by Bob Proehl
“We’ll all be out of jobs,” says Sangster, too loud, too enthusiastic. “We’re better off. Whoever said jobs’d be the be-all end-all anyway? Whoever made adulthood a goal? It’s bullshit thinking the pinnacle of human achievement is steady employment.”
Gail swizzles her gin and tonic, examining the ice cubes. The one small mercy in all this is that when Russell introduced them, Sangster didn’t recognize her name. He grunted politely and presented her with a dead-fish handshake.
When she was younger, Gail mostly liked the Mad Brit’s work. Some of it was a little too deconstructionist, sure. And his whole late-period Kabbalistic phase had a bit more tantric sex–meets–mystic Celtic woodland creatures than she had the stomach for. But the writing was solid throughout, and excellent at times. His characters had a psychological depth to them that was lacking in ninety percent of comics.
But also there was the rape. Before she’d gotten started in comics, Gail ran a fan site called BrainsOverBreasts.com that took pot shots at the comics industry’s retrograde gender politics. When Sangster announced his retirement for about the third time, and every other site fell over themselves to crown him the Greatest Writer in the History of Comics, Gail responded with a thorough rereading of all of Sangster’s work, from his early days on The Savior at National Comics through his switch to Timely for his R-Squad run, and everything in between. What she found was that in every comic book written by Alistair Sangster that ran for more than a hundred pages, there was a rape scene, or at the very least a scene of attempted rape or sexual assault. Every single one. She cataloged dozens and dozens of rapes in the body of Sangster’s work. She scanned and posted panels and pages. In the end, she made very little comment, except to say, “Apparently, this is the best our industry has to offer.”
Her site had a small following before, but the article on Sangster blew up, beyond the little knot of readers who followed both superhero comics and feminist blogs. The piece on the Mad Brit had run on NerdFeast.com, PanelAddict.com, and a number of other major comics sites. Which was about when the rape threats started. An overwhelming number of them—comments, e-mails, posts on social media. She realized that it was one thing to say something controversial in her little corner of the Internet to a small group of people whom, although she hadn’t met most of them in person, she’d come to think of as friends. From the minute the higher-trafficked sites put her words out there, she was attacked with such detailed threats of sexual violence that she began to fear for her safety. Ed and Geoff and a couple of other writers she’d become friends with in her time as a blogger reached out to her in solidarity and explained that they, too, had gotten death threats, but they couldn’t understand how this was different.
The obvious option would have been to take down the piece and retreat, but Gail decided to go public with the threats she’d received. She cataloged them just as she had the rapes in Sangster’s books. The article ran on almost every site that talked about comics; it got discussed on a couple of morning news shows and NPR. Other women spoke up about harassment at conventions and online. Flummoxed publishers had to field questions about whether or not the comics themselves contributed to this culture of sexual violence. They were asked where the women writers were, or the women artists or editors. And they had no one to point to.
Gail was inundated with interview requests, and the conversations evolved from a critique of what had gone before into a discussion of what should come next. Offhandedly, Gail rattled off possible storylines for dozens of female superheroes, detailing how they would appeal to female readers while not alienating the base—the impossible dream of the marketing departments of every major publisher. A few of her ideas, tweaked and revamped so they were recognizable only to her as her own, made it into the plots of books at National and Timely. But Russell Maddox at Black Sheep was the first one to offer her a job, writing the Anomaly miniseries. “Look,” he said when he called her up, “none of these publishers realize you’ve given them a problem and a solution all at once.” The threats continued, although they tapered off after she managed, with Russell’s backing, to press charges against a couple of her more virulent fans. She got a few calls for fill-ins at National, and when she got offered a regular gig writing The Speck & Iota, Russell told her to follow the money. He still threw her work every now and then, licensed stuff she could churn out in a week. Adam Anti spin-offs and adult cartoon tie-ins.
The article itself hadn’t led to anyone revoking Sangster’s status as Greatest Writer in Comics, nor did it significantly hurt sales of any of Sangster’s work, although she noticed that his comeback phase was pleasantly rape-free. It’s possible that rather than writing articles in his own defense, Sangster sacrificed a goat or some other piece of livestock to assure that Gail would never rise above the rank of B-list comic book writer. It’d explain her current limbo status at National, among other things. He could have done it from his magician’s lair in White Castle or wherever you move after you’ve made as much money as one person could ever make in comics and then retire to be a full-time professional magus and cultivate the largest beard in any known artistic medium. Look at that thing; you could house a family of sparrows in there. “So you’d stop writing,” she says, “in this amazing age to come?”
“I write,” Sangster continues, “to bring about that age. To invoke it. Once it’s here, the world won’t need visionary imaginations.” He turns to Ferret Lass. “We’ll all be writers,” he tells her. “We’ll each be epic dreamers of dreams.”
“Sounds nice,” she says, grinding ice with her molars.
“It won’t be a bit nice!” he shouts. “It’ll be terrible. Nothing will be stable, nothing will be static. There’ll be no more staying in to watch telly or nip down to the pub on a Saturday night. There’ll be dragons and ifrits and all sort of mad things about.”
