Yeah, there’d been the pandemic, and then the whole comics distribution system had collapsed, with panicked publishers suggesting they could maybe set up lemonade stands on street corners and sell all their titles that way. It was like the crisis management ideas that twelve-year-olds might have. Then, as the dominoes kept falling, all the movies that the industry had let itself become dependent on stopped coming out, and even the top company no longer looked as Massive as it had before. A lot of things had happened that were beyond anyone’s control, but if the comics field was honest with itself, it had commenced its swansong some years prior to the conspiracy of bats and pangolins that gifted Covid-19 to the world.

  One major problem seemed to be that nearly everybody working in the business – artists, writers, editors and publishers – was a promoted comic fan who, though they might know everything about King Bee, had no original or viable ideas of their own that might conceivably alleviate the comic world’s near-terminal condition. Yet another difficulty was the readership, presently atrophied to something like a hundred thousand devotees, most of them middle-aged or older, a core audience that wasn’t merely shrinking, but was literally dying off. And which – since everybody had decided that comics weren’t just for kids, then that they weren’t for kids at all – meant that the industry had no way to replace those vanished readers, having confidently sawn away the branch it had been sitting on. The fans were drying up, blowing away, while the immortal, ageless beings – whom they had grown old and lonely in the service of – could only stand on Worsley Porlock’s stereo or coffee table, looking down on all this anxiously and wondering if they were next.

  Restless with several months of more-than-usual inactivity, and agitating uselessly about what might be waiting for him upstairs at American in six weeks’ time, he once more picked up Kulchur, but had only read a line or two before his eyes were drawn away to the impossible carnival imagery that washed across his silent TV screen.

  Black-jacket myrmidons with glassy shields and faces seemed to melt away on contact with a mega-hydra that was made untouchable by its prevailing whiteness. Revolution as rock festival or sports event, attempted coup as a reality-show entertainment, playing out with Constitution on the one side, Independence on the other, Legion in the yawning gap between. Colony organism, Man o’ War, a millipedal mass now bounded half the whited sepulchre. It pressed from west and east, constricting, and its spangled pseudopodia cried out in rage or prayer or nervous jocularity as tear-gas puffballs blossomed here and there on the perimeter, to no appreciable effect. Windows announced their final music, and the secret dread of all authority poured in to flood authority’s inviolable palace, sent by an authoritarian. With a vestigial ideology of black and white hats, although largely carpeted in red ones, it extruded tendrils on the Senate floor and, suddenly, important people were escorted by trained killers, somewhere far from the influx of amateurs. Confronted by a wave of frightful jubilation, knowing military backup – a bad visual – would be unforthcoming, the blue line inside the Capitol had never felt so thin, so vulnerable. But, by then, the cataclysmic pageant was begun in earnest.

  Worsley’s eyes weren’t that great, so he couldn’t read the ticker tape of on-screen captions from this distance, but he thought that the whole thing might be to do with Trump.

  He shook his head and blew air down his nose ambiguously. Worsley had conflicted feelings about the whole Trump thing, but foremost amongst them were a feeling of exhaustion and a feeling of deferred guilt that he hoped to put off for as long as possible. Of course, he’d not actually voted for the horribly tenacious nearly former president, but then he’d not voted against him, either time. Embarrassingly, back in 2016, he’d been loud in his support of the reality TV star, telling anyone who’d listen that Trump’s great appeal was that he ‘wasn’t part of the political establishment’, to which some had responded that he needed the word ‘even’ in there somewhere, maybe after ‘wasn’t’. Porlock didn’t really have an explanation for why he had thought the way he had, although in his defence, a lot of other comics guys had been of the same mind.

