It was the most beautiful poster he’d ever seen in his life. He held it out in front of him, drinking it all in. He couldn’t believe how fantastic the artwork looked blown up to this huge size; the violent scene had originally appeared as a comic book cover back in the early fifties, and blown up to a 22” by 28” poster, and in full-blooded color yet, was some trip. Almost reluctantly he allowed the poster to roll itself back up, and he tossed it on his as yet unmade bed, to be put up on the wall later that day.
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
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.