“Why would anyone want that?” says Gail.
“Because we’ll need it,” says Sangster, “to become the heroes we ought to be.” He sets his drink down and rises on unsteady legs. “I’m off to the loo,” he announces.
“His superpower seems to be staring at my tits,” Ferret Lass says to Brett once he’s out of earshot. Gail turns on Russell, scowling.
“You set me up,” she says.
“I did no such thing,” he says, grinning to indicate she’s completely correct.
“For kicks,” she says. “You set me up for your own sick amusement.”
“I thought maybe there’d be spirited discussion,” Russell says earnestly. She does feel bad for him a little. Russell is one of those people no one in the industry has anything bad to say about, which he claims is because he’s everyone’s token black friend. But it’s the fact that he’s a stand-up guy who’s fun to be around.
“Some of what he said was interesting,” says Brett, who, again, is probably a nice kid and is trying to be charitable. “About stories being transmitted instead of created? I feel like that sometimes.”
“He just wants you to think he’s divinely inspired,” says Gail.
“He made it sound like a lightning bolt,” says Brett. “But it’s not like that. It’s like tuning an old radio.”
Finally, someone at this table other than her has said something intelligent. Because it’s like that for her, too, like she’s finding her ideas coming though faintly in a vast spectrum of noise. The hard work is in twiddling the knobs exactly right, and translating the little bursts that rise out of the static. For the first time since she sat down, it feels like a conversation is about to start, but before it can get going, a hatchet-faced boy stumbles over to their table, obviously drunk.
“Where is he?” he asks Brett. “Did I miss him already?” He looks around frantically. By his black-suit-with-black-shirt attire, Gail pegs him as an Alistair Sangster fan.
“He’s off to the loo,” says Gail, emphasizing the last word, crooning it.
“But he’s com
ing back,” Brett says.
“Loo, loo, skip to my loo,” she sings.
“Hey, Fred,” says Russell, “you’re late. You want a drink?”
“A whiskey,” says Fred, sounding as if he’s talking to a waiter. “Please,” he adds. Russell points around the table. Gail signals him for another; Brett and Ferret Lass take a pass.
“Where’ve you been?” Brett asks his drunken friend.
“I was having drinks, Mother,” Fred says, grinning acidly as he squeezes in next to Ferret Lass.
“I’ve returned,” announces Sangster, standing in front of the table. He takes a head count and after a second realizes the number’s right but the parts are wrong. “Who’s this?” he asks the rest of the group.
“Your evil beardless twin,” mutters Gail.
“Fred Marin, Mr. Sangster,” says Fred, standing up and putting out his hand. Sangster looks at it like it might be covered in herpes. “You’ve been a huge influence on my work.”
“Another writer, eh?” he says, scooting past Gail to resume his place at the center of the table. “Writers should be like blue jays: we should each have a patch of territory to ourselves, and we should squawk loud if another writer comes close.”
Gail is about to caw in his ear when Russell returns with the drinks.
“You know,” says Russell, who must realize he’s gotten all the fireworks he’s going to out of this, “we’d love to have you do some work at Black Sheep.”
“Definitely a possibility,” says Sangster. “I wouldn’t go back to Timely if Phil Weinrobe sucked my cock while handing me the Hope Diamond.”
Gail winces.
“He seems like a nice guy,” says Fred.
“He’s a figment of your imagination,” Sangster informs the young man. “Timely hired him because he’s too good to be true. And he’s not true. He’s just a thing in the dream of a corporation.”
“Bad blood?” asks Russell.
“No blood at all. No soul,” says Sangster. “I would be thrilled to work with you, Russell. I grew up with mostly blacks,” he says proudly. Gail thinks maybe in England that kind of thing gets said all the time. But still, gross. “Not to claim to be part of the struggle,” he adds. “The thing is, most of my time now is spent on my magic. Harsh mistress, the dark arts.”
“Yeah, magic’s a bitch,” says Gail.
“I should say, Miss Pope, that I’ve never actually read your work,” Sangster says, turning to Gail for the first time. All of his other responses have been directed to the ether, or posterity or something. Now he glares at her and sips his drink, deftly piloting it to his mouth through the nebula of his beard. “Certainly not with the censorious eye you’ve taken to mine.”
This, she thinks, is where it’s going to happen. Alistair Sangster is going to turn her into a newt.
“I’d always wondered if you’d read Gail’s article on your work,” says Russell, trying to engage the subject in a calm, salon fashion, a marketplace of ideas where Sangster and Gail are both merchants.
“I never bothered,” says Sangster. “The French have a saying: The spit of the toad does not touch the white dove.”
Gail realizes she was off by one: he’s turned her into a toad.
“But I’ve noticed,” says Gail, “that since you came out of retirement, your work’s been a lot less rapey. Well done on that, by the way.”
“My work was never ‘rapey,’” says Sangster, affecting a nasal American accent. “It dealt with transgressive forms of sexuality, which tends to make puritans like yourself uncomfortable. But only through confronting our puritanisms can we be liberated from them.”
