The next table over was a stall devoted to King Bee exclusively, with current issues, pricey older books, posters and lobby cards from the two King Bee movie serials and, obviously, merchandise related to the TV show. Standing beside this, studying a die-cast miniature of the Bee Buggy with disdain, was the same little kid with outsized spectacles that Worsley had seen in the street outside the Billingham when he arrived. His name, according to the hastily scrawled name tag, was Dave Wheels. Having himself just been included in his first fan conversation with Bandana Sean and Milton Finefinger, and knowing how much that had meant, Worsley felt an enormous pang of sympathy for lonely-looking Dave Wheels, and so asked the boy if he was a King Bee fan.

  ‘Not especially. I mean, you want the truth, I thought the TV series was for idiots. It sure didn’t do comics any favours. No, King Bee’s OK, but I’m more of a Massive guy.’

  This so closely articulated Worsley’s own position that he straight away accredited the twelve-year-old with a near-supernatural level of intelligence. They seemed to hit it off right from the start, and Worsley felt a glow of warm benevolence for how he’d taken pity on the friendless younger boy. Meanwhile, the younger boy was feeling pretty good about himself for how he’d not been mean to the rejected social outcast with the terrifying hair. The pair got on so well and didn’t really know anyone else, so that when lunchtime came, they went together to the diner down the street from the hotel and had fries, burgers and a Coke each, while excitedly reviewing their new acquisitions. Wheels was most impressed by Worsley’s copy of Disturbing – Worsley didn’t show him Squack – and said he’d wanted to buy Inappropriate, but didn’t think that he could smuggle it home past his parents. It seemed that the youngster was an undercover lover of Shaw Magazines, about which he was very well informed considering he said he’d never owned a single issue. He told Worsley that the lead writer on Inappropriate and Disturbing, Denny Wellworth, would be showing up at BeeCon1 the next day, but that Wheels wouldn’t get to see him because his overprotective parents would be turning up tonight at six to take him home. Worsley, who’d heard that fans unable to afford a hotel room could sleep at the convention’s all-night film show, made a note to attend Wellworth’s talk tomorrow but felt it would be insensitive to mention this to the forlorn Dave Wheels.

  After their meal they went back to the Billingham, where they hung out together for what was left of the afternoon. Despite their mutual antipathy towards King Bee, they both went to hear Davis Burke talk in the hotel basement’s other big room, and were glad they had. In his mid-sixties and now doing highly paid commercial work for grown-up magazines, Burke was a self-effacing little guy who seemed pleased and surprised that there was anybody interested in the comic books that he’d done ten or twenty years ago. He talked about his influences, mostly Lester Gentle’s Flatfoot Floyd, with what Burke called ‘its stylish and dramatic balance between black and white’, which left most of the teenage audience not even puzzled. He secured his biggest laughs with candid anecdotes – Burke was a naturally funny storyteller – about his time on King Bee for American. When asked about King Bee’s ‘creator’ Richard Manning, Burke was smiling, twinkly-eyed and devastating.

  ‘Richard Manning was a guy who liked to wear cravats and smoking jackets. He had this idea about a character called Ladybug Man, in a red suit with black spots. He couldn’t write or draw to save his life, so he calls up Ron Blackwell, a great comics writer that I worked with on King Bee for many years, a real nice feller. Blackwell tells him Ladybug Man is the worst idea he’s ever heard, and that he ought to change it to King Bee. Then Manning hires the artist Edward Hannigan to draw the character, and Hannigan and Blackwell come up with the Droll, and Buzz, and everybody else. They write and draw the whole thing, but the only credit on the book is Richard Manning’s. Last I heard, he was in California turning out these dreadful, dreadful paintings. And apparently, even his crappy paintings, he hires someone else to do them. Big pal of Sam Blatz, as I remember.’

  After that it was around five-thirty. Worsley sat with Dave Wheels while they waited for the latter’s folks to come and pick him up. They swapped addresses so that they could correspond, and Worsley called it a historic moment in the partnership of Worsley Porlock and Dave Wheels, to which the younger boy responded, ‘Who’s Dave Wheels?’

  Worsley was thus still cringing slightly when he stood outside the Billingham some minutes later, being introduced to the distrustful-looking parents of Dan Wheems, the fan formerly known as Dave Wheels. Mrs Wheems thanked Worsley, dutifully, for looking after her young son, but in a way that made it clear she thought he was most probably a trainee child molester, with a child molester’s haircut. The Wheems family then went back to her sister’s place, who they were visiting from Indiana, and Worsley went back inside the hotel where he tried to find somebody else to talk to.

