A Hundred Thousand Worlds (6 page)

T
rying to decide if it makes her feel more like a waitress or more like one of the boys, Gail maneuvers her way to the table holding their beers above her head. She’s known Geoff and Ed since her blogging days, and both of them have regularly praised the hell out of her work, but it’s tough not to feel like their little sister. Not to imagine herself judged by how different, how lacking, she is physically, compared with the anatomically ideal women they all write. When she went to her first con as a fan, she’d played at dressing sexy, but she’d nearly been tossed by security for giving, let’s say, an enthusiastic lecture to a group of college-age boys who took a break from catcalling a woman dressed as the Minx long enough to offer Gail dieting advice. Now she sports the same worn jeans and Northwestern University hoodie she wears while writing. Her outfit for tomorrow is a variation on the same. The winning move is not to play.

She carefully sets the beers on the table. Ed predictably tips his fedora, and Geoff thanks her and raises his glass to cheers the three of them.

“So have you had offers?” Gail asks Geoff, picking up the conversation where it left off.

“Are we talking about this?” Ed says. His voice is rapid and gruff, and very few people in the industry other than Gail know it’s not natural. When Ed got his start writing fill-in issues of
GigaDroids,
a comic derived from a cartoon show derived from a toy line, he was spunky and spoke in the ringing tones you would expect from someone who’d been in his college’s glee club, which, although he’d never admit it to anyone, Ed had. She’d interviewed him by phone back then, holding the receiver
away from her ear to buffer the treble. But when he’d made his major breakthrough with the detective series
Cleave,
which followed the investigation into the murder of a minor National Comics superhero, he’d taken on a public persona inspired by Dashiell Hammett, and now that he’d taken over
Red Emma
at Timely and been hailed as the founder of the “New Grit” aesthetic by PanelAddict.com, his private-dick act, which included the fedora and a pack of Lucky Strikes poking carefully out from the pocket of his vintage shirt, had become dominant. “I was under the impression we had agreed we were not talking about this.”

“So you’ve had offers,” Gail says. Ed’s currently writing three monthly books for Timely. Only
Red Emma
’s in the top twenty, but all three have “vocal fans,” meaning fans who spend a lot of time commenting on the Internet and would be likely to make an editor’s life unpleasant if any of the books were to get canceled. Geoff writes two titles for National and consults on four others, while remaining tight-lipped as to what it means to consult. Or what it pays.

Gail’s situation is a little dicier. For three years, she’s been writing
The Speck & Iota
. Thinking about it, she’s written a whole lot of
The Speck & Iota
. Twenty pages a month for thirty-six months, for a total of seven hundred twenty pages about a pair of scientists who can shrink down to the size of dust motes. That’s a Tolstoy kind of page count. And she could have done more.

Gail hasn’t told either of them that National is moving her off
The Speck & Iota
in three months. “On to bigger and better things,” her editor quipped, his desiccated sense of humor explaining how so many of Gail’s best jokes end up butchered before they make it into print. They didn’t tell her where she’d land, but she was given three issues to wrap up the storylines she’s been working on so the title can be handed off.

“I don’t think I could jump,” says Geoff.

“Don’t start,” says Gail, “You could write for anybody.” Before she was hired at National, Gail ran a feminist and sometimes misandrist website called BrainsOverBreasts.com. In the comments sections, Geoff would
add to her teardowns of a particular comic by pointing out continuity errors, moments when a story contradicted a story published ten, twenty years ago. National had originally hired him as a kind of fact-checker before giving him a tryout on
The Galactioneer,
about a dashing space pirate who’d appeared in one issue of
OuterMan
in 1978. Back then, Geoff and Gail would run into each other in hotel bars like this at small-time conventions like this and compare the day’s haul of autographs and sketches. They even made out once, in Pittsburgh, one evening when Gail had enough beer to dip her toe back into the tepid pool of heterosexuality, but luckily it hadn’t gone any further than that. When she was toured around the National office in New York for the first time after she’d been hired, Geoff was hiding in the men’s room. She still likes to bring up “that time you took advantage of me,” to see him go sheepish.

“That’s not true,” Geoff says. “That’s not.
You
could. You’re more versatile than I am.”

“Less distinctive is what he’s saying,” she explains to Ed, who laughs grimly. Ed does many things grimly.

“You have a very distinctive style,” Geoff insists, a little too strenuously.

“Female is not a distinctive style,” says Gail.

“You bring a real compassion to your characters,” Geoff says.

“It’s my mothering impulse,” says Gail.

“So why couldn’t you write for Timely?” Ed asks Geoff. Ed has taken a cigarette from his pack and is using it to play a safer version of mumblety-peg, tapping it nimbly in the spaces between his fingers.

“
Couldn’t
might be strong,” Geoff admits. “I could.”

“Have you had offers?” Gail asks again.

“Can we admit,” Ed says, spreading his hands out to quiet them both, although Gail was the only one talking, “that we’ve all had offers? That we’ve all been flirted with by the competition at this point?”

