Of course it wouldn’t be easy finding a place to display that beautiful poster: the walls of the little room were full as it was. In its former life, the room had been one of Planner’s storerooms, and after Planner and Jon had cleared and cleaned it, what remained was a dreary cubicle with four unpainted gray-wooden walls and a cement floor.
Jon had met the challenge by papering the gray-wood walls with poster after poster after poster, and the cement floor was covered by shag throw rugs and Jon’s considerable collection of comic books. The comics were neatly boxed, three deep along each wall, with a filing cabinet in one corner that contained the more valuable comics. Planner had contributed a genuinely antique single bed with a carved walnut headboard, and a non-matching walnut four-drawer chest of drawers. The room was cluttered but orderly, though against one wall was a wooden drawing easel with an expensive-looking swivel chair such as an executive might have back of his desk, easel and chair surrounded by scattered paper and pencils.
Comic art was Jon’s life. It went far beyond a simple hobby, and Jon was fond of his uncle but thought Planner’s button-gathering was dumb, just not sensible at all. Those precious political buttons of Planner’s were artifacts of a boring and unpleasant reality, while comics were “immortal gateways to fantasy,” as Jon had said in an article he was working on for submission to a fanzine.
He supposed his love for comics had something to do with his fucked-up childhood. Jon was a bastard, he hoped in the literal sense alone, and his mother had liked to think of herself as a chanteuse. What that amounted to was she sang and played piano in bars, and not very well. Because his mother was on the road most of the time, Jon’s childhood had been spent here and there, with this relative and that one, Planner part of the time, and Jon hadn’t lived steady with his mother until those last few years when she was serving cocktails in bars instead of singing in them. She was dead now, hit by a car some three years ago, perhaps by choice. Jon hadn’t known her well enough to get properly upset, and he had occasional feelings of guilt for never having cried over her.
His childhood was a good example, Jon felt, of reality’s general lack of appeal. Either it was boring — like the half dozen or so faceless relatives he’d lived with, the score of schools he’d gone to, the hundreds of kids he’d failed to get to know — or it was so goddamn tragic it was a soap opera and impossible to take seriously.
So why not comic books?
He had built his collection up carefully over the years, at first just hoarding the books he bought off the stands, then gradually, as he got into his teens, he began working on the older titles, seeking out other collectors and swapping, sending increasingly large amounts of hard-earned money through the mail for rare old issues, even trekking to New York each summer these past four years for the big comics convention. Jon read and reread the books, savoring the stories, studying the artwork. When he finished rereading one of the yellowing classics, he’d seal it back in its airtight plastic bag and carefully return it to its appropriate stack in its appropriate box.
Though he was as yet unpublished, Jon considered himself already to be a full-fledged artist in the field of the graphic story (as comics were called in the more pretentious moments of fans like himself) and he felt this way primarily because he was too old now to say, “I want to draw comics when I grow up.” He was grown up, as much as he was going to anyway, and at twenty-one years of age, Jon was more than just serious about his artwork and comic-collecting; it was his lifestyle.
The posters on his walls reflected this. More than half of them were recreations of classic comic book and strip heroes, drawn with black marker pen and water-colored, Dick Tracy, Batman, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Captain Marvel, Buck Rogers. The latest poster was a finely detailed face of an old witch, a withered old crone with a mostly toothless grin and a single bloodshot, popping eye, and was an indication that Jon’s taste in comic art was undergoing a transition. Once the ax poster was put up, and one of the superheroes taken down, the shift from heroes to horror would become even more apparent.
He sat on the bed and began eagerly opening his other packages. One of them was from California and was filled with underground comics. Jon smiled as he examined the cover of R. Crumb’s latest grossly funny masterwork; one of the nonoriginal posters on the wall was Crumb’s popular “Keep On Truckin’ ” poster, with a row of tiny-headed, huge-footed absurd men dancing in a line against a field of orange. One of the undergrounds had some Gilbert Shelton as well; Jon especially liked Shelton, whose “Wonder Wart Hog” was pictured on Jon’s tee shirt, though his “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” strip was more famous. Not much else of the underground art was up to their standard, in this batch of books anyway. Maybe the undergrounds were where he could make his first splash, he thought, leafing through several books full of artwork he considered beneath contempt.
Two of the other packages turned out to be rejections. Jon was very disappointed. It wasn’t so much that he’d expected to sell these “graphic stories,” but that he hadn’t realized that this was what the packages contained. He was disappointed that their contents hadn’t been more old comics or fanzines, dozens of which he’d paid for by mail order and should be showing up any day now. Both of the rejected stories were horror tales, and he was told, in a polite note from one editor, that he drew well but his style was too derivative of “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, and if he could just develop a more original style, they would be interested in seeing more. The other publisher included no note, but Jon was not surprised the story was coming back, because he’d heard through the fan grapevine that this company had gone out of business.
The other package perked him up considerably. It was chock-full of EC’s, and he’d half expected the ad he had responded to was a hoax, since these EC’s had been incredibly low in price, costing only five to six dollars a piece. There were four “Vault of Horror,” two “Tales from the Crypt” and one “Crime SuspenStories.” He flopped down on the bed and one by one opened each plastic bag and eased out the comic inside. He didn’t read the stories, he just thumbed through the magazines, window-shopping.
He had just got into the EC horror comics in the last six months or so. He’d heard of them, of course, but had never delved into the “Vault of Horror” because the prices were stiff for books printed as recently as the early fifties. And Jon’s primary interests had been the superheroes of the Golden Age of Comics, which ran roughly from 1937 to 1947, and issues reprinting newspaper strips like Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers.
But lately he’d gone sour on superheroes. They didn’t seem relevant to his life anymore. He guessed it had something to do with knowing Nolan, meeting him, working with him.
He smiled, remembering the first time he and Nolan had met. He glanced at the posters over his bed, which were the only noncomic art posters in the room: photos of Leonard Nimoy as Spock, Buster Crabbe in his serial days, and Lee Van Cleef decked out in his “man in black” gun-fighter apparel. Nolan had looked over Jon’s series of posters and had noticed especially the one of Lee Van Cleef, studying the black-dressed Western figure with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes and mustache, and Jon had told him who Van Cleef was, adding, “Looks something like you, don’t you think?” Nolan had shaken his head no, smiled crookedly and pointed a finger at Buster Crabbe, saying “Flash Gordon’s more my style.”
In a way, both Van Cleef and Flash Gordon were Nolan’s style. Nolan was the sort of man Jon had always hoped to meet but never thought he really would. The sort of man Jon had admired in fantasy. Nolan was Flash Gordon, and Bogart and Superman, too. Nolan was Dick Tracy and Clint Eastwood and Captain America. Oh, he wasn’t as pretty as any of the fantasy heroes. His face was lean, hard, cruel, and his body was so scarred from bullet wounds he looked as if he’d been used for a year as some medical student’s cadaver. And Nolan could be a bastard at times, could be a real bastard, really an altogether unpleasant person to be around.