A Hundred Thousand Worlds

by Bob Proehl

  Home, Away from Home

  It’s a half-hour drive to Hollywood Hills, which really are hills. You can look back and see the city below you, guarded by power lines. They turn into a neighborhood of big houses, one of which must be his dad’s. As the car approaches the house, Alex is worried there’s been a crime. Trucks and vans clog the narrow street, and on the vast lawn, people bustle back and forth. A woman, sharply dressed and tiny, not any taller than Alex, is coming toward the limo, attempting to wave them off. She comes up to the driver’s window, her face level with it, and he rolls it down.

  “You can’t get through here,” she says, louder than she needs to. Alex is impressed someone so small can be that loud. He doesn’t think he could do it, although he’s never tried. “All the development residents were told we would be shooting tonight. All the waivers have been signed.” She clicks both of these off on her fingers, which are also small. “Who’s back there?” she asks, trying to stick her head in the window. “What’s their name?”

  “His name is Alex,” says the driver. “He’s here to see Mr. Rhodes.” Even though they’ve hardly spoken, Alex has decided there’s something protective about the driver. Maybe it’s his size that leads Alex to believe he’d be a good protector, if one was needed.

  “Oh my God, it’s Andy’s kid,” she says, mostly to herself. “Well, let him out,” she tells the driver, a little snappish. “I’ll take him from here.” The driver puts the car in park, then gets out and opens Alex’s door for him. Pulling his backpack onto his shoulder, Alex climbs out of the car.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Alex says.

  “You going to be okay?” says the driver. Alex isn’t sure if it’s a question or a statement. So he shrugs.

  “Where are his things?” the little woman asks the driver. “Are his bags in the back?”

  “I’ve just got my backpack,” says Alex.

  “But where are your things?” she asks him, turning the same intensity she focused on the driver toward Alex. He knew he should have brought more stuff.

  “My things are at home,” he says quietly. The driver is looking at her as if to say, Hey, lady, lay off the kid, which Alex appreciates, and the little woman, noticing the look, appears stricken. Much to Alex’s surprise, she swoops him into a hug.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry,” she says. “These night shoots bring out the fascist in me.” Alex doesn’t know what the fashion in her has to do with anything, but he is pleasantly overwhelmed by the hug. He has been in need of one, without knowing it. She releases him and steps back, examining Alex for the first time. “My God, you look just like Andy,” she says. Alex has never thought of himself as looking like anyone, even his mother, so this is a weird thing to hear. “Come on,” the little woman says. “He’s going to be so happy to see you.”

  She grabs Alex’s hand and they head off toward the well-lit house. Alex looks back and sees the limo reversing, and it’s worse than when the limo pulled away with him in it. That seemed like it could be undone, but this is final. Alex is here now, with no way to go back.

  “Have I even introduced myself?” the woman says. “I’m Mandy. I work with your father. And I have heard an awful lot about you.” Alex doesn’t think there are even an awful lot of things to know about him, but he knows this is something adults sometimes say to people they don’t know an awful lot about. “I’m sorry things are in such a state at the moment. Peter, our director, insisted he needed exterior night shots right away. Tonight. So of course everyone has to snap to.”

  “Is this my dad’s house?” Alex asks. It’s a big house, not so much tall as wide. There aren’t houses like this in New York; there wouldn’t be room. But still, it looks familiar.

  “Oh, no, no,” Mandy says. “It’s Ted Kammen’s house. Your dad’s character on the show.”

  “I’ve seen the show,” says Alex. Mandy looks horrified.

  “Your mother let you watch the show?”

  Alex nods. “To see my dad,” he says.

  “Well, that’s . . . nice,” says Mandy, although she clearly does not think it’s nice at all. “This is the house we use for exteriors,” she says. “The inside shots are all on a soundstage. I’m sure Andy will bring you by the set sometime soon.”

  Alex has the feeling he sometimes gets when they go to a museum and his mother insists they take the tour. Even when the tour guides are super nice and explain lots of things, there’s a sense they’re also keeping you from something, whether it’s secret things in the museum regular people aren’t allowed to see or the opportunity to run around the museum really fast.

