Beyond the back-issue dealers was the self-deprecating alliteration of Artists’ Alley, my domain, which still clung to the Comic-Con in the same way the back-issue dealers did, like a vestigial tail. The setup remained virtually unchanged since the 1970s: a grid of fold-out tables behind which sat comic book artists and the occasional writer, selling comics and prints, offering to do sketches for fans. The wannabes fresh out of SVA or SCAD, pushing their stylishly bound photocopied mini-comics, sat beside legends of the medium who had come to realize there was more money in drawing Vargas-style cheesecake pinups of Black Cat, Mary Jane, and various other female members of Spider-Man’s supporting cast and selling them at cons than there was in actually drawing The Amazing Spider-Man comic itself.
One table had my name on it. I dumped my stuff on top; but before I could walk around to the other side Katie Poole rushed over to me. She had her trademark handkerchief tied around her cornhusk-frizzy blonde hair, perfecting a look that I would absolutely never tell her to her face I called “Hot ’70s Mom.” When she hugged me, the baby bump beneath her brown sweater rubbed against my side.
She instantly said, “Not fat, pregnant.”
“Oh, good,” I said, laughing. “Congratulations. I didn’t want to assume, that’s happened before and—it didn’t go well.”
“I hear you, I’ve been there.”
“How far along?”
“Seven months.”
“Wow. And you made it out this year?”
She looked at me like I was nuts. “What, and lose my table? Fuck that. Priorities, man, priorities.”
San Diego Comic-Con was unique among conventions in that once you were granted an Artists’ Alley table by the Powers That Be, you were grandfathered into the system. That table was yours forever, as long as you showed up every year to claim it. But miss just one Comic-Con, and you risked losing your table to the ravenous hordes on the waitlist who would gladly take it off your hands.
“So if I start going into labor prematurely,” Katie said, “I need you to run and get me hot water from the men’s room.”
“Don’t worry, I played catcher on my high school baseball team. You’re in good hands.”
The line of fans waiting in front of Katie’s table was a half dozen deep when I arrived, and now that she’d arrived the crowd was growing. She was facing me and hadn’t noticed. I nodded over her shoulder: “Your adoring public awaits.”
She turned and saw. “Oh! Look at that.” She waved at them. “Thanks for waiting, guys. Just let me get set up.”
I had exactly one guy waiting for me. He removed a stack of my Mister Mystery issues from a vinyl case. I hadn’t done a regular run on a book in my three years of self-imposed exile; the public forgets you quick. Katie, on the other hand, had replaced me on the MM ongoing and subsequently, as the kids say, blown up. It wasn’t so long ago that I first met her on the con circuit, when she was the talented up-and-comer pushing mini-comics of her own creation in Artists’ Alley. Back then she had asked me about tips for breaking in, and now she already vastly surpassed me in buzz. I tried to be proud of her success, the way a parent or a big brother would be, I really did.
But it was a struggle. Jealousy is the creative professional’s constant companion. You hear your friend gets a gig and your first reaction isn’t “Good for them,” it’s “Why didn’t I get that gig?” Social media provides a steady stream of nourishment to the envy demon. Online it looks like everyone is getting better reviews, everyone’s sales numbers are higher, everyone’s follower count is bigger. No matter how many breaks you get, whenever you suffer a reversal of fortune you can still feel like the unluckiest sap in the world.
And then along comes someone like Katie, who in my mind was still a wide-eyed art school chick with bad highlights. In just a couple years since her first six-page Atlas Comics backup fill-in job she’s metamorphosed into a seasoned superstar before my very eyes, zooming past me like I was standing still.
So, in my heart, I want to be happy for her. I desperately yearned to be a better person, a selfless person who could feel objective joy at her well-deserved success.
But it’s hard. It’s very, very hard.
Looking over the con floor, though, I found I still had so much affection for this world that had bludgeoned me so thoroughly over the years, with the persistence of a battered spouse. It’s easy to be cynical about the con world, but walking through those doors every year reminded me of how much I goddamned loved comics. Under one roof was the entire process of the creative spark transitioning through different stages of being: from comics to movies to toys to baby tees. Caterpillars, pupae, and butterflies adrift on a sea of interlocking references and knowledge points that you shared with a small army of strangers. I was part of a continuity that began long before I arrived and would continue long after I was gone, assuming society proceeded in some similar form. That was why I wanted to get into this business in the first place.
