Max turned, climbed across the rubble, and ran toward the jeep. Everything outside the building was as it had been in his world.
Fukai led the way, and as cherry blossoms rained down upon them, Noriko’s children welcomed her home.
Michael Scott Bricker has been writing and dealing antiques for most of his life. His passion for history is usually reflected in his writing, and his stories often take place in various historical time periods. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Borderlands 7, and Blood Muse. His first professional sale was to the anthology Young Blood, a book comprised of stories that were written before the authors turned thirty. The majority of his working career has involved books, and he has been employed by numerous bookstores and libraries in California, which has been interrupted by unfortunate office jobs that have ended abruptly whenever a supervisor would ask him to cut his hair. He obsessively collects and attempts to repair antique phonographs in his free time.
Mope Not for the Mighty
Michael Nethercott
In August 1965, my first copy of Prince Robozz and his Nuts-n-Bolts Brigade appeared to me like a vision on the comics rack at Smeckle’s, a rundown five-and-dime that mostly sold dust. This was issue #59, so by then the Brigade had been saving humanity’s hiney for nigh on half a decade. But for me, on that pivotal day, the Prince and his team were fresh, fantastic and intellectually seductive. I dropped twelve pennies into the cup of wrinkles that was Mr. Smeckle’s ancient palm and marched off with my prize.
Now, it’s not that I had never read a comic book before. After all, I was pushing ten—I’d been around the block. I had sampled a few issues of Fist Man, Rhino Woman, The Living Lump, and various other offerings of the superhero smorgasbord, but none of them had truly won me over. The cover of Prince Robozz #59, however, all but cried out my name. There stood the regal wrong-righter, natty in his metallic body armor and purple hood, pounding the daylights out of Dr. Sunset, his nemesis of the month. Everything you’d want from a professional crimebuster. But what really quickened my pulse was the caliber of his cronies. These were guys you’d want in your foxhole, anywhere, anytime.
As depicted on #59’s cover, they come rushing in from all sides, the Prince’s faithful quartet, clearly rabid to assist in the bad doctor’s pummeling. As I would learn in that first educational reading, Sprocket, Screw-loose, Lugnuts, and the gorgeous Gear Girl (collectively, the Nuts-n-Bolts Brigade,) were robots that the Prince had scientifically infused with the souls of four dead space warriors. Nifty or what? Being a fairly solitary kid, whose family moved around a lot, I couldn’t claim much by way of long-term friendships, so the idea of a group of powerful pals always watching your back had tremendous appeal.
In the manner of all addictions, #59 led to #60, which led to #61, which led to an uninterrupted run all the way to Prince Robozz #99 (including, of course, the two Christmas specials in which the Prince fights, respectively, Black Sugarplum and Frosto the Snow Madman). I even managed to make my mark by having an epistle of mine appear in issue #92’s letter column.
“The Brigade’s rematch with the Cruelty Corps was groovy,” I opined in the lingo of the time. “But I do have two complaints. One: on page twelve, panel three, Lugnut’s loincloth is colored green instead of yellow. Two: The guest appearance of Baron Bazooka was not needed. If the Prince gets in a real bind, he always has the Nuts-n-Boltsers to save his fat. Throwing in a superhero from another comic is just plain exorbitant.”
Exorbitant. I had dragged that last word screaming and kicking out of Roget’s Thesaurus. Though I didn’t know what it meant exactly, it seemed to have enough syllables to adequately express my disdain. Baron Bazooka and all those other second-raters had no place on Prince Robozz’s turf. I was a purist that way. Having to bring in other heroes to defeat your archenemies was like asking your Mom to help you face down the school bully.
I ended my letter with the observation that “Gear Girl is one alluring alloy! The Prince should ask her out or something.” Despite my sophisticated suggestion, no man-and-machine coupling ever came to pass. It’s probably just as well.