  “Where’s my dad?” he asks.

  “He’s in the trailer getting made up,” says Mandy, which Alex thinks is funny. Even now, when his dad’s about to become real to him for the first time since Alex can remember, he’s still going to be made up. “We probably shouldn’t interrupt him. He’s getting into character.”

  Alex wonders if he might be more comfortable meeting his dad in character than out. After all, he’s known Ted Kammen for three seasons.

  “Can I watch them shoot?” he asks.

  Mandy squirms. “I don’t think so,” she says. “The scene they’re shooting is a little grown up.”

  “Swearing grown up or sex grown up?”

  “Sex grown up,” says Mandy.

  “Never mind, then,” says Alex. “I’ll wait.” Mandy finds him a chair, although he’s disappointed it’s not one of those director chairs. Even though it’s nighttime, there are big bright lights everywhere, so it’s easy enough for Alex to read his book. He wonders if they could make it bright enough to shoot a daytime scene at night, and thinks how cool it would be if, instead of lights, there were darks you could turn on so you could shoot a nighttime scene during the day. Probably in Adam Anti’s world, there are darks. Flashdarks and darkbulbs. One thing he likes about the Adam Anti books is the idea that there’s a whole world, even if the writer doesn’t tell you about all of it. You can think of other things, other stories that would happen in that world. Maybe when he’s done with the story of the boy and the robot, he’ll think of other stories in their world. He’ll continue the stories of people they met, or invent stories of people they never met, who live in one of the cities and don’t know anything about the boy or the robot but have their own place in the world, with houses and friends and maybe a cat or something. Regular lives but in this strange world.

  He drifts off, thinking about this, but then someone is blocking the light in front of him. “Alex,” says the shadow. The shadow squats down and it’s his dad, who looks like on TV. Which is to say, he looks older than Alex thinks he should be, and in the dark his skin looks like cookie dough that’s been smoothed out mostly but is still lumpy. Alex realizes he and his father have the same eyes. It’s a weird thing to realize at first, like looking into a mirror and seeing someone who isn’t you but has parts of your face. But it also makes him feel connected to something where there was no connection before.

  “I’m so sorry I couldn’t meet you as soon as you got here,” his father says. He is squatting a few feet away from Alex, with his hands on his knees. Every now and then, one of his hands looks like it might reach out toward Alex, but then it goes back to gripping one of his knees. Alex feels like maybe he ought to stand, but he doesn’t.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Mandy explained everything.”

  “I’m going to wash up real quick,” his father says. “Then I was thinking we could grab a burger. Have you ever been to an In-N-Out Burger? Best burgers in the world.”

  “I like Shake Shack,” Alex says, not to dismiss his father’s claim about In-N-Out Burger, but because those are the burgers he likes. It’s not easy to find something you like, and when you find it, you should stick with it.

  “I don’t think we have those around here,” his father says.

  “There’s lots of them,”
says Alex. “But the good one’s the actual shack one in Madison Square Park.”

  “Well, you’ll have to try In-N-Out before you judge.”

  “Okay,” says Alex. Just because you already know what you like doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try new things, he supposes. But he’s skeptical.

  “So we’ll get you fed,” says his father, “then get you home. How’s that sound, champ?”

  Alex doesn’t like being called champ, and imagines that over the next few days there will be more of these attempts to fix a nickname on him. He anticipates pal, tiger, and maybe even worse things, like scooter or skipper. He thinks about telling his dad his nickname is Rabbit, but he doesn’t want anyone else calling him that, ever. Even if it means no one ever calls him Rabbit again. More important, Alex doesn’t like referring to wherever they’re going as home. But there’s no reason to be difficult; it won’t fix anything.

  “Fine,” says Alex.

  Funeral for a Friend

  If the bar seems a bit generic when Gail first arrives, it feels much less so once dozens of comics professionals are filling the booths, buying rounds, slapping shoulders, and sketching on napkins, trading the results like baseball cards. Zero to geek bar in ten minutes. But all of it is subdued, the joviality not forced but held in check. No one’s called it a wake, but there’s no question it is.

