The story with Frank Giardino, as Dan had eventually learned, was one almost entirely situated in the true crime section of the bookracks. It had seemingly been common in the forties and the fifties for the smaller comic companies to get a visit from their local Mafia franchise, offering advice on how the publishers could keep their offices from burning down. Goliath Comics had been no exception, but Sam Blatz had managed to put his unique Mephistophelean stamp on the deal, by offering to hire the unemployable young nephew of respected capo Salvatore Giardino, rather than just paying the protection money. Nominally, little Frankie was an inker, if you defined ‘inker’ as somebody who went over pencil lines in ink, rather than as an artist in their own right who would lend the pencilled page all of its volume, weight and texture. Frisky Frank’s only distinction, everyone agreed, was that it took a very special talent to make Joe Gold’s art look merely adequate.

  One of the ways in which Frank Giardino had accomplished this unprecedented feat was through his need for rigorously scheduled oral sex. Perhaps by some arrangement with Frank’s Uncle Sally, there’d be a professional fellatrix booked to show up here at Frisky Frankie’s office every weekday afternoon at five o’clock, with punctuality a paramount consideration. So, if it was getting to around four-thirty and he’d still got one of Joe Gold’s gorgeous pages for The Unrealistic Five to ink before he got his daily blow job, Giardino would take an eraser and remove a number of the background skyscrapers, or rub out what he thought to be extraneous figures from the artist’s detailed crowd scenes. Some months it had almost been The Unrealistic Three.

  Dan had always assumed that having Giardino at the company, an authentic minor Mafia associate, must have in some way tickled the unbounded ego of Satanic Sam. Blatz had enjoyed hanging around with Giardino, perhaps hoping that some of the organised-crime glamour would rub off, and there had been the much-repeated story of when Frisky Frank had taken Blatz out to a gentlemen’s drinking establishment owned by his uncle Sal. Unfortunately, Sam Blatz only had a tenuous grasp on ordinary reality, and none at all on the Five Families reality that Giardino’s uncle represented. When confronted by a room heaving with Mafiosi – that included, possibly, Frank Giacomo – Blatz had impishly elected to denounce them all as ‘dirty rats’ in a poor imitation of James Cagney, and then mimed mowing them down with an imaginary tommy gun. As fifty men wearing identical expressions of murderous incredulity reached as if for an inside pocket, Frank had Frisked for his employer’s life: ‘No, please, this guy’s an idiot. I’ll get him outta here.’

  Sat there in Giardino’s former workspace, haunted by the residue of his many unlikeable transactions, it struck Dan that the non-inker’s death in 2005 had been as suspect as his life. The first that anyone had heard of Giardino’s unforeseen demise had been with the announcement of his imminent closed-casket funeral. Chins had been stroked and brows creased, particularly when somebody said they’d seen Frank looking frisky just the week before. Best guesses were witness protection, or, more probably, something to do with piscine dormitory arrangements.

  It was all just as Ralph Roth had said the night before, how every comics-business anecdote was guaranteed to end up with a suicide, a liver failure, mental breakdown or some other kind of a closed casket. On Dan’s desk was an unopened envelope emblazoned with the logo of Satyricon 2015, no doubt fresh imprecations for Dan to confirm his presence at the usually febrile gathering in late September, only a few weeks away, which, in his current doldrums, Dan felt disinclined to do. Satyricon had, for some years, been more of a bizarrely costumed interspecies orgy than a celebration of the comics medium. The event’s sole function, almost certainly, would be the generation of brand new repellent narratives and freshly minted legends of degeneration. Something absolutely horrible might happen, anything at all, and all that would come out of it would be another utterly hilarious yarn in Worsley Porlock’s morbid repertoire. Wearily, Dan had shoved the envelope aside and gone back to considering the reason he’d returned there, to the erstwhile gangster love nest that he’d tried to think of as his office. His intention had been to reclaim some fond mementos of his funny-book existence before he abandoned it, but by then he’d been feeling nauseous and having second thoughts.

