The car swept past, not even slowing down, and in a moment it was gone from sight. Morelli straightened up, and breathed. This gardening business, if you overdid it, could raise quite a sweat. He peeled the gloves off, dropped them on the lawn beside his shears, and went inside to get that beer. The magic cloud of cleanliness was still above his house, which he found strangely comforting.

  Charlie Morelli had, conspicuously, no connection whatsoever to the world of comics.

  7. ( July, 1969)

  That summer’s theme, in retrospect, was probably ‘Americans approaching new and unknown worlds’. In the hot months of 1969, beyond Earth’s atmosphere, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong watched the solar system’s most gigantic lunar body, technically a minor planet, swelling in their viewport. In Los Angeles, yet equally beyond Earth’s atmosphere, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel wriggled like caterpillars through the dark towards a bright house on Cielo Drive. And fifteen-year-old Worsley Porlock, with a catastrophic haircut, almost skipped along the sparkling mica streets of Albany, NY, on the way to his first comics convention.

  Worsley had been living in New Jersey for around four years now, since his mother had remarried and they’d moved there from Milwaukee, with his former sometimes-uncle Paul, now made permanent-stepdad Paul. He didn’t really keep in touch with his dad Ray, who he’d heard had some kind of problem with his liver, and was still at his old job back in Wisconsin. They’d talk once a year by phone, at Christmas maybe, although now that Worsley thought about it, not last year. Perhaps the year before that, but he wasn’t sure. He guessed he sort of missed his old man, probably.

  Anyway, this was his first time in Albany, the sun was shining, and Worsley was more excited than he could remember being since his relatively recent childhood. He was headed for the Billingham Hotel, declining and yet still respectable, which served as venue for the long-awaited (at least six weeks) BeeCon1.

  He’d learned of the convention’s almost inconceivable existence just a month or two ago, there in the usually dull letters page of Manhunt #316, which in itself had been a usually dull publication ever since they camped everything up in imitation of the recent King Bee and Buzz television show, or at least in Worsley’s opinion. He’d only picked up the issue out of habit, hadn’t cared for either the lead story or the backup Rocket Ranger nonsense, and was glumly skimming through the letters of complaint in Manhunt Mailbag, when he came across a missive from ubiquitous King Bee enthusiast and letters-column stalwart, Jimjon Jackson.

  Formerly James Jonathan Jackson the Third, Jimjon had adopted his new name for the first issue of Bee Attitude, his boyishly exuberant King Bee fanzine. Now, presumably with Manhunt and American’s approval, he was plugging the world’s first King Bee convention, to be held in Albany that coming July. Worsley had been both incredulous and thrilled. It wasn’t that he was that interested in King Bee, but that this was a comics thing – a thing from Worsley’s private universe – yet manifested, shockingly, in the real world, where other people could experience it too.

  As was the custom those days, Jimjon’s mail address was right below his letter. Worsley had sent off the requisite five-dollar registration fee that had been mentioned, and within a week was in possession of the first convention newsletter: four pages in two folded sheets, with violet mimeograph printing and a smell like methylated spirits. On the cover was an OK cartoon by Jackson himself, with King Bee posed like Atlas holding up a globe made out of characters from other comic books or from newspaper strips, like Flatfoot Floyd and Squinty. Inside there were updates on the con itself – former King Bee delineator Davis Burke was going to be there, and Sebastian Squires who’d played Carruthers in the TV show – and also ads for five or six amateur comics fanzines, a phenomenon that Worsley hadn’t previously been aware of. These included Jackson’s own Bee Attitude, along with Comics Addict from Snit Whitley in Ohio, the distinguished Hooded Vigilante from fan-turned-pro Jerry Binkle, The Massive Collector out of Washington, and a peculiar item called What The – ? made by a Milton Finefinger in Boston. Consumed by a burning need that wasn’t there before, Worsley had sent away for all of these, with The Massive Collector and Bee Attitude already gratefully received.

