It was true.
Nobody had come to greet me in the store since I arrived. Regardless of the lights and heaters all running full blast, the muffled strains of music coming from a back room somewhere, I began to wonder if the store was even open. A sane person would’ve checked, would’ve looked for the proprietors. A sane person would’ve seen what I saw in that old, stupid, children’s comic and run like hell. But I wasn’t really sane at the moment. More than half-plastered, I was still less than fully thawed, I was freaked by my wreck and the storm and the store itself, and I was more curious than I should’ve been.
Only a handful of rational options could explain it. I’m dead. I’m in a coma. I’m concussed. I’m dreaming.
Only a handful of irrational options provided an alternative. I’m being tested by aliens. I’m living a computer program. I’ve crossed over to another dimension where the rules are different. I’m stuck in someone’s story.
Well, okay. Maybe one other option. This is really happening. This is the real world.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…
So I opened the sleeve on another comic, this one bagged, tagged, overpriced.
The 300th issue of Superman. I knew this comic well, as well as the Rudolph fluff I read when I was too young to understand market tie-ins, trademark vertical stacking. This issue was supposed to retell the story of Superman as if he landed on Earth in 1976. I paused for a second, fearing, knowing what I would find. Sure enough, Curt Swan’s iconic art greeted me with the image of a young boy with great gifts trapped in a Kansas upbringing, but it wasn’t the youth I remembered. It looked a lot like my father.
His mother — a woman who’d been married at fifteen, three children in hand, one on the way — looks out one day on her family’s cotton field to see a storm moving in. She notices rotation in the clouds, then recognizes her youngest out in the field, oblivious to the threat. She drops her dishes, slams her way through the screen door, and runs pell-mell for the three-yearold playing among the cotton rows. She has to save him, get him back to the house, grab the others and head for the cellar. But the boy is almost a mile away. By the time she gets back to safety, the boy in her arms riding the curve of her large belly, her other chicks squawking before her into the dank must of their dark cellar, it is too dark to see the blood pouring out of her sex. She can feel it though. She knows what it means. The boy won’t know till years later, not until after he takes a job at the church and has to mow the grass that grows on her grave.
Hers and his stillborn sister’s.
I located another long box, closed my eyes, picked an issue from the middle at random. I opened my eyes. Here, in a Deadman comic, I found my father was taking me to our first R-rated film together. Galaxy of Terror. My father squirmed as one of the actresses was stripped nude and raped by a giant slug creature.
I turned to another row of boxes, grabbed one from the front and one from the very back. I opened them, one after the other. Richie Rich and Sandman. The Rich story showed me and my father as bachelors in Phoenix. The short time we lived there, he developed an extravagant ritual for my allowance. Rows of pennies, turning to nickels, then dimes, then quarters led me once each month from my bedroom to the kitchen where I found cups set up on the Formica table as if for a magic trick. Tupperware bowls. Several boxes. All in sets of three. “Keep the money, or try for what’s under one of these cups,” he said.
“I’ll take cup number one.” It was a Twinkie.
“Okay, you can keep the Twinkie or go for what’s under the bowls.”
“Bowl number three.” A paperclip.
“Okay, keep the paperclip, or…”
He could keep this going forever. And it meant so much to me. But, according to the comic, it meant even more to him. We were so poor back then we had to entertain ourselves. No cable. Nothing but board games and cards. No new shoes. Shitty Sears shirts. Not a lot of theater movies, not a lot of comic book shopping. Even less Sirloin Stockade.
I opened the other comic. This one, The Sandman, came from the second series of that name, not the original Fox and Christman stuff, not the later, better Gaiman. Instead, Kirby’s garish, grandiose, wide-eyed style stared back. It showed my father and me biking from our apartment in Phoenix to a Rexall Drugstore, way out on the edge of town. We biked a lot together then. In the story, we rode toward a specific goal, my dad trying to help me find the latest issue of a comic I’d actually begun collecting. This one was supposed to have Man-Bat fighting the Dark Knight. On our way home, we pedaled our way through a park and arrived at a creek where my dad tried to jump the lip of a concrete bridge. He flew over the handlebars and landed smack-damn on the middle of his belly. It winded him so much he couldn’t talk. I stood over him, fanning him with World’s Finest.
She-Hulk told the tale of our family trip to Disneyland, when we stopped on the way at the Painted Desert, at the Grand Canyon, and, penultimately, at Bedrock, mock-up of an already outdated cartoon, and the saddest place on earth. All the stone-age homes, carved ostensibly from granite, showed signs of serious degradation. Chicken wire, crumbling stucco, the horrors of time and inattention. A short feature in the back highlighted my dad slapping Delia in front of an Allosaurus. A flash-forward showed him feeling ashamed for years after.
One issue of Heavy Metal contained a series of interconnected tales involving his grade school years, his growing interest in art and shop. His first failure in any class ever, Driver’s Ed. Evidently he had to take his driving test in a school bus. These were stories I’d never known before.
Neal Adams’ Batman told tales of our late nights playing poker with Monopoly money, struggling through the 221B Baker Street boardgame. An extra story, nestled toward the end of the comic, showed my father leaning over his ledgers, crying, trying to deduce the name of a villain, any villain, touching each red number, real money spent on my mom.
Jack Kirby’s Machine Man illustrated the work my dad did in Nichols Hills for years. The beautiful inlays and woodwork he created. All the terrible people who didn’t appreciate it.
Ms. Marvel explored the night he tried to get my mother back, offering to return her diamond property. The epilogue made it clear he failed to read the fine print.
The last comic I released from its polyurethane prison was a first issue of Epic Illustrated. I remembered this one from the Eighties. Full color, fine art, an attempt to steal the market from Heavy Metal.
The cover by Frank Frazetta didn’t connect in any way to the story of an Oklahoma boy who grew up poor and bright and talented, a boy who gave up his dreams for family, who collected comics and tried to pass that love on to his only son, who came to his son’s plays but wanted more for his legacy’s legacy, who, before the marriage and kids and eventual divorce, before the exile to Arizona and a rocky return, before the disillusionment and despair, before years of living alone and the seemingly arbitrary death sentence of Alzheimer’s, one Christmas morning, when he was five, got the one thing he had asked for from his dad…an eraser.
No, the cover, a grey-scale tableau of Roman soldiers bestriding a cliff, didn’t seem to signify that tiny, povertyplagued man who was — is — my father. But the story inside moved me to tears, dredging up the previous morning’s memory, a memory decidedly not comic, the memory I’d tried to avoid all day, all night. The memory of a phone call in whose service I wrecked my car.