  From their lofty positions on the bookcase high above him, his Sammy Awards had leered down at Dan knowingly, one to each side. It had been something like the way that animated cartoon characters made ethical decisions, with a vice or virtue perched on either shoulder, except that this was a comics-business version and it had no virtues. Thus, with only devils offering advice, the choice was not between the good and bad halves of an individual, but between the evil and the genocidally monstrous. The Satanic Sammy on the left might lead with, ‘Salutations, Seeker! Why not do something disastrous that you’ll regret forever?’, while the Sammy on the right might come back with, ‘Eyes right, Explorer of Eternity! Don’t listen to that faggot! Cook and eat your way through a whole orphanage! Do something everybody will regret forever!’

  Dan had been slumped in his seat and thinking hard about all this – Sam Blatz, the industry, Joe Gold, Mimi Drucker, Frank Giardino, Brandon Chuff dead in a diner, Chuff’s apartment burning and his funeral, Gene Pullman, Denny Wellworth, everything – when he had noticed that the constant inner voice of his frustrations and anxieties, which he’d lived with his whole adult life, had fallen silent and was gone. He wasn’t sweating, wasn’t tapping his foot uncontrollably or chewing his replacement stitches. With a dawning sense of wonderment, he’d realised that he was at peace, and, in the perfect clarity of that enchanted, unexpected state, he’d known for sure what he must do.

  He hadn’t taken any of the promo posters or Heirloom Editions, and had left the ring binder with his reviews and clippings where it was. He hadn’t glanced at his unopened mail, especially the invite from Satyricon; had not retrieved his Sammies from their vantage point up on the bookcase; hadn’t taken anything. He’d simply stood up and, after a last look round, had left the room. He had retraced his steps along the sour green carpet, passing the averted gazes of the labourers in the outside cubicles, passing Gene Pullman’s office with its gaping door. Taking a last peek at the Best Guy flying harness, he’d allowed himself a faint half-smile. No heirlooms, no conventions, no awards and no reviews. If anybody at that company had seriously wanted to cheat gravity, then they had only to put down the Massive burden they were shouldering. Then they’d have known what flying was.

  Dan Wheems had floated through the Pigsty door and, with a fond, respectful nod, past Denny Wellworth’s former base of operations. It had been like waking from a lengthy dream of dull, conveyor-belt employment, with the dawning understanding that it wasn’t real, and that he didn’t need to do it any more, and that he never had. Dan hadn’t thought that it could be as easy as deciding ‘no more’ halfway through imaginary dialogue between contending Sammy statuettes. Industry terminology and complex protocols of office politics flaked from him now like sloughed-off snakeskin, to reveal the new, pink individual underneath. Why, he’d not even reached the street doors yet, was still descending in the elevator, but already he’d forgotten the gradations of enhancement for the variant covers. His heart soaring, giddy with his sudden weightlessness and full of new ideas for how he wanted to approach that resignation letter, he’d taken a cab to his apartment.

  This was where he was now, his mind brimming with exciting plans and fresh conceptions which, for the first time in years, did not involve the National Guard or Human Tank. He’d run through all the practicalities of his forthcoming leap to nowhere, and it all looked doable. He’d had a stroke of luck some years before, when Vindictives: Choosing Pawns, the first film in the franchise, had just been released. The second volume in Dan’s run, with sombre flashback references to the team’s origin, was in the stores around then and it sold in quantities not seen before nor, as it turned out, since. In short, not being burdened by a family, by a cocaine-and-hooker habit, or by both, Dan had a healthy sum in his account. He could afford to move out of Manhattan altogether, maybe find a place in the Midwest, where he’d grown up. He had enough to get by comfortably for a few years, buy him some time while he commenced the Great American non-graphic Novel that he’d always meant to write. Without employment or a monthly vehicle to transport his ideas away, Dan found that he was having new ones every other moment, a rush of invention that he hadn’t felt in ages, and that he would have to find something to do with. Something literary, without pictures.

  To that end, he’d had some thoughts about the manner of his quitting: stopping work for Massive Comics would require no more than a brief letter, or perhaps just a text message. Saying goodbye to the entire comics field, however, seemed to call for something more creative, something that encompassed all Dan’s thoughts and feelings in some kind of artful closing statement.