  Some of the articles and the fan illustrations were terrific, others maybe not so much, but that wasn’t the point. The point, for Worsley, was that these were artefacts that testified to the existence of a different country, where they knew about Joe Gold, and understood the difference between the two Moon Queens, and would not see Worsley Porlock as some manner of subnormal introvert. It was a realm that he felt he’d been seeking all his life, like when Kid Unicorn from Freak Force found the Mutant Motherland concealed there in the icy Himalayas. Best of all, though, this uncharted planet turned out to be just a bus ride across town from where Worsley was living with his mom and Paul. In fact, its blazing portals were now just a little further down the street, where he could see the Billingham Hotel’s sweetly old-fashioned sign hanging above the stream of 1969 pedestrians.

  This had to be the place. As Worsley neared the hotel entrance, he spotted two teenagers on their way in, the taller boy in a Vindictives T-shirt. On the sidewalk right outside there was some little kid, maybe eleven, twelve, wearing enormous spectacles and getting lectured by a worried-looking pair who had to be his parents, looking like he wished the earth would open up and swallow him. Poor bastard. His heart soaring, Worsley bounded up the white stone steps, through the revolving door, into the lobby. He then followed a hand-lettered arrow sign and the two laughing teenage boys down a brief flight of stairs, towards a hotel basement with BeeCon1 posters everywhere.

  It was a wonderland, assuming wonderland was half a dozen young guys in a conference venue, talking, reading comic books and having a good time. This, evidently, was the BeeCon1 reception area, and at the centre was a trestle table with convention booklets piled on top of it, along with plastic name tags and what seemed to be the con’s attendance register. Seated behind this was a beaming man in his mid-twenties with a shock of ginger hair who turned out to be Jimjon Jackson. Worsley, momentarily surprised, had been expecting someone younger.

  Stepping up, he introduced himself and thanked Jackson for sending him Bee Attitude. His startled eyes alighting only briefly on the fifteen-year-old’s hair, as if it were a missing limb, Jimjon shook Worsley’s hand enthusiastically. He gave Worsley a plastic tag, a booklet, and loaned him a pen so he could fill his name in on the tag. He said he hoped that Worsley would enjoy himself, and seemed about to offer him advice about the hair, but then thought better of it. Jackson put a tick where it said ‘Porlock’ in his register, and Worsley walked distractedly away, already leafing avidly through the convention booklet with its schedule of events and its donated sketches from a range of pestered comic artists: King Bee as imagined by John Capellini, Robert Novak, Preston Williams, Davis Burke and, unbelievably, Joe Gold! Moving like a somnambulist or someone underwater, Worsley drifted haltingly in what the arrows said was the direction of the dealers’ room.

  This had the size, the intimacy and the atmospherics of a church bazaar, except that nobody was old. Tables around the outsides of the room, and then a square of tables in the middle there, like circled wagons. This left a rectangular path for convention attendees to bob around, like plastic waterfowl in an old fairground Hook-a-Duck attraction. Just the hotel-carpet smell and murmuring sound of it were thrilling, and the visuals were a fireworks display realised in card and paper. There were comic books of every vintage, covers glowing with forgotten 1940s colour, and fantastic paperbacks whose jackets dripped with warriors, abominations, nude princesses, violet alien skies.

  Dumbstruck and numb with wonder, Worsley circumnavigated his daydream emporium. There was the sweet smell of cheap incense issuing from somewhere, and a gentle undertow of music that meandered from The Ventures, of whom Worsley was aware, to shimmering and mystic-sounding things by San Francisco bands he didn’t know so well. Wrapped in a daze of perfect satisfaction, he paused at each stall and felt obscurely sleazy, like a voyeur, ogling goods for free while knowing he could not afford to buy them. There were books like Massive Men’s Adventures from the 1940s, back when Massive were still Punctual, its cover rich with violent detail that depicted Fishman, the original Fogmaster and the National Guard, all grinning while they slaughtered buck-toothed and banana-coloured Japanese infantrymen in inch-thick pebble glasses. He was rendered near immobile by the sighting of an early Thunderman, like, #87, somewhere around there, when Felix Firestone had a beard, moustache and different-coloured hair while pesky Thundermite looked like a leprechaun. He briefly fantasised about possessing it, this thing from before Worsley had even been born, but it had a white sticker on its plastic wrapping that said twenty dollars, which was almost all the money that his guilty stepdad Paul had given him for the entire weekend.

