‘It’s around then I notice that the bigger photograph, the one that’s now her husband, it’s no longer on her office wall. There’s just one of those faintly darker rectangles you get. I ask about it, and she tells me “Daddy-and-Augusto” is at home, and that she’s promised that she’ll take him back a DVD that they can watch together. It turns out the marriage was suggested by this therapy the company’s providing for her, to alleviate the problem with her sex drive. Something about making a commitment to the thing that means the most to her, the thing that truly makes her happiest, and that, apparently, was Daddy-and-Augusto. I’m just sitting there and trying to take all this in, when she adopts a confidential tone. She tells me she knows what I must be thinking, which is a lot more than I do, and says that she wouldn’t want me thinking her married relationship with Daddy-and-Augusto was anything other than platonic, or that there was something, I don’t know, incestuous about it.

  ‘Then she … Dan, this was the worst. The worst thing that I’ve ever seen. She sat there on her desk, and then she did her thing. Still with that same fulfilled and dreamy smile, she started opening her knees. And, you know, normally it would be sudden, halfway through a conversation and they’d just flip open like the pages of a heavy book, but this time it was different. It was slower and, I don’t know, it was more theatrical, like she was drawing back the curtain on some great dramatic statement of our times. She moved her knees apart, a centimetre at a time, and I … I couldn’t look away, like it would seem discourteous or something. She … she wasn’t wearing any underwear, and when her legs were open all the way, there was …’

  Roth’s eyes, ringed with charcoal, stared maniacally at the admittedly unsightly carpet, but were evidently seeing something infinitely worse. At last, when Dan Wheems had exhausted all the feverishly imagined possibilities for what there might have been up Mimi Drucker’s skirt, Ralph had looked up at his unfathomable, Frankenstein-lipped host with an expression like King Lear might have if he’d just learned that he was being audited.

  ‘Dan, there was nothing there. No hair, no genitals, just … nothing. Or, I don’t remember, maybe there were pores. I don’t know. It was like a G.I. Joe, without the ball-and-socket joints. And there were no, there were no scars, like there’d be if she’d had cosmetic surgery. You have to understand this, Dan: everything had just gone, without a trace. When Mimi sees I’ve got the idea, she demurely shuts her knees and smooths her skirt down, then she looks at me with this real serious expression and she says, “It’s just, my thing with Daddy-and-Augusto. I don’t want you thinking something weird is going on.” Me, basically, I’m still in shock, so I’m just going, “No, no, Mimi, haha, not at all.” And then it’s like the exhibition’s over, but just as she’s showing me the door, she gets all whispery and conspiratorial. She says, “Ralph, I want you to remember that this company can give you anything. The company wants what we want, Ralph. It wants that we should have our heart’s desire. I promise you, there’s someone watching over us, here at American.” And then I’m off and running down the eye-strain corridors and trying to remember which way daylight is.’

  Roth had looked broken. He was sitting there, just shaking his head silently over the heat death of his coffee, like the interlude with Mimi had been a last straw, the one outrageous comics-business anecdote too many that had snapped his back. Dan had been overwhelmed with empathy, and felt the story about Drucker – surely metaphorical – had perfectly encapsulated everything that he himself had started feeling about comics since the death of Brandon Chuff: the way the business unsexed and dehumanised the people working in it, and the way it sucked them into an insane alternative reality, where there weren’t walls or limits, nothing but a kind of endless psychiatric freefall which, right at the start perhaps, might feel like flying.