No one responds, no one makes eye contact.

“Good,” says Ed. He turns his attention back to Geoff. “Now why can’t you come write for Timely? What about the Ferret? You love the Ferret.”
Each time he says “Ferret,” he reaches across the table and hits Geoff lightly on the shoulder. This kind of casual physical contact is one of the things that make Gail feel like an outsider. Out of a respect she’s never requested, very few male colleagues ever touch her in any way that isn’t formal and earnest, mostly hugs and handshakes.

“The universes work differently,” Geoff says.

“The universes?” asks Gail.

“Timely and National.”

“The universes work the way the writers write them,” says Ed, returning to his cigarette tapping.

“You say that, but it’s because you don’t have to worry about it,” says Geoff. “You do this street-level ass-kicking stuff and it doesn’t matter if it’s the mean streets of Metro City or the mean streets of New York.”

“Thank you,” says Ed, “for so elegantly belittling my work.”

“Who’s belittling?” says Geoff, throwing his arms outward. “I’m saying they work differently because they were built different. National publishes
OuterMan
in thirty-eight, but he’s alone for years, until they add OuterGirl, who’s basically OuterMan in a skirt. Early forties, National sues Stunning Comics for copyright infringement over Captain Wonder, then ends up owning Captain Wonder. Blue Torch, the Perfectional, and the Speck were all bought from Heston after the war, and ExSanguina and the Diviner were bought from Femme Fatale after the Senate obscenity hearings put them out of business in ’55. But none of the characters interacted until the late sixties, when they formed Vengeance Troop.”

“They fixed all that with
Conflux Across Timespace,
” says Gail.

“Have you guys ever read
Conflux
?” Geoff asks.

“No,” says Ed.

“I’ve read the wiki,” says Gail.
Conflux
was a twelve-issue series from the dawn of the eighties that featured every National character ever and a plot so convolutedly cosmic that even Gail, who loved all things intergalactic, had to put it down.

“It’s kind of brilliant,” Geoff says. “It’s so precise. But it incorporates everything. It fits all these stories together like a watch made out of scrap metal. And so it needs constant tending and adjustment. Retcons and explanations.”

“It’s true,” says Gail. “I spend at least one page each issue of
The Speck & Iota
trying to explain the crazy bullshit some other writer had them do a decade ago.”

“But Timely has a birth moment, and parents. Everything grows out of Brewer and Loeb creating the Astounding Family. The Astounding Family discovers the totem that gives the Ferret his powers. The Ferret discovers the Visigoth trapped in ice during a battle with the Wailing Wendigo, and Doctor Right uses the Visigoth’s DNA to create the R-Squad. Red Emma’s family is killed in a fight between the R-Squad and the Perilous Pentad, which starts her war on crime. The Timely Universe grows and accretes. Each writer adds to it, but they don’t have to fix what’s come before. They work with the universe; it’s an organism.”

“You’re romanticizing,” Ed tells him, “with your mechanisms and organisms. You’re talking about two massive corporations, neither of which give two shits about how their little comic book universes operate as long as they have characters to put into movies and on T-shirts.”

“Red Emma’s not in any movies,” says Geoff, “and you’re still outselling me on
OuterMan
and
The Blue Torch
.”

“Why is a man writing
Red Emma
anyway?” asks Gail. Most female characters have male writers, but it’s always offended Gail that
Red Emma
, which is as close as the industry comes to portraying an ass-kicking lesbian, even if they never admit it, is written by a Sam Spade impersonator.

“It’s due to my lack of compassion,” Ed says.

“It’s due to
my
lack of a cock,” Gail says. “Which is why, incidentally, I have not had offers.”

“You’re shitting me,” says Ed, banging his beer on the table for emphasis.

“Why would you leave anyway?” asks Geoff, sounding a little hurt.
Geoff is old enough to have been in the wars, the old days when National fans hated all things Timely and vice versa. It’s a partisanship he’s never shaken off.

“I don’t
want
to leave,” says Gail.

“I can’t believe they haven’t made an offer,” says Ed.

“Besides which,” she continues, making sure to sound like all of this is theoretical, “what if National decides they don’t want me anymore? That I don’t understand how the universe works? I’m back working full-time creator-owned—
if
I can get somebody to publish it.”

“You working on ideas of your own?” Geoff asks.

“I like to think all my ideas are my own,” says Gail. Creator-owned work holds a weird place of reverence among the three of them. Steady superhero work pays more reliably and affords a comfortable living, not to mention that all three of them are established enough to have a certain amount of creative freedom in their work. But they are playing with someone else’s toys. The rarity of a successful creator-owned project is daunting, and the path is littered with bodies, but at the end of the path: complete creative control, complete rights. Gail talks about it as if she’s equating it with financial ruin, but part of her hopes she might be forced off that cliff, might begin to float midfall.

“I bet by the end of con season,” Ed says to her, “Timely offers you a book.”

“Maybe they’ll offer me
Red Emma,
” she says, grinning maliciously at him.