  Possibly it had to do with the exaggerated cartoon aura that the guy had, or at least as Worsley saw him. Back in 2016, everything had got a kind of superhero atmosphere about it, not least Donald Trump, or, as supporters still referred to him, the Donald, like the Streak or the King Bee, as if it were his superhero name. That year, six of the dozen biggest-grossing movies had been superhero films, and he supposed that there had been a feeling as if people wanted this to be a simpler world, that they could understand. They wanted big dramatic threats and enemies, no matter that they strained all credibility, and also wanted some improbable and memorable character to offer them solutions that were simple, and as unbelievable as the imagined menaces they pledged to combat. Just how the electorate had come to be in such a malleable state, Worsley had no idea.

  Taking a further glance towards the televised melee occurring on the room’s far side, he found himself less able to relate to what was going on than to, say, an inadequately plotted boxset season closer. Scratching unselfconsciously inside his King Bee boxers, decorated with explosive onomatopoeia, he reluctantly retrieved Finefinger’s Kulchur essay from amidst the comics and cardboard containers on his sofa, and attempted to pick up where he’d left off.

  ‘One might ask, even if this fan attention could be justifiably described as some far-fetched addiction, how can anyone be sure that superheroes are its focus, rather than some other aspect of the medium or industry? In answer, I’d suggest the questioner peruse contemporary comics threads, and find out for themselves: the structures and the storytelling possibilities of comics aren’t discussed at all, implying little or no interest in the comics medium. As for the industry, creators would seem largely to be mentioned in relation to some character or storyline, while even companies are only talked about in terms of just how badly they are serving both their readers and the properties they own. Fan loyalty is not, then, to the artists and the writers who create the figures that they so admire, but to the characters themselves.

  ‘Even a craftsman as revered as Joe Gold could have his creations stolen without any protest from the readership, but if some aspect of the Human Tank or National Guard’s by-now-mangled continuity is treated with the slightest disrespect, they feel entitled to protest in droves. Their attitude is perhaps best explained with recourse to our central metaphor of drug addiction, in that those habituated to cocaine don’t care about the work conditions of the peasants who pick all the coca leaves. Their loyalties can only lie with those who furnish them directly with the thing that they depend upon. Their loyalties can only lie with the cartel.’

  Returning Kulchur to the fellowship of fast-food and fast-fantasy containers littering the couch, Worsley was saddened to see someone else who’d retired from the industry running it down the way Dan Wheems had done. He also felt demoralised by the whole air of breakdown and bitter recrimination that had settled on the comics field over the last four or five years, coincidental with the present outgoing administration … and his own tenure as editor-in-chief, now that he thought about it. His assembled figurines and painted idols, on their various domestic perches, seemed to share with Worsley this forlorn assessment.

  While he knew that he was just imposing patterns on a random sequence of events, he couldn’t help but feel that Brandon Chuff’s untimely stoppage at Carl’s Diner had precipitated an abysmal chain reaction of immense complexity and woe. When he had burned down Brandon’s awful mausoleum of lust with Wheems and Moskowitz, all the time knowing that those priceless first appearances and origins were going up in pornographic smoke, he’d somehow understood that he was damned. Then fellow arsonist Dan Wheems had gone spectacularly nuts at Brandon’s funeral, attacking Brandon’s son and disappearing from the industry immediately after. He’d left nothing but an incoherent rant against the comics business, which was probably where Milton Finefinger got the idea. At least Wheems wasn’t present for the Brandon Chuff memorial and tribute at Satyricon, that year in late September, so had not included the horrific incident that happened there amongst his catalogue of disenchantment. Even if he had, Worsley supposed, it surely couldn’t have made comic books look any worse. Their terminal decline, by 2015, was becoming glaringly apparent.

