunderstorm, right? That’s like me, I got this reputation, with my temper. Boy, you get me mad, watch out! There’s one writer so scared of me, I won’t say who, I hear he keeps a pair of clean pants folded, hanging on a chair for when I call. Because right when the phone rings, every time, he’s going to make a shit there in his underwear. Ha. You believe that? There’s the power to summon thunderstorms, right there. (LAUGHTER)

  (…)

  JM: No, no, see, that’s just the rough and tumble of the business. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that, coming in the door. They know what to expect. It’s a tough industry, what can I say? You got to toughen up, you’re going to make it. And these writers, they think I’m bad, they should see the guys running American when I came in, around ten years back. Some of those guys, even me, they nearly made me shit my pants. Now, these were serious guys. Rat-a-tat-tat, know what I’m saying? I mean, these days they ain’t quite so prominent, but back then? Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. I met Hymie Weiss one time; Legs Diamond … he was a smart guy, an interesting guy. Had this big picture in his bathroom, it’s that pyramid that’s got the eye in, off the dollar bill, seal of the Treasury. Strange guy. If you went out to take a pee it felt uncomfortable, like it was watching you, the pyramid thing. Maybe looking at your Johnson. (INAUDIBLE) Anyway, kind of a tangent there. What were we saying?

  (…)

  JM: Oh, yeah. Yeah, the similarities, do I identify, etcetera. Well, let me think. Hmm. There’s – and I ain’t sure about this one, it’s just now coming to me as I speak – there’s the Demento-Thunderman I mentioned earlier, who’s like this monster who’s the opposite of Thunderman. That’s sometimes … it’s like, if something is going well, maybe a, a, a friendship, something like that, something that makes me happy, then, I don’t know why I do it, I start acting crazy, like deliberately I’m trying to screw things up, does that make sense? It happens every time, like Felix Firestone turns his ray gun on me and I’m suddenly Demento-Metzenberger. ‘What are beautiful, us make to ugly’, the whole shtick. And there’s another thing …

  (…)

  JM: No, this is not connected with Demento-Thunderman, this is a separate thing. This is what I was talking about just a minute back, about how I had the idea for the Thunderstones. Now, Thunderstones, what they are, they’re these chunks, like I was saying. They’re these fragments come from Thunderland when it exploded, when it got hit by the super-pirates’ nuclear-ray thing, in the origin. Now, turns out that the nuclear ray, what’s based on elements unknown to science, what it’s done, it’s made these fragments – what they look like is red, glowing crystals, like giant rubies, bigger than your head – it’s made them radioactive, but only to people come from Thunderland. Thunderman, Thunderboy, Thunderdog – if they’re from Thunderland, it poisons ’em and makes ’em weak, and then it kills them, right? It puts out this pink light what slowly turns ’em pink, and when they turn that real bright pink, they’re dead. These fragments rained down on the Earth like meteorites, all burning hot and red, and every month or so, some crook or other – usually it’s Felix Firestone – digs one of these glowing crystals up, and uses it to damage Thunderman. So much of that stuff’s been dug up by now, you could build Thunderland again out of it, ten times over.

  (…)

  JM: Well, how this is relevant is what I was just getting to. See, with me, how it is, it’s like the time-bottle, what I was saying about memories. Some of the memories I got, I’m what, I’m fifty-six? I done a lot of things. A lot of things. Some of my memories, the ones in the time-bottle, they’re real precious to me. Other ones … well, other ones, they’re private, you know what I mean? And if some enemy of mine – and trust me, I got lots of enemies – if somebody like that, some Felix Firestone, if they dig these poison memories up, then that could really hurt me, in all sorts of ways. Professionally, personally … it could maybe kill me. These bad memories, these things I don’t want digging up, they’re like my Thunderstones, you understand? Like they’re my secret weakness, how they are with Thunderman.

  (…)

  JM: What?

  (…)

  JM: Well, that’s just their colour.

  (…)

  JM: Why was …? I don’t know. It’s just the colour looked best printed up, is all. It could be any colour, I don’t know; it could be blue, it could be green. I don’t see why …

  (…)

  JM: It don’t mean nothing. Why does every damn thing have to mean something? I’m wearing brown pants, what does that mean? You got a blue tie on, so, what, I should ask what that means? I don’t buy it. What, is everything significant? That clock up there, what does—

  (…)

  JM: The hell I am! The hell am I defensive! You know what? This is all baloney. Turn that off.

  (…)

  JM: You heard. This is all so much bullshit. Turn that thing off now, before—(INAUDIBLE)

  SESSION CONCLUDES

  5. (August, 2015)

  The six or seven weeks after the situation at Carl’s Diner would have surely been the most eventful ones of Brandon Chuff’s life, had he lived. Firstly, there was the incident itself, and then the shocking vagueness of the autopsy, as if the coroner had just said the first thing that came into his head. Next, Chuff’s apartment burned down, and then came the shitshow that was Brandon’s funeral, where a son nobody knew that Brandon had produced showed up, and Dan Wheems seemed so inexplicably distressed that he gnawed accidentally through the stitches that they’d put into his lip after the Carl’s occasion, so they had the whole blood everywhere/kids screaming/Jerry Binkle fainting thing over again. This would, in any normal year, have been as dreadful as it got in the post-mortem Brandon Chuff experience but, as we all now know, that was before what happened halfway through the special tribute honouring Chuff and his efforts, at SATYRICON 2015 in late September.

