It’s the inks.
You look at the four pages and the ink work jumps out at you, black lines flowing over mediocre pencils with an almost magical, mesmerizing gloss. Get too close and the broad, powerful strokes draw you in like a fish, make you forget where you are and what you’re doing until your nose is right up against the paper and you snap out of it, the spell broken.
It’s only at that moment that people understand where I get the nerve, asking them to pay me $1,000 for four pages of a comic book that never made it into print, pages that were written, drawn, and inked by a writer/artist whose name is only vaguely familiar to them, if it’s familiar to them at all. Before then, when their first impression of the clumsy, anatomically incorrect artwork and third-grade dialogue almost has them walking away without hearing my pitch, they think I’m crazy—$250 a page for this drivel? There’s original artwork of a higher, more professional caliber to be found at every third booth at the Con, and at far more reasonable prices.
But then the ink work sinks its teeth into them, without their even knowing it, and they start asking questions. They want to know more about the pages—the who, the what, and the why—not so much because they’re interested in buying, but because they know there must be a story behind them. A story that will help them understand how comic book artwork, so ordinary otherwise, could have such a paralyzing effect upon them.
So I tell them the story, the way it was told to me.
It was Ken Fenderson’s first Comic-Con and he was hoping to God it would be his last. He wasn’t a comic book person. Far from it. He considered himself above such foolishness, costumed superheroes and flimsy, shorthand fantasy stories told with pictures. Fenderson was a writer, not a clown or a child, and he took his work as seriously as a bomb squad tech took his. But comic books were where it was at, the very eye of the latest Hollywood storm where every multimedia and merchandising deal worth a paragraph in the trades was forged, and hell if Ken Fenderson wasn’t going to make a spot for himself at the feeding trough. Fenderson was nothing if not an avid follower of the The Money, wherever it chose to lead.
So here he was in San Diego on this weekend in July, bouncing off and among the freaks and geeks filling every square inch of the San Diego Convention Center like plaque clogging an artery. Spandex in a rainbow of colors was everywhere, taut as a second skin here, as loose as a rumpled bedsheet there, and almost invariably in the service of a body that nobody on a full stomach would have wanted to set eyes upon. Fat Batmen and hairy Wonder Women, bald Wolverines and impish Captain Americas, and hundreds of other, pathetically rendered costumed superheroes and sci-fi movie characters of unrecognizable origin. It was like a madhouse for retired circus performers, a hot and sweaty rodeo corral teeming with nutjobs whose minds had never advanced beyond the age of eleven.
Fenderson was appalled. It was all he could do to keep his breakfast down. This fiasco happened once a year in this place? This gigantic, eight-block long, landlocked cruise ship on Harbor Drive they called a convention center? How was such a thing possible? And what the fuck had happened to San Diego?
Fenderson had no use for the city, he’d been living in Los Angeles ever since his father moved the family there from St. Louis over thirty years ago, but he’d been here once or twice back in the early ’80s when you could still get a thirty-nine cent beer down in Tijuana. Back then, L.A.’s “sister city” was a pit as far as Fenderson was concerned, a navy boomtown way past the boom, as old and slow and lifeless as a Mormon bingo party.
But now? Jesus H. Christ, downtown San Diego looked like Vegas crammed into a mason jar. The nautical-themed convention center anchoring the old navy yard was just the tip of a redevelopment iceberg that had apparently run amok, surrounded as it was by new restaurants and hotels, shops and cafés, and—most incredible of all—a goddamn baseball stadium, PETCO Park, sitting smack dab in the middle of the Gaslamp Quarter like something a tornado had uprooted from the suburbs and dropped from the sky.
Fenderson couldn’t have felt more disoriented were he hanging upside down on a float at the Doo Dah Parade.
But business was business, and business today was here at Comic-Con in San Diego. Distractions aside, Fenderson had to focus and look for what he’d paid a ticket scalper the preposterous fee of $100 to find among all these funny book-obsessed weirdos: a great illustrator willing to work on the cheap.