  He was partially successful, hanging out with Milton Finefinger discussing What The – ? and, incredibly, trading a ‘hi’ with the blonde girl from Seventh Heaven on his way back from the men’s room. Finally, fortified by another diner trip, he settled in a corner of the room where he’d seen Davis Burke and readied himself for the all-night film show.

  It was an unusual experience. It started with a haunted run of animated cartoons from the 1930s, black, white and a pearly grey like X-ray plates, contemporary tunes like ‘Viper Rag’ spooky and crackling on the soundtrack. Titled Tadpole Tex and featuring an immature amphibian in a Stetson, the creation of forgotten animation-wizard Ole Knutson, these were short, surreal, and filled with surely accidental metaphysics, like when Tadpole Tex encounters what seems to be God imagined as a giant white frog, who sends the hapless pollywog to a strange pond-life purgatory full of microorganisms with demonic faces. Feeling tired already, Worsley thought they might be the cartoons that people see behind their eyelids just before they die.

  Next up were all the episodes – eight? Ten? Fifteen? A hundred? – of The New Adventures of King Bee and Buzz, the second movie serial from RKO to feature the two characters, made in the 1940s. In its own way, it was as unsettling as Tadpole Tex. For one thing, the costumes were slightly wrong, with the antennae on King Bee’s mask looking droopy, as if they were made of felt. The outfits also drew attention to the fact that, in real life, made from real fabrics, superhero suits were sort of wrinkly and preposterous. And there were other things. The actor playing Buzz seemed to be in his early twenties; the Bee Buggy was an ordinary car, looked like a beat-up Oldsmobile; and worst of all, King Bee’s hideout, the Hive, was now a kitchen table and a microscope. In one scene, leaning out of the Bee-Oldsmobile and talking to King Bee in a street full of people, Buzz pushed his domino mask up to his forehead like the whole secret-identity thing didn’t matter. You could hear those members of the audience who weren’t talking about the imminent moon landing gasp in disbelief. The villain, rather than the Droll or someone else out of the comic, was a standard Oriental fiend called Dr Dragon, who had some kind of special-effect death ray. Worsley found it hard to keep his eyes open, and by the sixth or seventh chapter, he was sound asleep.

  When he woke very briefly some time later, it was during Fritz Lang’s five-hour-long masterpiece Siegfried, although being only half awake, Worsley assumed it was still part of the interminable serial. From the brief sequence Worsley remained conscious for, it seemed that Dr Dragon turned out to have been an actual dragon all along. King Bee had evidently killed the villain, then had taken off his wrinkly costume so that he could bathe in Dr Dragon’s blood, observed by twittering birds in the surrounding treetops. As his mind began to slide once more into a warm and comfortable oblivion, Worsley construed this as a cinematic pun about the birds and bees which, in his last scant moments of awareness, he thought very clever and sophisticated.

  A few hours after that, he had another short stretch of lucidity. Unfortunately, this was halfway through a showing of bizarre, low-budget exploitation flick Bee Kong a Buzz-Buzz, made three years before by maverick director Dexter Fairfield Harris for about four hundred bucks, and borrowing satirically from the King Bee TV show. Worsley, dreaming with his eyes open, was not aware of this, and took Harris’s plotless spoof as a continuation of the movie serial he thought that he was watching: it appeared that bathing naked in the lifeblood of his enemy had taken a huge psychological toll on King Bee. He now had noticeable stubble and a paunch, spoke with a different accent, and his costume had devolved into an utter travesty. The hero was depicted in a sleazy nightclub, giggling and sipping on what might have been a marijuana cigarette, dancing the Hully Gully while surrounded by at least a dozen topless women. The disjointed narrative of the RKO serial had unexpectedly veered into tragedy, with noble King Bee made into a leering barfly as a punishment for killing Dr Dragon and then using the dead villain as a shower accessory. The stripy sentinel was doing shots and dry-humping a stripper as Worsley passed out again. He hadn’t even noticed that the tawdry final episode had been in near-fluorescent colour.