  Gail, whose social batteries are run down, buys a pitcher with three glasses and sits at a bistro table in the corner, counting on an easy gravity to draw Ed and Geoff over eventually. She didn’t run into them at the convention, having spent most of her afternoon walking around with the moderator of the “Distaff Goes the Distance” panel, a woman with a pink-dyed crew cut and piercings who had no right to be straight but probably was. Gail is holding out hope she’ll show up here later, although she didn’t have the nerve to invite her. There may have been flirting involved. That’s the quantum quality of flirting: its existence is provable only in hindsight.

  She spots Ed, Geoff, and Fred at the far end of the bar. They’re talking to Phil Weinrobe from Timely. Not just talking; in cahoots. There is very obvious cahooting going on here. Gail wishes she were the type of woman who would mutter something like “I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” then stomp across the bar and do just that. But if she possesses such a Nancy Drew gene, it must be recessive or dormant. So she tries to read facts and details in their body language from across the bar. All she can determine is that they are definitely in cahoots.

  Weinrobe concludes whatever discussion they’re having and, drawing himself up to an impressive full height, calls, “Excuse me,” in a voice that silences the bar. Gail thinks this silencing is sycophantic, since the careers of most of the people in the bar depend on or could be improved by Weinrobe. But even the booths of civilians quiet and turn, Weinrobe having one of those Moses-like voices.

  “We’ve all suffered a great loss,” he says. He speaks like he’s the patriarch of the comic book industry, which Gail supposes he is. “No one has been more important to comic books than Levi Loeb. And I’m saying this knowing someone’s going to pass it on to NerdFeast and I’m going to get an earful from my bosses tomorrow. Not to mention a certain nonagenarian gentleman who shall remain nameless.” This gets a chuckle. “But it’s past time someone at Timely said it, so I’m saying it. No one has been more important to comic books than Levi Loeb.”

  Some people in the crowd lift their glasses in a hear, hear! The Brewer-versus-Loeb debate has tended to draw a line between writers and artists, although a fair number of writers, Gail included, side with Loeb. Other people have whipped out their phones, no doubt sending this news tip to one of the blogs or fan sites.

  “There was a plan,” says Weinrobe, “to have Levi Loeb here in L.A. tomorrow for a big announcement. I bet none of you knew that. Hey, Hampton,” he calls to someone down the bar, “we finally managed to keep something a secret.” There’s a roar of laughter from a knot of what Gail assumes to be marketing or publicity people, her assumption based on the fact that they’re dressed like adults. “We’re still going to make the announcement tomorrow. Levi Loeb won’t be up there on the dais with me, like I always imagined he would. And Hampton and his hacks will have a speech prepared for me that bobs and weaves through a lot of legalese. But, Ham, you’re going to cringe now. Spoilers on.”

  The number of smartphones visible doubles.

  “I’m telling you this because it’s about the history of what we do. The people who’ll be there tomorrow, they’re fans. And you know I love the fans. But you all are the makers. You guys. If I was a smarter guy, I’d remember that speech from Henry V. The Saint Swithin’s Day speech or what you call it. I could rightfully say those things to you. Because I feel that we in this room, here, are a band of brothers.”

  “And sisters!” Gail yells before she knows she’s going to do it. If everyone isn’t staring at her, it certainly feels as if they are.

  Weinrobe purses his lips. “You know what,” he says, “I’m gonna drink to that.” He takes a swig of beer. “I always say everyone needs an editor.” Gail sits up a little straighter in her chair, and across the room, she and Weinrobe exchange a look she can’t interpret.

  “Fifty years ago, this company made a mistake. It was the kind of mistake, born of carelessness, born of hubris, that plays a crucial role in the origin stories of so many of our characters. We betrayed, for the sake of money, for the sake of financial expediency, one of the fundamental builders of the Timely Universe.