This was geek culture.
* * *
– – – –
I don’t mean to say I was without business, far from it; mine just trickled in at a slower rate than Katie’s. I kept a Commissions List on the corner of the table where fans would come up to me and write down what they wanted me to draw, and I’d charge them based on how big the drawing was, i.e., how long it would take me: a pretty straightforward proposition. By the end of preview night the list was three-quarters filled with characters: Deadpool, Tomb of Dracula Dracula, Captain America, Mister Mystery, Batman, Baby Groot, Power Girl, somebody’s Dungeons & Dragons character (9th level Drow ranger/wizard), another Deadpool, and so on. Before noon tomorrow it would be completely full, and I’d have three days to crank them all out. This, in essence, was how I made my living.
I could do a head shot ($50/ea.) in an hour, that was easy dough. Half figures for $150; full figures twice that and the biggest moneymakers by far. For the fulls, if I worked hard and didn’t dick around and socialize too much I could do five of those a day. Oftentimes, though, I had to work on them back in my hotel room at night. In a show in the middle of the boonies someplace where I didn’t know any of the other pros, that wasn’t much of an issue. But here at San Diego, where everybody I knew was in attendance, it would be tempting to head out to parties and drink all night, so I had to get as much as possible done in Artists’ Alley while the show was open.
I love drawing for so many reasons I could barely begin to tell you, not the least of which is that the ability to set images down on paper in the form of lines, for me, purges those same images from memory. The sight of the ranting Eastboro preacher next to the robot cosplayer was equal parts amusing and infuriating, so I sketched it out as a warm-up. I had my red Ziploc bag full of art supplies, which consisted of a Palomino Blackwing pencil, Microns, a refillable brush pen, various mechanical pencils, replacement leads, wedge erasers, and the phallic blob of gray putty that was my kneaded eraser.
Time kind of blurred in the eternally lit, windowless convention hall, and soon I was in the Zone, where others could not reach me and I could only leave when I chose. Set a line down here, set a line down there—wait, no, not there, here instead. They say sculptors dig a statue out of a block of marble by knocking away all the stone that isn’t the finished piece; I was just covering all the white I needed to on the blank paper until the only thing left was the image floating in my head. And then my mind would be completely clear, because the image in my head was gone. Until the next one appeared a few seconds later.
For some reason, though, the thing I love most about drawing is that moment of completion, of transforming a stack of blank Bristol boards, one by one, into finished works of art. I was turning Nothing into Something. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the feeling godlike, but there was something undeniably mystical and sacred about the process, even if all you had at the end of it was a headshot of Sonic the Hedgehog.
&nb
sp; I’d knocked out that first Deadpool and the Dracula by the time preview night ended and so I could head over to the Marquis to meet Sebastian Mod guilt free. The comics pros were already three deep around the square cabana bar by the time I arrived. I looked for Sebastian there and then searched the dimly lit luxury grotto by the pool, but I couldn’t find him.
However, I did find half a dozen friends from around the world I only get to see at Comic-Con. They hugged me and slapped me on the back, and together we commiserated about the loss of Ben. Even those who didn’t know how close he and I were had been hit hard by the news, and we all wanted to talk through it.
And, more importantly, drink through it, with a rapidity that made our increasingly panicked server start with “Rough Night” in her eyes until, two hours later, became “Please Kill Me Now.”
One of my guilty pleasures of attending a comics convention is visiting the hotel bar after hours and watching all the pros fill the place beyond capacity. The mounting horror on the bartenders’ faces (or, even worse, bartender’s) as they realize these people won’t stop drinking and I may not have enough stock to last the night, much less the weekend is a truly awe-inspiring sight to behold, not unlike seeing the sun setting behind the Grand Canyon. The bartenders don’t understand that—for a lot of us—the con circuit is the social circle we don’t have at home, trapped at a drawing board round the clock, unless you have kids to drive to school or a wife who wants to go to the movies more than twice a year.
So, here I was, depressed and drunk, faced with impotence in the face of death. I just want you to understand what my mental state was when I saw the person I hated more than anyone else in the world walk into the pool area.