  The table next to this turned out to be the one harbouring both the smouldering joss stick and the tape recorder with a psychedelic playlist. Representing either a mail-order business or a shop called Seventh Heaven, the compact but fascinating stall was managed by a young man with long chestnut hair who wore a stars-and-stripes bandana, and a very pretty blonde girl who was probably his girlfriend. Up until he saw her, Worsley wasn’t consciously aware that BeeCon1 was otherwise a wholly masculine environment, and her appearance was as unexpected as it would have been in a guy’s washroom. While she bagged customers’ purchases behind the table, she maintained a smile of quiet amusement, for which Worsley was unduly grateful. Since, in his experience, female expressions varied from disinterest to dislike to disbelief, he’d settle readily for quiet amusement. And the stall itself was laden with intriguing, captivating things he’d never seen before. While the long-haired proprietor was talking animatedly with a tall youngster who laughed down his nose a lot, and the amused blonde girl made change out of a cardboard box, Worsley investigated.

  There were science fiction paperbacks and magazines from England that had covers without swirling galaxies and, frankly, looked a bit upsetting. Up the back, there were a couple of American or Massive’s more progressive, trippy comics such as Professor Abnormal, Solar Sailor or The Aeon, but these were outnumbered by far more exotic items. At the front were copies of Disturbing and its sister title Inappropriate, two classy comic mags in black and white with gorgeous painted covers, put out by Shaw Magazines, who usually did periodicals for horror-movie fans. By being magazines rather than comic books, Shaw’s publications dodged the Comics Code Authority and could hire all the legendary artists, like Jeff Pleasant and Slim Whittaker, who’d worked for SP comics in the fifties. Worsley had his eye on an edition of Disturbing where the cover image showed a frightened hunter running at the viewer through a winter forest, with a pack of shadowy but hot-eyed wolfmen in pursuit, chasing him through the snow between the black and frozen midnight trees.

  Elsewhere were what seemed to be fanzines, but with standards of production and design that put professional material to shame. There was the scholarly but energetic Graphomania, and something else called margins that was an experimental magazine of comic strips edited by Slim Whittaker, with artwork by his many famous colleagues. Worsley’s pulse was racing, and this was before he noticed the assortment of underground comics in the table’s middle reaches.

  He’d heard about these, but had thought they were illegal. Squack, Findmuck Funnies, Drugless Douglas, and a tabloid offering called Yellow Zeppelin. His hand quivering slightly, hoping that the blonde girl wasn’t watching, Worsley casually picked up Squack #3 and started flipping through it with what he hoped was an unimpressed look.

  Jesus Christ. The cover was a beautifully drawn and coloured cartoon version of the Whore and seven-headed Beast as featured in the Book of Revelation. Worsley could have looked at it all day, but then the opening story had some average guy trying to suck himself off with a vacuum cleaner, getting pulled inside and finding a libidinous nirvana. The piece following, by yet another radically distinctive artist, wasn’t even a real story – more of a delirious progression of transmuting shapes which, at one point, included the newspaper-strip delinquents Kurt and Karl both having penetrative sex with that stout, bowling-pin-shaped mother/aunt/cook/governess or whatever the hell she was. Worsley, unable to believe his eyes, decided there and then to buy Squack #3, although this meant he’d also have to buy Disturbing, Graphomania and margins to disguise the squalid intent of the purchase. Trying to look serious and scholarly, he interrupted the stall owner’s conversation with the gangly teenager to ask if he could pay for his selection. While the amiable hippy and his clearly entertained assistant dealt with this, Worsley was left to stand in awkward silence with the older, taller kid, who looked to be around eighteen. He offered Worsley an appraising grin.

  ‘Nice hair, hnohh-hnohh-hnohh-hnohh.’

  Worsley, who had no idea what he looked like – one attendee at the con shaved off his own hair and applied to join the military after seeing Worsley – was about to thank the stringy adolescent for the compliment, when the boy startled him by adding, ‘Hey! You’re Worsley Porlock!’