  “Life moved along, we made a lot of money off creations that relied, deep in their DNA, on the imagination of Levi Loeb. So much money, in fact, that when, twenty years later, Levi Loeb sued us for his rights, the money he deserved, it would have been impossible for us to pay him. The company would’ve been broke. And all our stories would have ended. The Timely Universe, destroyed by its creator. That’s not a story Levi Loeb would have wanted us to tell.

  “A lot of this has been kept secret. It’s been speculated about. But I’m going to pull the curtain back and tell you what happened twenty years ago, when I took over at Timely. I was going over contracts and statements and records. And I was finding the same thing Levi Loeb’s lawyers were finding. We were protected, on a lot of fronts. Not saying we were right, just that we were protected. But then there was the Astounding Family. They were the founding heroes of the Timely Comics universe. A brave family that burrowed into the center of the earth and were transformed into superpowered beings by the ancient gods they found there. Brewer and Loeb created these four characters for a company that was so on the ropes, they didn’t have the manpower to draw up contracts. And it looked like, because things were done so quickly, with handshakes instead of lawyers, Levi Loeb might be able to destroy the entire Timely Universe. The same one he’d saved by creating the Astounding Family and a hundred other heroes in the first place.”

  This statement alone would have been newsworthy within certain communities. Timely has always made a point of referring to Levi Loeb only as an artist. He always “draws” characters. The word “create” is studiously avoided.

  “So I made a decision. I went to his writers and said, ‘I want you to kill off the Astounding Family.’ The greatest heroes the Timely Universe has ever known, and they had to die. I tasked Porter Coleman, who was the best guy working at the time, to do it. If you ask me, it’s Coleman’s masterpiece. People don’t think of him as a cosmic writer—they think of the Ferret. But ‘Dream’s End’ is one of the most ambitious stories he ever wrote. The Astounding Family died saving the universe, of course. In more ways than they ever knew. With the Astounding Family off the table, the case between Loeb and Timely was resolved. Everything else was clearly contract work. But we could never publish a comic featuring the Astounding Family again.”

  This version of the story isn’t new, but it’s the first time anyone from Timely has ever admitted this is the way things went d
own. In the official version, Porter Coleman had come up with the story idea months before the Loeb case was decided, and Timely stopped using the characters because they were dated.

  “In the years since, nothing has weighed heavier on me than the plight of the Loeb family. And the Astounding Family. It’s been my dream to bring both families back into the Timely Universe.

  “Two weeks ago, we announced we were restoring Levi Loeb’s creator credits to every character he touched. What we didn’t announce then, what we were saving till tomorrow, was that we’d reached a settlement on the rights to the Astounding Family. Rights which we signed over to be jointly held by Brewster Brewer and Levi Loeb, or their estates. And that Levi Loeb had agreed to license to Timely, at a pretty hefty fee, I tell you. The old man was a hell of a poker player at the bargaining table.

  “It doesn’t fix the mistakes we’ve made,” Weinrobe says. “But it means Levi Loeb passed away knowing he had his rightful claim to his creations. And it means the Astounding Family will be returning to comics for the first time in twenty years.”

  Weinrobe turns and beckons Ed, Geoff, and Fred to come stand next to him, and Gail’s whole body tenses. Her head begins to give a little side-to-side shake, involuntary.

  “Right here are the three gentlemen who are going to do it. You all know Ed Rankman, because you’re reading Red Emma every month, same as I am. Some of you might have heard of Geoff Sukowski, who works for our Noted Competition. Worked for, I should say. What is it you do over there, Geoff? Talking animal books?” Gail can see Geoff blushing. “But this kid here,” says Weinrobe, pulling Fred forward, “maybe you don’t know. He’s been killing it on a little independent book called Lady Stardust. His name’s Fred Marin, and he’s about to step into some of the biggest shoes there are. Am I making you nervous, Fred?” Oddly, it doesn’t seem he is. Fred seems more sure he deserves to be up there than either Geoff or Ed. He bows a little at the waist, not that anyone is applauding.