  It was probably right there that Dan Wheems had decided that he absolutely must get out of the demented industry, while he still had a nervous system capable of doing so. The fellow feeling between him and Ralph, two brothers in adversity, was like a great and sombre current in the room. He clapped one hand supportively upon Roth’s shoulder, and he talked his heart out in a way that he had never done before. With rhetoric like flaming, beaten gold, he’d spoken of four-colour comic books as a false flag of innocence, flown from a cesspit of depravities and racketeers. In burnished syllables, he’d catalogued the startling details of his epic contretemps with Hector Bass, and settled all those rumours that abounded with a lyric flight of argument more like a song. He’d cursed the comics field resoundingly as a half-witted abattoir of children’s dreams, and sworn that sooner would he pluck out his own eyes than toil another moment in this vineyard of life-eating trivia and emotional arrest. He railed against his own Sammy Awards, now badges of a terrible infirmity, an illness of unowned adulthood. Using finer language than at any other point in his career, Dan spoke his human truth, a torrent of volcanic phrase and fulmination that might set the night afire. Unfortunately, all that Ralph Roth could make out was ‘Ubuffuff wuffuffabuff’ for around twenty minutes, after which he’d given Wheems a weary smile and said, ‘I hear you, pal. I hear you,’ this being at least technically true.

  Roth had departed shortly after that, so Dan had ordered Chinese takeout and then sat up late with his mind racing, wondering if he was really going to have the nerve to go through with this. Did he have the stones to walk out on a job he’d wanted since he’d been a twelve-year-old, effectively walk out of his whole life and not come back? He didn’t know if he, or anyone, could truly do that; didn’t know if it was even possible. But then he had to, if he didn’t want to end up turning into Worsley Porlock, Mimi Drucker, Brandon Chuff, or something worse that was beyond imagining. After his meal arrived, he’d pulled the four trade-paperbacks of his Vindictives run down from the shelf and thought he’d read them through again, perhaps to rediscover his lost fondness for the field in the groundbreaking series that had earned Dan both his Sammies.

  He found that he still enjoyed them, couldn’t put them down, so it was nearly three o’clock before he got to bed. He remained proud of all his work, which in the early nineties had been so innovative. That scene where he’d had the original Vindictives meeting up again after some years, as older individuals. The atmosphere and the comparative realism of his dialogue, like the famous interchange between Ormazda and the Brute – nobody else had been attempting stuff like that back then. He could be justly satisfied with what he’d done, and yet …

  And yet, the work, it wasn’t really his. He’d not created the beloved characters that everybody bought the book for, the established icons that lent all Dan’s knowing modern riffs their resonance. He hadn’t come up with the National Guard, the Brute, the Human Tank, Ormazda, Miniman and Minimaid, or the idea of sticking them together in one book called The Vindictives. That was all Sam Blatz and Joe Gold, which was just the same as saying it was all Joe Gold. A tough kid from the tenements, blessed with a comic book imagination more fertile than anyone had ever seen, who’d had everything taken from him by Sam Blatz and Massive Comics, and who, if you added up the billions that the Massive superhero films had made already out of his creations, was a victim of the single biggest theft from any individual in human history. Was this, then, all that Dan was proud of, his complicity in robbing someone genuinely talented of what was theirs? Was this the best that today’s industry professionals could say about themselves, about their work? He took these thoughts to bed with him, and, in the morning, saw he had no choice: he knew he couldn’t take it any more.

  In consequence, he’d gone up to the Massive offices with all of the determination he could handle, and the complete absence of a plan. Originally, he’d intended to explode in on Gene Pullman, Massive’s current, overbearing prick-in-chief, and make some sort of heartfelt condemnation of the industry while handing in his resignation. Then he thought about it some more and decided that this was way too much trouble. Pullman would most probably be out somewhere, pulling a bullion robbery or something, and even if he happened to be in, wouldn’t have given two shits about whether Dan Wheems quit, or got run over, or became a member of the Man-Boy Love Association. It would just be one more story about Doleful Dan and his unending barrage of dissatisfactions. No, what Dan would do is just go in, clean out his desk and write the company a letter, handing in his notice and explaining his decision. He was looking forward to it, getting all that poison off his chest.