Excluding the random unwanted guest-star, I was more than delighted with the escapades of my champions. The Prince and his mighty team had traveled all the way from their home world Quarzzox to protect the feebler denizens of Planet Earth. I was immensely grateful that, for a measly twelve cents a month, I could keep track of their valiant workload. Beyond those chronicled accounts, I fantasized other equally grand adventures which included the Brigade’s only acceptable ally—me.
But then everything ground to a halt with the devastating announcement on the last page of Prince Robozz #99 that this would be the final issue of the title. The Prince’s publishing company—Sci Fi Funnies—was changing its name to Sci Fab Fiction, Inc. and would henceforth be replacing its comics line with a series of “pop art” speculative novels featuring “mod, marv space-hipsters battling intergalactic bummers.”
In many ways, my innocence died with Prince Robozz and his Nuts-n-Bolts Brigade #99. For months before, the letters column had teased us fans that the much-anticipated 100th issue would be “a double-sized extravaganza packed with thrills, chills, and more villains than you can shake a Quarzzoxian laser-spear at.” But #100 never came. Couldn’t they have at least allowed Prince and the Brigade to go out in that one last promised blaze of glory?
But no, but no. The editors had lied. Grown-ups lied. The president lied. This was the winter of 1968. Vietnam. Rebellion. Martyred leaders. I was thirteen. Through the pangs of disillusionment, I berated myself: thirteen was damn well old enough to stop reading stupid kiddy books. In a blur of hot tears, I tossed my forty-one issues of Prince Robozz into the trash and forced myself to forget my heroes.
Jump ahead more than two decades. I’d left comic books behind and put together the usual string of life experiences: high school, college, career, marriage, dalliance with my wife’s cousin, divorce, second marriage, dalliance with my second wife’s aunt, divorce number two—followed by a big double-sized extravaganza of a mid-life crisis.
In one of many attempts to bolster my flagging spirit, I attended a pricey New Age seminar entitled “Hugging, Healing and Hurling Your Inner Child.” There I was encouraged to embrace the small lost boy within, exonerate him of any guilt, and then fling his self-pitying little ass out of my psyche. Actually, I never quite mastered the technique, but something unexpected did come of the seminar. During an exercise in which we were instructed to close our eyes and visualize a moment of pure childhood joy, what should pop into my head but that first beautiful copy of Prince Robozz, gleaming like a sequestered jewel in the dusty tomb of Smeckle’s Five-and-Dime.
Several days later, on impulse, I sought out a comics specialty shop in a neighboring town. By the twitchy manner in which I entered the place, one might have thought that I’d come in search of hard porn. The clerk, a round thirtyish fellow with a frizzy orange chin beard, sauntered over to me. He wore a tee shirt bearing the words, “Proud Fungus”—which I guessed was either the name of a punk band or a strident declaration of lifestyle. Though I could not know it at the time, this character—one Chester Prutzman—was destined to become my friend and ally.
He sized me up with a look that mingled bemusement with disgust: clearly, I was slumming here. I mumbled my desire, and he vanished into a backroom for several minutes before returning with a small stack of comics. He spread these out on a table, and I caught my breath. Here, snug in their protective polypropylene bags, lay thirteen issues of Prince Robozz, including the visualized #59 as well as the heart-breaking #99. After a gap of twenty years, the Prince, Gear Girl, and the others stared up at me boldly in all their multi-colored splendor. I imagined, for a fleeting moment, that they were forgiving me for that long-ago abandonment.
Then Chester told me the price, and I nearly soiled myself.
My shock made his day. He snickered, “Hey, man, you can’t put
a price tag on history.” (Though he just had—a whopping one.) “Prince Robozz is pretty much the only Silver Age hero who’s never been reissued, revamped, or revitalized. He hit the wall in ‘68 and, splat, that was that. Robozz is like a frickin’ prehistoric insect preserved in amber.”
Succumbing to this primal image, I hauled out my checkbook and welcomed the Prince and his clan back into my life. After that initial purchase, I found myself on a mission to acquire the rest of the ninety-nine book run. Over the course of that next year, I managed—with Chester Prutzman’s help—to hunt down and obtain sixty more issues. Even after he lost his job at the shop (due to an incident in which he labeled the owner a “brain-dead gonad” for ceasing to carry the underground comic Cannibal Nurse,) Chester continued to aid and abet me.