“We could cowrite an arc,” he suggests.

“I would destroy you with my skills,” Gail says, waving at him dismissively.

“He would drink you under at every story meeting,” Geoff says. Ed looks directly at him as he finishes his beer, then turns back to Gail.

“By Los Angeles,” he says, “Timely offers you a book.”

“You putting the word in with Weinrobe?” she asks. Gail has never attempted contact with Philip Weinrobe, Timely’s editor in chief. He has a
reputation for being preternaturally nice, and is loved by everyone who works for him. But none of that changes the fact that he took over Timely when it was in bankruptcy in the mid-nineties with the expectation he’d oversee the demise of the Timely Universe, selling off its intellectual properties and bringing the publishing side of things to an end. Instead, he managed to bring a long-standing court case between Timely and Levi Loeb to a favorable conclusion, then set to clearing out all the dead weight, guys who’d been hacks in the seventies but had kept steadily churning out rehashed plots as long as they pulled a paycheck. He headhunted young talent, he declared that nothing was sacred. And he turned Timely, which had in its stable some of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world but was squandering them, into the top publisher in the industry.

“You want a word in,” says Ed, “I’ll put a word in. Who do you want to write?”

“Tell him we should change the Ferret into a woman and I’ll write her,” says Gail.

“Ferret’s in movie development,” Geoff says, always aware of various characters’ licensing statuses. “They’ll never let you gender-bend him.” Here, a rule of comic book writing: the more money a character is worth as a property, the less the writer is allowed to deviate from that character’s status quo or core concept. All three of them are, in a way, blessed that none of the characters under their current control are being considered for Hollywood treatment.

“Who
will
they let me gender-bend?” Gail asks.

“You can gender-bend me any day of the week,” Ed says, leaning in and fixing her with his best fanboy leer.

“There’s not enough compassion in all of Metro City for me to mercy-fuck you, dear,” Gail says, and dusts off her beer.

T
he book is too good to put down for something as minor as food, so Alex sits cross-legged on the floor and devours the last chapter of
Adam Anti & the Wild Wild Life
simultaneously with a small bucket of microgreens.

When it’s over, he slams the book shut, which is one of his favorite things to do. He prefers hardcover books for this reason; although they are bulkier and harder to carry around, they make a much more satisfying noise when slammed.

“I’m done,” he says proudly. He gives his mother a huge, toothy grin. Bits of microgreens have filled every possible space between his teeth, and she makes a disgusted face.

“Oh my God, go brush right now,” she says, laughing. Alex rushes to the bathroom and makes the same face at himself in the mirror he’s made for his mother. He looks like a hideous monster that lives at the bottom of the sea. It’s one of the main reasons to eat microgreens, although it doesn’t work unless you eat them in huge, chomping mouthfuls. His mother, he knows, has been expert at using disgusting biological quirks to get him to eat things most kids find repellent. He eats asparagus because it makes his pee smell funny, beets because they make him poop red, and microgreens because they make him look like a hideous monster that lives at the bottom of the sea. Alex vigorously brushes his teeth and watches the lime-colored spit, thick with chunks, swirl down the drain.

“So tell me about your day,” his mom says as he comes back into the room and starts putting on pajamas. It’s a silly request, since he’s spent
most of the day rocking back and forth on the folding chair next to hers or sitting on the floor against the wall, writing in his notebook.

He shrugs. “I finished my book,” he says. He thinks about showing her the picture Brett drew for him, but he worries about trying to tell her the beginning of a story when he doesn’t know the rest. He wants to wait and share it with her when it’s done.

“Nothing exciting?” she asks. He shrugs again and jumps onto her bed. “What do you think you’re doing?” she says.

“Cuddling with you,” he says, wedging himself under her arm.

“What if I wanted to read?” she asks. This is a silly question, because the whole time he’s been reading, she hasn’t picked up her book. He can’t blame her: it doesn’t look very interesting. It’s very long, and it’s a history of dancing. Not fun dancing, but theater dancing. It has a ballerina on the cover, and even she doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.

“I don’t think it would be very fair,” he says, “for you to read when I don’t have a book.”

“So I should stare off into space until you fall asleep?” She’s basically been staring into space for the past twenty minutes, so he can’t imagine why she’s upset about it all of a sudden.

“You should tell me a story,” he says, wriggling in, resting his head on her stomach so that her breath lifts and lowers it.

“What season do you want?” she asks.

“When do Frazer and Campbell become friends?” asks Alex. His meeting with Brett earlier has him thinking about friendship, about how it can be a process or a becoming. He has friends in New York, but it just happens. Put two kids in a room, or in a park, and they’re friends right away. Sometimes his mother will take him to a playground and say, “Go make friends,” and it’s that easy. At least it was when he was littler, but that, like everything else, was bound to change.

“Season two,” she says. “They were friends in season two.”

“Then that’s what I want,” he says. She sighs, as if she’s about to do something difficult, and Alex focuses his attention on her voice.