  His visit to the offices on Lexington provided none of the catharsis he’d been hoping for. He’d gone up in the elevator to the fifth floor where the legendary Massive ‘Pigsty’ was, and lingered wistfully a while outside the separate office that had once been occupied by Denny Wellworth. Denny had checked out with prostate cancer getting on for three years earlier, but before that, and before departing for American, his office had been an oasis of calm rationality amidst the brutalising tension-factory that was Massive Entertainment. Denny had been the best writer in the business, and perhaps the only grown-up. Possibly through the self-confidence that came with knowing that, he’d never become the infantilised, embittered sphincter that a large majority of his contemporaries ended up as. Dan had almost worshipped Denny and his wife Diane, both gone now, and when Denny had been dying at the hospital, Dan had been in to visit him near every day. Denny had even shown enthusiasm when Dan had suggested he record an interview, some final thoughts about the comics business, on Dan’s phone. Although the piece was never published, Dan still had the transcript somewhere and had thought, as he stood gazing mournfully at what had once been Denny’s door, that he should dig it out.

  To reach Dan’s little side room – too small to be thought of as a proper office – had entailed the usual dispiriting forced march through the Pigsty itself. He’d paused there at its entrance to collect himself and draw a fortifying breath, before abandoning all hope and flinging wide the gates of hell.

  When he’d been ten and had first read about the Monstrous Massive Pigsty, on the ‘Pigsty Postings’ page they’d had in all the monthly books, Dan had imagined it as an exciting adult romper room where everybody was exempted from the burdens of maturity, and could remain enthusiastic schoolboys pretty much forever. In his prepubertal mind’s eye, he had pictured Joltin’ Joe Gold trading funny stories and cigars with Rabid Robert Novak, Jittery Jeff Stevenson or Frisky Frankie Giardino, while Satanic Sam himself sat crouched over his typewriter, inventing all the characters. Could be that Winsome Wendy Dietrich would be fixing everybody coffee, but because she genuinely wanted to, and not because they made her. He’d thought it an Eden that had superheroes.

  The collective workspace that he now stood at the portal of was, say, the size of four average living rooms. There at the centre was a five-by-six grid of open-topped boxes that resembled indiscreet lavatory cubicles, and almost every one contained a worried-looking penciller or inker digging graves for their own talent. Windowless, with less than ideal artificial light, the fog of desperation and anxiety that hung immediately over these creative cattle pens was almost visible, a stale cigarette smoke of the psyche. Like battery hens whose once sharp sensibilities had all been clipped for their own good, men with the eyes of massacre survivors hastily sketched interlinking ovals, convulsed balloon animals Dan recognised as larval forms of Beetle Boy, the Brute, or Dr Unrealistic. Here and there, the pittering rain of fingertips on keyboard marked a writer’s oubliette, and somewhere somebody was muttering, ‘I think I have a plot. I think I have a plot,’ over and over, in a flat tone which to Dan suggested that most probably they hadn’t. It smelled neither quite as bad, nor quite as fresh and natural, as an actual pigsty, although both felt, undeniably, like places of confinement for unhappy animals. He knew a couple of the inmates, and they caught his eye but quickly looked away, not through dislike, but through a fear of fraternising when they should be toiling, every lapse easily spotted in their open-plan panopticon.

  The oblong path bordering the perimeter of the industrious and fraught central enclosure had some six doors leading off from it, into the individual side rooms where the editors and writer-editors like Dan were stationed. From the varying degrees of wear apparent on the carpet, itself an upsetting pickle-green, one could deduce which routes were the most popular and which were most often avoided, like the near-untrodden stretch outside Gene Pullman’s office, which Dan happened to be then approaching. He had heard somewhere that when top predators – like wolves – were introduced into a population of their primary prey – like caribou – they would unfailingly establish something called a fear map. This contained once popular zones, such as grazing areas, that had since been abandoned through the increased likelihood of being chewed to death, in favour of less nourishing but safer destinations. The deep carpet pile outside Gene Pullman’s office hadn’t looked like it had seen a lot of grazing lately, put it that way.

  Walking past the shunned door, which was open, Dan had been relieved to learn that Pullman wasn’t in that day, although the ambience was still thick with his presence: what had been an ordinary comics-business office unit now existed in a state of superimposition with a well-equipped, high-tech gymnasium, part of Pullman’s shot at physically transforming himself to a superman. His office chair had been displaced in favour of an exercycle flanked by weight machines, while near one wall, the photocopier had been designed to function as a vaulting horse. Miniature treadmills were strewn casually around like throw cushions, for moments when the occupant might find themselves just staring blankly at a wall, and didn’t want to waste the workout opportunity. Surmounting all of this, hung from the ceiling by a length of chain, was Pullman’s flying harness. This had been installed so he could personally model as his self-resembling creation Best Guy, for the frightened artists sitting with their sketchbooks in the punchbag-crowded room below.