After that first successful stretch, my purchasing slowed down considerably. It was getting harder to track down the Prince’s old adventures, especially the earlier issues which I had never read. Still, I persevered and after a couple more years, I owned almost the whole series—ninety-eight out of ninety-nine comics. Only the premier issue had eluded me.
“Hell, you’ll never find that one,” Chester assured me one night as we sat in his tiny apartment trading shots of tequila. “It’s the only issue that was written and drawn by George Vanderpool, himself.”
“The man who created Prince Robozz,” I added. Chester had tutored me well.
“Yep.” My friend nodded. “Ol’ George died in a boating accident a week after Robozz #1 hit the stands and, from issue two on, a bunch of different people took turns on the series. #1 had a very small printing, and only three copies of it are still known to exist. And frickin Karleen Mopps owns ‘em all.”
Karleen Mopps. Her name invariably came up in any discussion of high-stakes comics collecting. In a field dominated by younger men, Mopps, a woman in her seventies, was an anomaly. Having gotten in on the ground floor years before collecting became an industry, she had built up a small fortune buying and selling complete runs of the most sought-after series. She reputedly lived the life of a wealthy recluse in an old mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“Maybe Karleen Mopps would consider selling me one of her copies,” I mused aloud. “After all, she doesn’t need all three.”
Chester looked at me as if I’d just stated my intention to swallow a piano. “Dream on, nimrod. Once Moppsy’s got her claws in something legendary like the Robozz #1 trifecta, she ain’t never gonna let go. Besides, you’d have to sell your lungs to even afford a copy.”
This reality check left me feeling morose. But after a few more doses of tequila, I woozily shifted my thoughts toward matters of philosophy: “Why d’you think they’re called the Nuts-n-Bolts Brigade? I mean, there’s only four of ’em, right? Five, if you count the Prince. Can five be a brigade? That always bothered me. Now, maybe if they said Squad …”
Our conversation deteriorated from there, ending, I recall, in a heated debate on the aforementioned Baron Bazooka. Chester championed that uninspiring hero, going so far as to suggest that he was Prince Robozz’s equal or even—blasphemy of blasphemies—his superior.
“Are you insane?” I cried out. “Everyone knows a prince outranks a baron!”
“We’re talking quality, not royalty,” Chester countered. “Hey man, Baron Bazooka is the bomb!”
“Jesus!” I corked the bottle before our friendship could dissolve into fisticuffs. “Enough fire-juice for you.”
Sometimes a miracle will just leap out of nowhere and slap you in the jowls.
Not long after that tequila-drenched night, I was enjoying a leisurely ride in the country and stopped at a yard sale down a winding back road. A very elderly man behind a row of cluttered tables gestured toward his wares and declared, “Make an offer.” I scanned the pickings and determined quickly that there was little there but junk and knickknacks. I had just started to leave when I noticed something colorful peeking out from under a pile of old Reader’s Digests. I pulled this item free and held it in both hands. At that moment I forgot how to breathe. For some time, I stood there, my eyes welded to the cover.
The old man noted my interest. “Oh yeah, I got a couple of those old funny books mixed in there. Left over from when my sons were little.”
“How much?” I croaked out.
“Well, those things are worth something these days, aren’t they? Would you do, say, five dollars?”
I nodded. Just nodded. And placed a five-dollar bill into his ancient palm.
That evening, with Chester by my side, I oh-so-slowly turned to the splash page of Prince Robozz and his Nuts-n-Bolts Brigade # 1.
“Bro,” said Chester in a reverential whisper. “Today, the geek gods were looking down on you for sure.”
We marveled at my luck. The comic was in certifiable good condition—a little creased and stained, plus a couple small tears on the cover, but thoroughly intact. We read the book in silence, cover to cover.
When we’d finished, Chester let out a resounding “Whoa!”
“Whoa,” I echoed.