For all his talent and ingenuity, after fifteen years of trying, Fenderson had yet to make it big as a writer, either of crime novels or screenplays, and he was at his wits end, attempting to figure out why. It surely had nothing to do with the work itself; compared to the crap some name authors were getting paid six figures or more a book to churn out, Fenderson knew his stuff was as good or better than anyone’s. His premises were startlingly original, his characters were unforgettable, and his dialogue crackled with realism.
He knew all this because some of his best drinking buddies in the business—who had no reason to lie to him, right?—had often told him so, and the host of the public television show Bebe’s Bookshelf gave his last book, Murderer, a rave review. So his problem, as near as Fenderson could tell, could only be chalked up to one thing: timing. He was simply in the habit of missing the crest of the wave.
It was an error he was determined to correct immediately. This time, he was going to be ahead of the curve, and the curve at present led directly to the graphic novel. Glorified, oversized comic books with hardback covers—that was what everyone was buying, especially the suits in Hollywood. You wrote the right graphic novel, big-dollar option deals were almost certain to follow. The fan boys in the movie business couldn’t get enough, and there seemed to be no end in sight to all the money they were willing to throw around in search of the next Hellboy franchise or Watchmen blockbuster.
Fenderson didn’t know Hellboy from Superboy, but he knew a gravy train when he saw one, and he’d driven down to San Diego for the express purpose of hitching a ride on this one. He had the “novel” part of his graphic novel already in hand—typical of his ability to produce amazing work in a short period of time, he’d written the 400-page manuscript in less than a month—and now all he needed was an artist to illustrate the ten-page proposal he’d put together. He’d done enough research to know that no editor would glance at five pages of his book without illustrations, so an artist was a must. Preferably, someone extremely talented, desperate for a break, and dumb enough to do the job for free, based on Fenderson’s bullshit promises of a big payday on the back end. Gullible, that was the word. He needed a brilliant artist who was also gullible.
He couldn’t imagine he’d have much trouble finding such a geek in this room; pimple-faced kids dragging portfolio cases bursting with artwork from one booth to the next were everywhere. Some were in costume, more just wore geeky T-shirts, but they all looked ripe for the picking. All Fenderson had to do was find one who could actually do professional-grade work, then give him the big pitch: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collaborate with one of the most critically acclaimed authors in crime fiction on a graphic novel project that editors and movie producers were already lining up to see. Who the hell could say no to that?
Fenderson roamed the halls for two hours, peeking over shoulders, eavesdropping on conversations, taking his sweet time. He wanted to get this right, and it would be all too easy to make a mistake in light of his inexperience in such matters. Having as little interest in comic books as he did, all the artwork on display at the Con pretty much looked the same to him. The godawful stuff was fairly obvious, but everything else struck him as equally juvenile and absurd. His contempt for the entire medium made it difficult for him to view the work of the artists in attendance with anything approaching a critical eye.
But then he saw the fattest Luke Skywalker he’d ever laid eyes on showing a stack of large black-and-white pages to a mildly attentive fanzine publisher, and he thought he had his man. Chubby wore a five o’clock shadow and was dressed as if for a blind da
te on Tatooine, but the artwork he was flashing with obvious pride had a noirish power to it that even Fenderson couldn’t miss. Fenderson waited for his conversation with the publisher to peter out, being jostled on all sides as he did so by cardboard-clad Stormtroopers and video game characters swathed in felt and Velcro, then moved in on him as he started to walk away, a shark chasing fresh blood in the water.
“Ken Fenderson?”
Fenderson spun around at the sound of his name, startled. Fat Luke slipped off the hook and disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd.
The young woman who had called out to him did not look familiar. He made a point of forgetting homely girls as soon as he met them, and this one, at first glance, was as homely as they got: lifeless, shoulder-length black hair, zero makeup, and the posture of a plow horse, all wrapped up in the standard uniform of a violin teacher.
“Yes?” Fenderson said warily.
She showed him a small smile he could not quite read. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Had she been a looker, a lie would have been called for. But for this sad sister, the truth was good enough. “No, frankly, I don’t.”