  This, as it transpired, was Milton Finefinger of Boston, and he fumbled in his holdall before handing Worsley a Manila envelope containing the new issue of What The – ? that Worsley had sent him a dollar for. Apparently a special BeeCon1 edition, on its cover was a crude but funny cartoon of King Bee and Buzz, which showed the apian avenger standing in a puddle of his own intestines while remarking to his horrified young chum, ‘See, this is why I’m not supposed to use my stinger.’ Finefinger was likeable enough, and he and Worsley talked while the blonde Mona Lisa bagged the latter’s underground sex-comic and its camouflage. The stallholder, whose name was Sean, rejoined the conversation so that Worsley noticed the American publisher’s logo on the comic book that he was holding. It appeared to be an issue of Thunderman’s Girlfriend Peggy Parks – a title that no serious comic reader had looked at in years – but what he could see of the cover art looked wrong. Not bad – incredible, in fact – just … wrong.

  ‘Excuse me, what is that? It looks like Peggy Parks, but …’

  The proprietor smiled genially.

  ‘Oh, you haven’t seen this one? This is what me and Milton were just chewing over. It’s not in the stores until next week, but I know someone who works at American. Here, take a look.’

  Sure enough, it was Peggy Parks, but it was drawn and written by Joe Gold. Worsley experienced extreme cognitive dissonance. This was exactly like those dreams he had of being in some corner store he didn’t know, where there were comics that could not conceivably exist, like Beetle Boy and Blinky’s Christmas Stocking or Thunderman Gone. He gaped at the impossibility, there in his hands, as the bandana-wrapped stall owner helpfully explained.

  ‘Yeah, it seems like Massive jerked Joe Gold’s chain once too often. Way I heard it, he told Sam Blatz to stick The Unrealistic Five, Ormazda and the National Guard up his ass, then took off for American, where he’s planning a whole raft of new titles. At American, when they asked him if there were any of their publications that he’d like to try his hand at, he apparently said, ‘What’s your poorest-selling book?’ And then when they said, ‘Peggy Parks,’ Gold said, ‘Give it to me. I’ll fix it.’ That’s how come you’re holding it right now. Try not to dribble on it, OK?’

  Worsley couldn’t understand how he had never realised previously that Peggy Parks was such a fascinating character. Here she was, racing at the reader down the bore of what looked like a Joe Gold version of a cyclotron, wearing a silver and black jumpsuit that had straps and valves and tubes all over it, the tar-pool of her shadow keeping pace and slithering beneath her as she ran. She’d even got a trademark Joe Gold ink-curl on her chin, as if to signify her substance and determination. Following her down the barrel of the atom smasher was what looked like the Caretaker, an old Joe Gold hero from the 1940s, and then one of Gold’s beloved kid gangs, the Boy Desperadoes, also from the war years. An overexcited blurb promised the reader they would fathom the ‘Mind-bending Mystery of the Alternity Complex!!’ And meanwhile, Thunderman was nowhere to be seen.

  Still basking in the comic’s aura, equally electrifying and disorienting, Worsley gave it back to Sean the young entrepreneur, and then told him and Milton Finefinger he hoped he’d see them later. With his bag of treasures and the copy of What The – ? beneath his arm, the fifteen-year-old Porlock floated off into the thickening crowd, concussed with marvels.

  At the far end of the dealers’ room, set on a solitary table, was what had been advertised as BeeCon1’s art exhibition. In reality, this was less than a dozen smallish pieces, most of them by fan artists and all of them in black and white, but it was his first glimpse of comic-art originals and Worsley was entranced. There were two pages by convention guest and former King Bee illustrator Davis Burke, who’d worked on Manhunt and King Bee throughout the 1950s. This was when the character was simultaneously at his best and at his most ridiculous, battling goofy-looking aliens, and every other issue getting turned into ‘The Polka-Dot King Bee’ or something equally inane and charming. Up close, Burke’s art was a revelation. There were arrows and instructions in blue crayon, fragile pencil lines that hadn’t been erased, and in the areas of solid black were smeary traces of the artist’s brushstrokes. Worsley had a sudden overwhelming realisation of the artwork’s physicality; of how the printed pages he could skim in seconds had been laboured over, patiently, for hours or days by real people, bent over real drawing boards and making marks on paper, one line at a time. Thousands of pages, days and people poured into the service of imaginary super-guys. It made him briefly dizzy.