  One of the many reasons Best Guy hadn’t really worked, then, was contingent on Gene Pullman’s own atypical anatomy. The thing was, Pullman was unusually wide. Not fat, by any means, just … wide. He looked like he’d been drawn in ballpoint on the skin of a balloon then laterally stretched, or as if he were showing in the wrong screen ratio compared with everybody else. Frankly, it made Dan’s eyes ache looking at him sometimes, as if he were a particularly fiendish optical illusion. And on top of his unfortunate appearance, personality and reputation, Pullman was just plain unfortunate. When one considered all the awful things that had chanced to occur on Pullman’s watch – employees dead from overwork, or the few thousand pages of Joe Gold’s originals that had been stolen just before the company had been legally required to give them back to him – then it was difficult not to conclude that the poor guy was simply monumentally unlucky. Rumour had it that he’d been the young writer referred to in the Julius Metzenberger psychiatric session they’d reprinted in The Comics Contemplator back in 2013, the young man who’d kept clean pants beside the telephone for those bowel-emptying emergencies whenever Metzenberger called. Dan thought he understood how a career trajectory that started out like that could end up with somebody dangling from an office ceiling, dressed up in a special extra-wide costume, pretending to be Best Guy.

  Dan continued past Gene Pullman’s office to the more well-trodden reaches of the gherkin-coloured carpet further on, around a sharp right turn, where his own side room was located. Opening its door for what he realised with mixed feelings might be the last time, Dan stepped into the tiny Skinner box that for the last five years he’d forced himself to see as ‘cosy’. To be fair, Dan hadn’t needed anywhere near the amount of space that Pullman obviously did, not having to accommodate as many barbells, hanging ropes or wall bars.

  All his room had was a desk, a chair, and a free-standing bookcase where Dan’s reference material was stacked untidily, this being the ‘Heirloom Editions’ that reprinted all the earliest canonical adventures of the individual characters comprising the Vindictives. Perched atop the bookcase was Dan’s brace of Sammy Awards, one to either side, for symmetry. Each was a nine-inch figurine caricaturing Massive’s founding father Sam Blatz, supplemented by cartoonish horns, barbed tail and pitchfork, but wearing a Luciferian smirk that was unquestionably Blatz’s own. The walls were papered with dynamic posters and promotional material, most of them hyping Dan’s own books, a décor he’d thought casual and modern when he’d at last been awarded his own office back in 2010, but which now seemed self-congratulatory and teenage. Dan had sighed, as had his worn-out swivel chair when he’d lowered his worn-out body into it.

  Part of the reason that Dan found his work environment so thoroughly depressing, he was sure, was the persisting ghost, or at least aura, of Frank Giardino. Giardino was the glaringly talent-free inking veteran who’d occupied this so-called office several people before Dan, and it had taken Dan a while to figure out how come an inker – especially one as incapable as Frisky Frankie Giardino – had his own room, while guys like Joe Gold and Robert Novak were out slaving on the Pigsty’s sweatshop floor. Dan had joined Massive some years after Giardino left, and had thus never met the man in person, but he could remember a blurred photograph he’d once seen. It had been in the filler pages of a twenty-five-cent reprint book called Massive Milestones in the early sixties, a cheap bonus feature where they’d thrown together snapshots of ‘the Pigsty Posse’. There’d been stocky little Joe Gold, his arms folded proudly and a cigar stub protruding from his grin; there’d been myopic and retiring Robert Novak, half turning away as he flinched from the camera; and there’d been Frank Giardino. In the picture Giardino had been grinning, like Joe Gold, but whereas Gold was grinning with the viewer, Frisky Frank was grinning at them, because they were all just marks and didn’t know the real deal like he did, squinting on a sunny afternoon approximately half a century ago.