  Anyway, it was the Saturday, right after that upsetting Tuesday evening at the diner, when a still stitched-up Dan Wheems and a still reeling Worsley Porlock went around to Brandon’s place to see if there was anything that they could do. Wheems only lived a street or two away, and the late editor-in-chief had given him a key to the apartment, to be used in the event of an emergency. Admittedly, the real emergency had been unhappily concluded four days previously, and so Dan and Worsley were aware of shutting stable doors after the horse had fallen face down in its spicy wings. But, as they saw it, somebody had to check that the premises were still secure, and pick up any mail that had accumulated, things like that. It was the normal, decent thing to do for somebody who’d been a buddy, a more well-known and well-paid professional competitor, and an immediate superior at one’s place of employment. In addition, they each privately supposed that Chuff might, just conceivably, have a collection of considerable interest to comics scholars like themselves, albeit just to look at, obviously. And if not comics, maybe there’d be touching personal effects, just some memento of the guy: that pendant that he always wore back in the seventies, or his old Massive Militant Marauder Corps pin with its little pictures of the Brute, the Unrealistic Five and Beetle Boy – items of that variety.

  Between them, they’d agreed to make this trip when everyone was sitting stunned and silent in the offices up at American, during the aftermath of Brandon’s very public passing. Everybody thought their visit was a good idea, and even David Moskowitz, one of the upstairs people at the company, had said that he might drop by later on the designated Saturday, to pay respects and no doubt to check out Chuff’s hypothetical collection. Dan and Worsley didn’t talk much as they made their way along the sweltering early August streets to the bereaved apartment, Dan because the stitches in his lower lip made talking difficult, and Worsley because he was trying to process being editor-in-chief, which still felt like a marvellous and only moderately tragic dream. He’d naturally been devastated by Chuff’s death, of course he had. Brandon had been both colleague and incessantly demanding boss, almost a bullying step-brother to Worsley, and he would be missed, no doubt about it. But, then, editor-in-chief. But, Brandon. But, then, editor-in-fricking-chief. You can imagine.

  Wheems was of a more unsettled disposition. Frankly, after the grotesque display at Carl’s the other night, Dan had begun to question many pillars of his previous existence. For example, comics continuity. Was it at all important, in the larger scheme of human life and death? And what about him and his friends, his industry associates? What in God’s name had they become? What had this business done to them? How had it happened, and how could Dan Wheems get out of it? Behind all this was the persistent thought that Brandon Chuff’s last moments on this Earth had been spent listening to a Jerry Binkle Mr Ocean monologue. Brandon had hated Mr Ocean. For that matter, he had also hated Jerry Binkle. Don’t let me go out like that, thought Dan. Please. Anything but that.

  His thoughts in turmoil, hardly any of them were to do with Brandon’s orphaned comics.

  Continuing along the boulevard into the messy afternoon, they were a poorly thought-through paradox; two tortoises without an Achilles in sight. The nothing that they had to say was deafening. Part of the problem was that the two men’s relationship, a tenuous one at best and wholly comics-based, was not designed to handle real events like sudden death. In comics, dying was always conditional – there’d been so many tragic ends for Thunderman in the last nearly eighty years, American had brought out two successful Greatest Deaths collections.

  And another thing with Dan and Worsley was the power gradient, shifting uneasily between the two of them over the Mylar-bagged years that the pair had known each other. They’d first met as teenagers at Jimjon Jackson’s BeeCon1 in Albany, NY, although the 1 in BeeCon1 turned out to be superfluous as there weren’t any more conventions called that, ever. They wrote letters to each other and met up from time to time for some years after that, attending so many conventions as a team that other fans referred to them as Blinky and his best pal Bottleneck, after the famous high-school duo. Dan, who had back then worn heavy-rimmed corrective lenses, had of course been Blinky. Worsley had been Bottleneck because he was, at that time, taking his first steps towards becoming a recovering alcoholic, which were basically those necessary to become an alcoholic in the first place.

  Soon thereafter, Porlock had been given money by his stepdad and had published the fondly remembered, offset-printed fanzine Comiclasm, in which Dan had been invited to contribute an opinion column, ‘Wheems Screams’. It was the first time he’d seen his work in print; his dry wit got him noticed by the younger freelancers at Massive and American, which ultimately led to Dan getting some script jobs on American’s poor-selling mystery titles, Tower of Frightening and Chamber of Dreadful. So, this was the first time that their status balance wobbled, with Dan now a pro and Worsley still a fan, but it was not the last time such reversals would occur. To start with, Worsley gave up Comiclasm and became a sometime dealer trading in original art, comics pages purchased from hard-up professionals who often did not fully understand their own work’s value. Worsley’s list of artist contacts soon became immense and his address book legendary, so sought after that when American appointed Worsley as assistant editor on Exploit and Exciting, nobody was the least bit surprised. This was around the time that Dan had got in that ungodly row with Hector Bass and had to quit American for Massive on war titles that nobody read, even their authors, such as Captain Tantrum and his Subdued Seadogs, or the uneventful Sergeant Distant. Then, with time and Jerry Binkle’s Massive problems, Wheems found himself writing The Vindictives and became an overnight fan favourite, although these days maybe not so much. And now, with Brandon Chuff dead in a so-so diner, Worsley Porlock was American’s new editor-in-chief. Between them, as they trundled listlessly towards Chuff’s residence, they had a lot to think about.

  When both feared that their teeming inner monologues might reach some threshold where they became audible, Dan Wheems ventured a conversational opener with, ‘Fo, fum orpopfy,’ and Worsley turned to look at him in startled silence for a second, then said, ‘What?’ Raising his voice while still maintaining his unintelligibility, Wheems near shouted, ‘I fed, fum orpopfy. For pippy fake, I meme, “fpopped”? Ferioufly?’ To which Porlock thought the best response was to nod gravely and say, ‘Yeah, ain’t that the truth,’ hoping that this was in the ballpark.