“They were actually bad guys!”
“What do you—?”
“Robozz and the Brigade! They came to our world as invaders! They fried dozens of innocent people with their laser-spears—it says so here!”
Unfathomably, what he said was true, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it. “No, no, they became our defenders.”
“Are you in frickin denial?” Chester pointed at the opened comic. “Look, in the last panel here, they vow to not rest till they’ve conquered Earth! Sure, they battled crime starting in issue 2, but that was written after George Vanderpool died. Sci Fi Funnies must have decided to sanitize the book and told the new writers to put Robozz on the straight-and-narrow. Had Vanderpool lived, chances are the Prince would have gone Mussolini on us.”
I could offer no rebuttal. The terrible truth lay sprawled open on my coffee table: my childhood heroes had been created to be enemies of humanity. Before he left my house, I made Chester promise to keep mum about my new acquisition. He agreed without an argument.
Two days later, I got a phone call from none other than Karleen Mopps.
“I understand you possess an inaugural issue of Prince Robozz,” she said in her creaky Katherine Hepburn accent.
“How did you hear about that?”
“Ah, you know, information travels like a hummingbird in the collecting community. I wish to purchase your copy—for an appropriate fee, of course.”
“I don’t wish to sell,” I informed her.
“A more than appropriate fee.”
“No.”
A touch of ice came into her voice. “Very well. Then at least come visit me so that we can compare copies. I assure you I’ll make it worth your while.”
I fell silent for a few moments. The idea of viewing Karleen Mopps’s fabled collection was certainly enticing. As long as I didn’t part with my P.R. #1, what was the harm? I accepted her offer to come by that weekend. She promised to send a limousine for me.
When I saw Chester the next day, he managed within minutes to get me to forgive his loose lips and, additionally, to weasel his way into my planned journey. The weekend came around and a long, sleek limo arrived as promised. Our chauffeur was a lanky, skittish individual with a facial tick who kept grinning at us in the rearview mirror and exclaiming, “See? I’m a good driver, aren’t I?”
Eventually, we found ourselves on the doorstep of Karleen Mopps’ antique mansion. I had worn a suit and tie for the occasion; Chester had chosen a spiffy ensemble consisting of camouflaged army pants and a tee shirt announcing, “I Brake for Social Lepers.” The door was opened by a tall, angular old woman in a velvet dressing gown, with a cascade of pure white hair and a distinct air of haughtiness. Our hostess.
She appraised us as if through a microscope. “My, aren’t you the unique pairing. Enter.”
We followed Karleen Mopps through a series of sizable rooms, all filled with glass display cases b
rimming with comic books.
Chester pinballed from case to case. “Jesus! She’s got six copies of Rampaging Walrus #3—the first appearance of Killer Minnow! And look! The complete run of Captain Biceps! And Madame Mad-dog! And, holy crap! here’s The Plaid Stallion #18—the one where Saddle Lad dies!”
“Come along,” Karleen Mopps ordered. “There’s time for that later. Besides, those books are here merely for financial purposes. My true passion is Prince Robozz.”
We came at last to a large room unlike any of the others. Here there were no comic books on display. Instead, every wall was lined with desktop computers, television monitors and a vast array of complex-looking equipment, the function of which I couldn’t begin to guess at. Standing to one side, two very big men in white slacks and turtlenecks awaited us. Once we’d entered the room, the quirky chauffeur, who had been trailing us, stepped in and closed the massive oak doors behind him.
As we reached the center of the space, the three men moved in to flank Chester and myself. Mopps stood before us, her thin lips squeezed into a small, unsavory smile. She pointed a bony finger at the briefcase in my hand, which contained my copy of Prince Robozz #1.
“I’ll claim that now.”
With something akin to a paternal impulse, I clutched the briefcase to my chest. “Remember, I only said you could look at it.”
“Oh, I’ll look at it, all right,” she cooed. “And then I’ll destroy it.”
Chester aimed his own stubby finger at Mopps. “Back off, mummy lady! No one said you could—”
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