  He woke properly around nine in the morning, when the hotel staff came in to clean up the convention room in preparation for Sunday’s activities. He splashed water on his face out in the washroom, and then made another visit to the diner for a hearty breakfast. While there, he ran into someone else from the convention who was even younger than Dave Wheels/Dan Wheems, a happy, cheerful boy called Arvo Cake. Worsley, making conversation, commented on just how strange that King Bee serial had been, to which Cake, thinking of the scene where Buzz had pushed his mask up, readily agreed. He really was the sweetest kid.

  The rest of that day, after Worsley’s interrupted sleep, was something of a blur, best reconstructed later. In the morning was a hastily convened fan-artist’s panel, where the most arresting element for Worsley was that one of the assembled fanzine illustrators – a nice, talkative guy who went by the name or nickname Christmas Day – was black. Like with the blonde girl helping out at Seventh Heaven, the guy being black was what made Worsley realise that the rest of the convention definitely wasn’t. He decided that if he ran into Day he’d praise his art, which Worsley hadn’t seen, so nobody would think him racist. Also in the morning was the panel with Sebastian Squires, TV’s Carruthers, being interviewed by an excited Jimjon Jackson. Having had enough of King Bee after the upsetting avant-garde experience of the movie serial, Worsley elected to sit that one out and went instead to read margins and Graphomania in the almost deserted BeeCon1 reception area. Later he saw Arvo Cake again, who’d heard the Squires interview and said the English actor had talked mostly about how he liked living in cottages with people the eleven-year-old hadn’t heard of, like ‘dear Johnny Gielgud’. Both thought that this might have been the actor in the TV series who played King Bee’s foe the Tickler, but weren’t really sure. In any case, it didn’t sound like Worsley had missed anything.

  He skipped lunch after his heroic breakfast and, that afternoon, witnessed his first comics convention fancy-dress event. No more than eight or nine attendees had been bothered to make costumes, but the competition still managed to be hilarious. Joint winners were two kids who dressed as the Shaw Magazines mascots, Uncle Inappropriate and Cousin Disturbing. The joint runners-up were Sean from Seventh Heaven and his girlfriend, in beekeeper outfits that had dozens of toy bees attached to them by thin pieces of wire. Claiming to be the apiarists Dr James Reed and his wife Susannah, King Bee’s parents, they ran round in circles screaming then dropped dead, thus recreating the iconic origin scene as portrayed in Manhunt #22.

  The con’s last scheduled panel was a sort of amiable debate between some of the younger writers in the industry, most of them former comics fans, and followed on almost immediately from the fancy-dress contest. The biggest name amongst the panellists was that of Jerry Binkle, currently a hit with fans for his exciting and enthusiastic work on Massive’s The Unrealistic Five. Beside him were two younger writers from American – Ralph Roth, who’d done some stories for the mystery title Tower of Frightening, and Brandon Chuff, who’d been writing King Bee in Manhunt and was rumoured to be taking on the script duties of United Supermen. Binkle seemed irritated by his fellow panel members, Roth looked terrified and hardly said a word, while Chuff, hugely self-satisfied, said nasty things about the other guests and then pretended he was only kidding. But it was the last of the four writers, sitting at the table’s other end from Binkle, that Worsley was really there to see, and who he was the most impressed by.

  Denny Wellworth, in black turtleneck and jeans, elastic-sided boots and a thin leather coat, was the best dressed amongst the four, and also seemed to be the funniest and most intelligent. He was distinctly different to the others in that he appeared to have a life outside the comics industry, and didn’t seem to care much about superheroes. His main interest, he said, was not so much in characters as in what could be done with visual storytelling, with the medium itself. When Brandon Chuff said, ‘Denny here’s a real know-nothing when it comes to superheroes. No, I’m only kidding,’ Wellworth smilingly replied, ‘I’m sorry, Brandon, but when I’m off work, home with my wife, the subject of your scripts for King Bee doesn’t really come up very often.’ Everybody laughed but Chuff and possibly Ralph Roth, who still looked trapped and frightened. Wellworth talked engagingly and modestly about working for Shaw, with all the SP artists who had been his heroes as a teenager, and how much he enjoyed writing without the limitations imposed by the Comics Code Authority. He told a fascinating anecdote about Jim Laws, the SP publisher and writer, who’d apparently been coming down from pep pills when he gave his testimony to the Senate subcommittee looking into juvenile delinquency, the thing that more or less brought the Code into being.