  It occurred to him that opening this statement with a page of comic strip would be both novel and appropriate, provided it addressed the issues that were central to the cloudy argument that he was forming. As he thought about it, sitting at a kitchen table in the blue-white underlighting of his open laptop, he began to see that the comic book industry’s most emblematic story was also its first. It was the narrative of David Kessler and Si Schuman, sitting up together on those starry science fiction nights in Delaware, building with ink and paper a new kind of creature, powerful enough to bend their lives and warp the culture that surrounded them with its tremendous gravity, the force of its attraction. Dan could even see a way to link the theft of Thunderman from his creators with the birth of corporate America, the whole idea expanding into larger territories the more he thought about it. A spontaneous image out of nowhere came to him, a panel with Dave Kessler supine on his mortuary slab, while, reaching into view from off, an orderly draws up Thunderman’s golden cape to cover Kessler’s face. That sold Dan on the concept. That’s what he was going to do, whatever it turned out to be.

  The venture’s possibilities were opening like a flower. In Thunderman, he had a microcosm of the comics industry, while in the industry he had a microcosm of America. His farewell address could be a thing of several parts, to include all the disparate affairs that needed to be talked about, like a collage or a mosaic. He could investigate the whole notion of Thunderman from a variety of angles, until all that it was possible to know or say about the character and his effect on culture had been captured. He’d include that Denny Wellworth interview, and a few other things that were announcing themselves to him as he typed out his preliminary notes. He didn’t have a title, but was confident that one would show up in its own good time. This was all going to be so great.

  What he would do, he’d send his multipart farewell note in to one of the more serious and dignified trade magazines, and then he’d vanish. He’d just disappear. His contact with his fellow industry professionals was largely non-existent as it was, and if it should cease altogether then most probably no one would notice. Dan felt limitless, euphoric, wondered why he hadn’t done this sooner. All the stress that had evaporated once he’d stepped out through the Pigsty doors, God only knew what all that had been doing to him. He felt sure that his decision to leave comics would make an enormous difference to his life expectancy, amongst so many other things.

  His fingers were on fire. He opened a new document in order to commence work on the Kessler and Schuman comic strip, put page one, panel one, up at the top, the same as always, and got down to work, immediately so immersed that his apartment faded from awareness.

  Sitting there ignored and silent on Dan’s sofa watching this, the Human Tank’s sigh echoed in his silver helmet. Disappointed human eyes slid sideways in their metal slots, to gaze enquiringly in the direction of the Brute, seated there next to him. The blue behemoth shook his huge head in disgust and expressed his opinions that this shit was cold, and that he wasn’t going to sit around for any more of it. Beside him, at the sofa’s other end, the National Guard could only nod in sad concurrence. Dan Wheems, bent over his laptop, wouldn’t even look at them. Resignedly, they stood up, one by one. The Guard picked up his stylised-eagle shield from where it leaned against the coffee table, and they filed past the oblivious writer as they headed for the door. Clearly annoyed, the Brute kicked over Dan’s wastepaper basket on the way, because they, after all, were the Vindictives.

  They let themselves out, and didn’t really come around to his apartment after that.

  16. ( January, 2021)

  And with a thousand heads, it poured as Sunday sunlight on the famous avenue, behaving like a varicoloured gas or like an organism, speckled and gelatinous. Tossing and stamping, making ritual presentations, undulating in a mile-long New Year’s dragon that had flags for streamers, it advanced on its desired catastrophe.

  Against an appalled hush, it whistled, barked and chanted. It laughed, and called out the names of people that it wanted killed. Ahead, a white rotunda lifted into blue noon on the marbleised exhaust jets of its columns, while the writhing, composite immensity flowed in to flood its foreground with a fractious ocean of resent that spilled on to the alabaster portico. It dashed its swarming head upon the stately frontage and exploded into radicalised butterflies, their flapping banner wings painted with bars and stars and swastikas; with Gadsden snakes and letters of the alphabet and Jesus Christ.