She offered the odd smile again. “Jennifer Alcott. I was a student of yours once. ‘Writing the Can’t-Miss Screenplay,’ class of winter ’96.”
Oh shit, Fenderson thought. One of those.
For two years, back in the mid-’90s, he had taught a beginner’s screenwriting class at the Learning Bridge, a low-rent extension-course outfit in the San Fernando Valley that no longer existed. The pay had been shit and the students had been worse, retirees and wannabes from all walks of life who laughingly thought they had the chops to become the next big A-list Hollywood scribe. None of them could write their way out of a paper bag, and it was all Fenderson could do to read their stuff week after week without retching all over the page.
“Oh. Hey,” Fenderson said. The name Jennifer Alcott rang a very dim bell, but the face meant nothing to him.
“It’s such a surprise to see you. What are you doing here?” Alcott asked, not appearing to be pleasantly surprised at all.
“Actually, I’m looking for an artist. For a graphic novel I’m doing for Dark Horse.” He’d read somewhere that Dark Horse was one of the top publishers in the graphic novel arena, and implying he already had a deal in place there was a lie he was prepared to tell at the Con all weekend long.
“An artist? Really.” Fenderson thought she would flash that bizarre smile of hers again, but this time all she did was nod. “Well, what a coincidence.”
“Coincidence?”
“That’s what I am now. A comics illustrator.” She gestured with the portfolio under her right arm, bringing his attention to it for the first time.
“No kidding,” Fenderson said, searching for the nearest exit. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Alcott had to be as lousy an illustrator as she had been a screenwriter, even if he couldn’t remember, exactly, just how lousy a screenwriter she was.
“Maybe you’d like to see my work.”
“Uh …”
“Just for old times’ sake? You never know. I might be exactly what you’re looking for.”
Fenderson figured there was zero chance of that, yet he couldn’t bring himself to blow Alcott off. It bothered him that she was such a blank page to him; her name was familiar, so why wasn’t her face?
“Well, okay,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Here?” Alcott looked around, scrunching up her nose at all the bodies flying by them. “I’d rather we found a place to sit down. Maybe have some tea or something.”
Tea. Right, Fenderson thought. “Okay. But finding a seat in this zoo—”
“Not here at the Con. Somewhere else. I’ll drive, if you want. I know just the place.”
Fenderson couldn’t imagine why he should go anywhere with this cow. He tried to retreat. “Gee, I don’t know, Jen. I’ve got a couple of meetings to take later, I wouldn’t want to be late.”
“I understand. You don’t want to waste your time on somebody who can’t deliver the goods. And all you’ve got so far is my word that my stuff’s decent, right?”
That was exactly what Fenderson was thinking. “No, no. It’s just …”
“Here. I’ll give you a small peek.” She unzipped a corner of her portfolio and peeled it open for him.
Fenderson leaned in, squinting. What he could see of the artwork inside was pretty damn impressive: crisp, bold, even slightly cinematic. It wasn’t as dynamic as the stuff the big man in the Luke Skywalker outfit had been hawking earlier, but it was close. Maybe even close enough.
“Not bad, huh?” Alcott said. “Some people tell me that my work reminds them of Jack Kirby.”
Fenderson had no clue who Jack Kirby was, but if he could draw like Jennifer Alcott apparently could, he’d probably go far in the comics business.
“So,” Alcott said, zipping the portfolio back up before Fenderson could ask to see more of what it contained, “shall we go?”
Fenderson wanted to say no. He’d been hoping to partner up with somebody who was more than just another face at the Con, maybe one of the superstars sitting in on a panel or signing books for a line of people winding through the hall like an endless snake. But that hope was a long shot and Alcott was a bird in the hand. If the lady was as good as the sample she’d let him see, and she could be bought for next to nothing, he could avoid all the hassles of negotiating with a stranger by cutting a deal with her instead. Rather than a pain-in-the-ass distraction he could have done without, maybe running into Alcott like this had been a genuine stroke of luck. The kind of luck, he knew, that only came to people destined for greatness.