  After the discussion broke up in appreciative applause, Worsley saw Denny Wellworth standing on his own, smoking a Marlborough in the reception area. Summoning up his courage, he approached the writer, told Wellworth how much he’d liked the talk, and asked if he’d mind signing Worsley’s copy of Disturbing. Wellworth not only obliged – ‘To Worsley Porlock, with regards from your Disturbing buddy, Denny Wellworth’ – but he stood and chatted to the awestruck teen for some ten minutes, just as if they weren’t admirer and admired. Learning that Wellworth had occasionally worked on the Human Tank for Massive, Worsley asked him what he thought about Sam Blatz, who Worsley had heard several critical remarks about over the BeeCon1 weekend. The writer laughed.

  ‘Satanic Sam? Oh, everything they say is true. He cheated Joe Gold, Robert Novak, all those guys, and I doubt that he’s ever written anything that’s more demanding than a shopping list. But … well, I don’t know. I don’t think Blatz is evil so much as I think the guy’s maybe got something wrong with him. Before I got into the business – this is 1960 when I was a teenage nobody – I can remember seeing Sam Blatz sitting having breakfast in a booth at the same deli I was in. And he was talking to his food. He sat there staring at his plate, like he was listening to what it had to say, and then he’d answer it, and it went back and forth like that for the whole meal. Whether he ever ate it, I don’t know. It can’t be easy eating something when you’ve had a heart-to-heart like that.’

  All things considered, it had been the most amazing and transformative weekend of Worsley’s life. He said goodbye to Denny Wellworth, then did a last circuit of the hotel basement shaking hands with Jimjon Jackson, Arvo Cake, Milton Finefinger and finally Sean from Seventh Heaven, although sadly not Sean’s girlfriend, who had gone home early. Striding down the front steps of the Billingham into the dazzling July sunshine, purchases beneath his arm, Worsley felt filled with purpose and ambition for the first time ever. He’d been reading comics since he was a child, but this had been his first experience of the comics world, a world he realised that he wanted to be part of all his life. He couldn’t draw or write, but then, by all accounts, Sam Blatz and Richard Manning were both in the same position. Standing waiting for the bus – that he still had the money for – to take him back to Jersey, sunlight pouring on his earnest features, Worsley carelessly made the career decision that would seal his fate, then watched some ants for the next fifteen minutes.

  Meanwhile, on or near the moon, the three Apollo astronauts were dealing with an unanticipated side effect of their historic mission. With no atmosphere to shelter them from the torrential radiation pouring from the sun, all three were inadvertently exposed to an amount that changed their body chemistry. Neil Armstrong found he now had the ability to turn himself into a sentient liquid, while Buzz Aldrin could control and generate magnetic fields. The least irradiated of the three men, Michael Collins, paradoxically was the most drastically affected and became a hideous magma-monster, with tremendous strength and a big heart. Laying one bulky glove atop another, the three swore a solemn oath and, as the Ultranauts, returned to Earth and solved all of the planet’s problems. Thwarted in their evil plans for an apocalyptic race-war, Charlie Manson and his Family were locked up in energy-prisons on the moon’s dark side forever. War, disease, hatred and hunger were abolished, so that 1969 became known as the year when everything just kept on getting better. Worsley Porlock married the blonde girl from Seventh Heaven, and everyone on the Earth thereafter led fantastic lives, at least until Cosmax arrived from space in 2025 and ate the world.

  8. ( June, 1954)

  Jim Laws in the hot seat and he’s sweating not with June but with amphetamines he takes them for the long late deadline nights and hopes they’ll get him through this bullshit but but but it’s going on so long and these four guys these senators look like they think Jim’s the most entertaining thing they’ve seen all day well no surprises there when Jim’s the only one the single solitary soul who’s proud of what he publishes the only one prepared to stand up and defend it when all these flag-waving Bible-thumping sons of bitches are just coming at the Constitution in wave after wave and if the industry just takes this sitting down they’re going to end up with this Comics Code thing this white flag that Stickman and those other assholes at American or Blinky are attempting to run up the masthead at this very moment making like they’re being morally responsible when it’s just thinning out the competition what Jim has to do is focus and try not to lick his lips so much or do that thing where he rotates his jaw because there’s plenty riding on this not just SP and the chair’s hard and that Morton guy who’s the chief counsel looks as if he’s winding up to take another pitch—