  It grew a myriad of hands that bristled with professionally printed slogans, two-way radios, Tasers, ziplock handcuffs, pepper sprays and pipe bombs, and it wore a T-shirt promising that work would make us free. Borne on its shoulders were the makings of a gallows, and it came to celebrate the violent passing of coherence, history and fact. From in its multiplying pipe organ of throats, the compound voice declared a catalogue of pulp hallucination, and within its aggregated mind, it felt itself becoming the forge-lit impasto of a future patriotic painting. Its blood singing with rich pigments, heart engorged with hot impossibilities, a beast of people howled at inconvenient reality.

  His consciousness partly dissolved by working from home during the pandemic, Worsley Porlock blinked at the TV screen and had no idea what was going on.

  About him stretched the merchandising showroom that was his home office, dining room, and, sometimes, when he didn’t have sufficient motivation to move from the sofa, bedroom. Every horizontal surface had become a balcony from which his favourite characters – as costly cold-cast figurines, poseable action figures, neotenic plushies, cubist Lego-people, plump inflatables – gazed down on Worsley in his King Bee boxer shorts as he attempted to both watch TV and read a magazine at the same time, and was equally unsuccessful in either endeavour.

  He’d been sent the magazine, which was called Kulchur and was evidently a revival of some fifties thing, by Milton Finefinger. Milton had left the industry four years ago, partly in sympathy with Dan Wheems, partly in disgust over the ongoing non-publication of his Union book, and had been doing well with film reviews, opinion pieces, things like that. He’d married Jo, who was now managing Carl’s Diner, and seemed happy. He’d sent Worsley Kulchur magazine because the current issue had the only article on comic books that Finefinger had written lately, and the first such that the magazine had published. It was called ‘A Spandex Wrapper for the Naked Lunch’ and seemed to be about neurology, though Worsley wasn’t concentrating hard enough to make much sense of it. This was in part because of all the crazy stuff on his muted TV, but mostly it was Worsley’s invitation upstairs at American, in five or six weeks’ time, that was the source of his distraction.

  Was this a promotion, or some prelude to promotion? He’d been editor-in-chief more than five years now, and a couple of vice presidents had come and gone since then. The post was vacant at the moment, and he couldn’t help but speculate. Alternatively, this might be connected to the fact that, as chief editor, he had presided over the most crippling decline American had ever seen. And although none of this was Worsley’s fault, he couldn’t think of any way in which he’d helped the situation. Maybe he was being taken upstairs to be vanished, as was rumoured to have been the case with Mimi Drucker. This exhausting oscillation between apprehension and anticipation clearly wasn’t doing Worsley any good, and so he tried once more to focus on Finefinger’s article.

  ‘If you’ve spent time, as I have, in the company of junkies, you’ll have noticed that while many can avoid the clichéd image of the drug addict, a number of the stereotype’s trademark aspects will still be broadly applicable – a certain pallor, itchy arms, a startlingly efficient diet plan, and money going missing. Basically, there are sufficient symptomatic similarities, across this diverse group of citizens, for us to state with some degree of confidence that we are looking at a bunch of people needing urgent treatment for their intravenous drug dependence. It is the intention of this article to argue that the same thing can be said of some contemporary comic fans: as with the drug-habituated, any social growth is terminated and the superhero addict is admitted to a subculture with people whom they may dislike, but who share their affliction. One might also note that whether they crave heroin or hero, a distinctive tenor of complaint, consuming need, and victimhood seems to be common to both these communities.’

  Which seemed, to Worsley, more than a touch harsh, and there was nothing in his own real-life experience to justify such an invidious comparison. He’d never been sucked off by somebody who needed money for their next issue of The Alarming Beetle Boy. He put the magazine down on the sofa next to him, amongst the company of empty pizza boxes and a scattering of this month’s complimentary copies from American. These, in the industry’s currently straitened circumstances, totalled just over a dozen titles, all featuring characters attached to currently stalled movie franchises. So there was Moon Queen, Thunderman, King Bee, United Supermen, and a few others, like the smash-hit supervillain team Americans for Evil. This was, like, a fifth of the amount of books the company had been putting out this time last year. He knew the industry would pull out of its nosedive because, well, it always had before, and because a world without monthly comic books was unimaginable, but if he hadn’t possessed the confidence that came with being an insider, he guessed that the current situation would look like garishly coloured death throes; a super-extinction of some kind.