  One huge problem was that almost everyone in editorial, throughout the business, was a comic fan like Worsley, who sometimes appreciated good ideas but never had them. Thus, when sales had gone into a tailspin, everyone had panicked and had pounced on half-baked notions as potential salvation, without having any way of telling whether the ideas were good ones, bad ones, or even ideas at all. At Massive, for a while, it seemed as if they figured a new colour was as good as a new concept, so there was the Yellow Brute, the frankly hideous Mauve Brute and a full spectrum of Beetle Boys that ranged from Chartreuse to Magnolia. American, meanwhile, had locked itself into a cycle of unending reboots, overhauling their whole continuity every few years, until nobody had a clue which Earth was which, or what the hell was going on. In recent years, the company’s most talked about achievement was a 2018 issue of King Bee in which the apian avenger’s pollinating apparatus was made briefly visible. Worsley glanced at his cabinets where different versions of the character were incarnated, posturing in resin or in plastic, and was quietly relieved to find that the balls-out King Bee was not amongst them, although such a thing most probably existed.

  Anyway, so, Trump had happened, Covid happened, the replacement inker on Finefinger’s Union went to prison for arranging dog fights so Milton had quit the business, and nobody ever got a goodbye phone call from Dan Wheems, which Worsley found a little hurtful. OK, he could see that Wheems had needed to get out of comics, but the two of them had been through so much, just in those few hours they’d spent in Brandon Chuff’s apartment, and a postcard would have been nice. Instead, not a word in over five years; silence that outlasted the whole Trump administration. Although, had it, really? Just how serious was this armed Mardi Gras descending on the Senate going to prove? Despite his efforts, Worsley’s eyes were drawn, wet compass needles, to the TV’s irresistible magnetic north.

  Bypassing a stone epidermis and the slippery glass mucous membranes, now inside the body politic itself, clumps separated from the central mass as it metastasised throughout the building. Some cells drifted past historic canvasses and disapproving busts as though on an unguided tour, gait and expression those of mesmerism volunteers. The great transgression, the impossibility, had been enacted. Now the disappointing Real was broken, and inside it was a grand and rapturous dream where there weren’t consequences, there weren’t laws, and nobody would go to jail. Pink men in grey fatigues heaved giant Confederate banners back and forth, painting the air, eyes full of burning resolution and a paralysed bewilderment. The creature swirled through hallways with crisp echoes and through booming chambers where the national past was sleeping. Jeering polyphonic and unstoppable, it scissored officers between bulletproof doors, or posed for selfies with their less obstructive colleagues. It demanded hangings, and it suffered cardiac emergency. Where it had been, footprints in shit, and blood on the marmoreal bosom of Zachary Taylor. Portraits were exfoliated, statues blinded by corrosive residues. Horned and incredulous, a possibly ironic Medicine Man rolled back the gleaming floor tiles of the world and stepped, wide-eyed, into a paranoiac dreamtime.

  Sitting alienated on his sofa, Worsley felt the emptied canyons of New York extending eerily about him. If he looked at what was happening on TV from any sort of editorial perspective, this was well beyond the point where he’d have called the writer in to have a serious discussion: this was irredeemable and utter narrative collapse. This was American reality become a crappy superhero comic book, in the last senseless issue before abrupt cancellation. He supposed he should have seen it coming when Kellyanne Conway dressed as Thundergirl for Trump’s victory ball, or when Anthony Scaramucci posed during his ten-day reign in classic Thunderman flight posture, with Thunderman treasuries and posters and Exciting #1 facsimiles behind him. What he saw on TV was the slapstick end of a cartoon administration, with a floundering plot much like what he expected from the next Vindictives movie, if they ever brought it out.

  In an attempt to rouse his flagging spirits, he allowed himself to daydream over that forthcoming upstairs visit, and his future prospects as, perhaps, the new American vice president. His TV at that moment was reporting calls to lynch the old one, but Worsley remained oblivious to the material world’s intrusions. He was somewhere else, imagining how it was going to be when he was, like, practically running the whole company. All those ideas he’d had, over the years, for how he’d do things better if he got the chance – now was his opportunity to put them into practice, if he could remember them. There was his great idea to have the Streak change back to his original costume, and his idea to have King Bee die but then, after a few issues, it turns out to be a hoax. And there’d been others where those came from. What about if all the characters wore hats? Or what if Thunderman did something, and then something happened? Worsley was on fire.