“Sure. Lead the way,” Fenderson said.
She drove an old shitbox Honda that would have had him laughing out loud had it not been a big step up from the ancient Toyota he’d driven down to San Diego at a crawl. The A/C was on the fritz so they had to ride around with all the windows down, Alcott’s hair blowing in her face like a damn sheep dog.
She took him to a café that sat on a corner at the feet of the old El Cortez Hotel, up in the hills above downtown where the one-way streets could make you crazy if you didn’t know the territory. The café was mundane and the place wasn’t even a hotel anymore—all the building played host to these days were business seminars and wedding receptions—so Fenderson couldn’t figure what they were doing there until they were seated at a table and Alcott explained the irony in her choice of setting. Apparently, during its infancy, Comic-Con used to be held at the El Cortez, down in a basement that was far too large for the meager turnout it was able to generate at the time. Alcott knew this because she’d been coming to the Con forever, even back then when she was just a pimply faced kid, having dreamed of drawing comic books years before the thought of being a screenwriter ever entered her mind.
Fenderson nodded and pretended to give a shit. He still couldn’t recall anything about Alcott as she’d appeared in his Learning Bridge extension class, but her mention of screenwriting gave him an idea as to how he might discretely refresh his memory. “So how’s the script going?” he asked.
“The script?”
“The one you were writing in class.”
“Oh. That,” Alcott said, clearly embarrassed the subject had come up. “I gave up on it. Everybody I showed it to said it was awful.” She flashed that eerie smile again. “Just like you did.”
“Me? Did I say that?”
“In so many words. You told the whole class. But I didn’t take it personally, because you liked to say similar things about everyone’s writing.”
Fenderson briefly considered denying it, then decided to save his breath. Of course he’d said some terrible things to the morons in that class; they’d paid their tuition to have a working professional assess their writing in an honest and straightforward manner, and he wouldn’t have been doing them any favors by killing them with kindness. The sooner they realized they’d just be muddying
the waters real writers like Fenderson had to swim in, glutting the market with unsolicited screenplays that were all but unreadable, the better. Cruel? Fenderson liked to think he was simply giving them their money’s worth.
“Remind me what it was about. I’m drawing a blank,” Fenderson said.
“It’s not important. I’ve moved on. And it’s not my writing we came here to discuss anyway. It’s my abilities as a comics illustrator.”
“Yeah, I know, but—”
“Why don’t you tell me a little about your novel. So I’ll know whether or not it’d even be worth your while to see more of my work.”
Rather than argue, Fenderson gave her the bare bones of it, as careful as ever not to say more than was absolutely necessary. People were always on the lookout for what Fenderson had to offer, a fresh, new idea with endless commercial possibilities, and even a nobody like Alcott could get him ripped off if he took her too far into his confidence.
She listened to his pitch without comment, sipping her tea and picking at her salad, her face as devoid of expression as a porcelain doll’s. If he hadn’t known better, Fenderson would have thought she was bored by it all, until he wrapped things up and she nodded her head and said, “Wow. That’s really something.”
“It is, right? It’ll make a hell of a movie, but I thought selling it as a graphic novel first would be the best way to get a film deal done.”
“Sure.”
“Which brings us back to you and your work. I’d love to have you onboard as the illustrator, but I haven’t seen enough of what you can do to know whether or not you’d be right for the project. Have I?”
Without further encouragement, Alcott opened the portfolio propped against the chair beside her and eased a page out of it, handling it with the care of an obstetrician delivering a newborn. It was the pencil-and-ink page she’d allowed Fenderson to have a look at earlier; the text seemed to suggest some kind of weird superhero/sci-fi hybrid. The words meant nothing to Fenderson but the artwork was striking, proving that his initial impression, based on just the first panel, had been accurate. Alcott was damn good. Certainly good enough to illustrate his proposal. And beyond that, who gave a rat’s ass? Once he had his novel sold, the publisher could sign Alcott up or replace her with whomever they liked.
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