“So in R-Squad, when the Perilous Pentad held down Medea and took turns fucking her bloody,” says Gail, straining to keep her voice even, “that was intended to be liberating? Because it seemed to me, at the time, more like wish fulfillment from the kind of kid who didn’t see tits that weren’t on a page from the time he was weaned till he became the anointed Greatest Writer in Comics.”
Gail steels herself for a smiting. She expects Sangster to rise up and expand, his sport jacket billowing out with arcane energies as he strikes her down with a lightning bolt. But he simply looks at Russell calmly and says, “I think, in the interest of civility, that one of us should leave.”
“Yeah,” says Gail, “I should probably get out of here before someone drops a house on you.”
Russell puts a hand on her shoulder before she can get up.
“It’s been good to see you, Alistair,” he says. “Have a safe trip back.”
There is a quiet moment at the table, while the piano plays a maudlin rendition of Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack.” And as Brett, Fred, and Ferret Lass get up to let Sangster out of their booth, huffing as he goes, Gail thinks that if her man-kissin’ days weren’t well behind her, she would plant one on Russell right then and there.
Anomaly Finale
His mother is being strange. It’s because he didn’t talk to her last night, and now it’s like she isn’t talking to him because she doesn’t want him not to talk to her. Alex can’t think of anything to say, so neither of them talks. This morning when they checked out of their hotel room, they put all of their stuff into the back of Babu’s truck. They’re going back to her house for the night and taking the train to L.A. in the morning.
The nice thing about riding in the truck is that he gets to sit in the front seat, but it makes it more uncomfortable that they’re not talking. Alex turns on the radio and fiddles with the dial. There’s a song he likes on one of the stations. People were playing it in the park back in New York. But he turns it to NPR, because he knows she likes that. The sun is setting as they leave Chicago, the sky full of reds and oranges.
They’ve been driving for half an hour when Alex reaches forward, straining against the seatbelt, and clicks the radio off.
“Mom,” he says, “can you tell me a story?”
She looks over at him and smiles, but it’s a sad smile. “You all done being upset with me, Rabbit?”
He’s not sure he is. There’s still something angry inside him and it hasn’t gone away. “Yeah,” he says, looking at his shoes.
“How about I tell you one once we get to Babu’s?” she says. “Then we can catch up on some cuddles.”
“Could you tell me one now?” he says.
“It’s tough to story-tell and drive, Rabbit.”
It’s beginning to get dark, and he thinks maybe she’s right. But he decides this is important enough.
“Tell me how it ends,” he says.
“I’ve never told you that one, have I?” She sighs and adjusts herself in her seat. There is always this moment, where she gathers the story, pulls it into herself. But now it’s like she is going there, to the place where the story is, and where Alex is waiting for her.
“The last episode,” she says, eyes focused on the road, both hands on the wheel, “wasn’t planned to be the last episode. There was supposed to be another year. But it was as good a place as any to end it.
“Anomaly is in ruins. The Leader has finally attacked, and it is devastating. He wipes agents out of existence, back to the moment they were born. He zaps dinosaurs into the offices and sets them loose—not huge ones, but the ones that are people-sized and vicious.”
“Velociraptor,” Alex says.
She nods. “Campbell and Frazer try to fight him, but it doesn’t work. He puts Frazer in the hospital with broken ribs, and he steals her baby.
“Campbell goes crazy. He tracks down an agent who’s been working for the Leader in secret since season one and tortures him. When he finds out what he wants, Campbell kills him.
“Back at the hospital, the Leader shows up in Frazer’s room, with the baby. He gives the baby back to Frazer, saying he only wanted to see him, saying he misses him so much. Then he takes off his mask. You can’
t see it, but Frazer sees who he is, who he’s been the whole time.
“Campbell searches out the Leader’s hideout, and the Leader is there waiting for him. The Leader tells him it’s already too late: Frazer and the baby are both dead. Campbell shoots him, again and again, and the Leader’s mask flies off. Underneath, it’s Campbell.
“As he’s dying, the Leader tells Campbell it’s not too late. The Leader’s suit and mask are laced with time-travel technology like Anomaly has never seen. Campbell can take them, go back, and stop all this from happening. The Leader dies, and Campbell picks up the mask.
“In the hospital parking lot, Frazer puts the baby into the car seat. She doesn’t know what else to do. She is so scared. Being around Campbell at all would put her baby in danger. He’ll be safer if they run. The only way he’ll ever be safe is if they run away.”
“That’s a good ending,” says Alex. He knew when he asked that her ending would be different from the real one. The one that was on television, anyway. You couldn’t say that one made-up story was more real than another. But driving away is always a good ending, because you can go anywhere. It’s way better than people standing somewhere. More than that, it’s a good ending because he knows she made it for him, to tell him things she can’t tell him any other way. He thinks back on all the other stories she’s told him and wonders how many are real and how many she made up for him. It’s like the masks the superheroes wear that become more important than the faces under them: the story hides something so it can reveal the thing more clearly.
As the light fails and stars pinprick through the canvas of the sky, Alex thinks about the boy and the robot, and what his story is trying to reveal to him, and what it’s trying to hide.