  But then, maybe the upstairs world might have its problems, too. He thought about the last time he’d seen David Moskowitz, outside of a Zoom conference. It must have been in late 2019, when he’d called in up at the offices, and had been told that Moskowitz was, for some reason, in the building’s basement. Worsley had dutifully gone down in the elevator, and, as he’d been promised, there he’d found the publisher. Since, with Dan Wheems, the two of them had burned down Chuff’s apartment, they had rather tended to avoid each other out of mutual embarrassment. Having thus not set eyes on Moskowitz for some considerable time, Worsley was startled to discover that the publisher now looked to be a fraction under five feet tall, and more astonished still to learn that Moskowitz had found a broom from somewhere and was sweeping up the basement area obsessively. He’d answered Worsley’s work-related queries but had made no reference to his janitorial activities, save to remark that he liked making sure ‘that everything was shipshape down here’. He seemed unaware of any psychiatric symbolism in his actions, which made Worsley think that nobody at Brandon’s place that night had managed to get out wholly unscathed. Dan Wheems was ghosting everybody, Moskowitz was lost in Jungian spring-cleaning, and Worsley was sitting in his King Bee boxers, watching the world fall apart without a fundamental understanding of, well, anything.

  Still, even if the higher echelons of comics management were fraught with difficulty, should the point of next month’s visit be to offer Worsley a promotion, then he’d take it. The alternative was to remain at the same career level, decade after decade, until you went mad and ended up like Jerry Binkle. Worsley had been in the audience at the cinema with Binkle and his wife Elaine to see United Supermen, and the appalling film had been the least of his ordeal. The movie’s languid gesture at a plot, presumably to placate older comics fans, centred on the iconic villain from the superhero combo’s first appearance back in Comic Clarion Presents, an interplanetary comb jelly known as Coelentero the Controller. At the movie’s climax, when United Supermen inductee Mr Ocean employs his control of marine organisms and makes Coelentero hang itself with its own tendrils, it had been too much for Jerry. While the other audience members were convulsing in hysterics at what would come to be called ‘Monkey Christ Thunderman’, Binkle had stood up in his seat and started yelling at the screen: ‘He’d never do that! Mr Ocean wouldn’t do that! Don’t you morons understand? His best friend was a jellyfish! Fufu meant everything to Mr Ocean! Everything!’ It had been mortifying. Everyone was telling Binkle to sit down, and in the end his wife Elaine had Tasered him.

  Thinking of Binkle’s seemingly lifelong fixation on the watery wonder prodded Worsley’s free-floating awareness in the general direction of Finefinger’s article. He wasn’t sure he got its drift, but if he did, it was a drift he didn’t care for. Still, he ought to finish it, so the next time Finefinger said that Worsley couldn’t read things without pictures, he could cite ‘A Spandex Wrapper for the Naked Lunch’ in his admittedly threadbare defence. Grunting dismissively before he’d even started reading, Worsley picked up Kulchur gingerly, like he suspected it however it was spelled.

  ‘Nevertheless, how can I justify comparing costumed characters with an addictive substance like cocaine or heroin? I think the answer lies in the word “costumed”.

  ‘I was reading recently of the important role that colour serves in those time-wasting games, like Krystal Krunch, that you find yourself playing on your phone, obsessively, until the small hours of the morning. It appears that certain hues and certain colour combinations are addictive, triggering our reward chemicals. If you should doubt this, simply alter your device to greyscale and see how long Krystal Krunch retains your interest.

  ‘From an unrelated feature in a science magazine, on recent findings from the field of neurological research, I learned the startling fact that a child’s mind can be rewired by exposure to a logo or an emblem, much as hatchlings will emotionally imprint on the first object that they notice. On reflection, neither of these notions should have been a big surprise. I can remember playing with those big, old-fashioned marbles as a little kid, and how I’d make up names and even personalities for special favourites, based on nothing more than the mystique that different colours held for me at that age.