Now my mother, bless her soul, is one of the most kind-hearted people I have ever met, and she always discourages me from saying I “hated” anybody. And for a long time I tried to pretend I didn’t hate Daniel “Danny” Lieber. He was a lifer at Atlas Entertainment, which is what Atlas Comics renamed itself once they started making movies. He started out as an editor when I was an artist on the regular Mister Mystery comic book series, and I tried to make my mother proud and not hate him when he would take some of my pages away and give them to another artist whenever there was the slightest hint of me missing a deadline. I tried not to hate him when he tried to have my A rate slashed by $20 a page. I tried not to hate him when he was condescendingly informing me that I was never big as I could be because I didn’t ape the work of Artist X, Y, or Z.
But I would have to say I gave up all pretense of trying not to hate him when I returned to this very pool bar from the men’s room three years ago and discovered him making out with my wife.
Yeah, I’d have to pinpoint that as the exact moment I was pushed over the edge.
I saw that on the last night of the con, and I walked out of my, let’s be honest, already disintegrating marriage. I happened to have another con in Toronto I was going to right after San Diego that year. So I threw my stuff in a storage unit and flew off to Canada. And I booked another con after that, and another con after that. And so on and so forth. I never returned to our home in New York. Or any other home at all, for that matter. I just embarked on an infinite tour.
One of my drinking buddies, the bearish English artist Ian Smallwood, leaned over like a ruddy-faced devil on my shoulder and muttered in my ear:
“Aw, what is this…Can you believe this wanker, showing his face around here?
I looked and saw Danny, dressed like a generic entertainment-industry douchebag, which is to say he was a fifty-year-old trying to dress like he was fifteen: hoodie, gray T-shirt, overpriced jeans, limited-edition high-tops.
He was carrying a portfolio not unlike my own, covered in colorful stickers. “Pathetic,” Ian said. “Tooling around with that portfolio. Probably got samples from some poor Estonian art student he can pay in blue jeans to take our gigs away.”
I saw Danny through the palmetto bushes, seeming kind of lost by the edge of the pool, checking his watch and then looking around as if he didn’t have anywhere to go. My drinking buddies, maybe half of whom knew that the Editor-Makes-Out-With-Freelancer’s-Wife Incident was what precipitated the end of my marriage, followed my gaze. This half erupted in a combination of gasps and giggles.
When I got out of my chair and started walking toward Lieber with terrible purpose, I could sort of hear the scrape of chairs behind me as somebody tried to stop me, but then Ian Smallwood stopped them:
“No, wait. I want to see this, it could be brilliant.”
A small footbridge connected the bar area to the pool area over a bubbling rock-lined tropical fountain. Lieber was staring at his phone as he crossed and didn’t even see me until I walked into him, shoulder first.
Hey, it’s not like I’m proud of this. I’m really not. Truth is I had a jet-black serpent of bile inside me that was rattling and squirming and trying to get out. I was pissed off at just about everything and I had drowned with booze any part of me that might have stopped me from surrendering to my worst impulses.
My mother was a literature professor. What does Ishmael say at the beginning of Moby-Dick? He goes to sea because the damp, drizzly November in his soul makes him want to knock strangers’ hats off in the street.
I really wanted to knock this motherfucker’s hat off is what I’m saying.
After we collided, Danny Lieber looked up, into my eyes, and he did not like what he saw there. I couldn’t blame him. He took a few steps away from me.
“Isn’t Christine’s birthday thing tonight, Danny? Shouldn’t you be there?”
“We’re not together anymore,” Lieber said, eyes downcast. “She moved to L.A. last year.”
“What?” My pickled brain roiled, unable to process this information. “Really?”
I had walked over here with a vague plan to kick his ass, but now I was just standing in place with my mouth open. Did he really say that Christine was single?
“Yeah, so.” He shrugged. “There’s one thing we have in common. She dumped both of us. I guess I did you a favor. Anyway. I got a meeting, so…Good to see you? Maybe? I guess?”
He tried to get past me, across the bridge, but I stepped in front of him.
“What third-world penciller are you exploiting today, Danny?”
I made a drunken lunge for the handle of his portfolio, but Lieber leaped back. “Dude, find some coffee,” he growled. “Stop fucking the corpse of your career. It’s not a good look.”
In my peripheral vision I could see my drinking buddies stirring, exchanging worried looks, as in, gee, maybe throwing the lit match into that lake of kerosene wasn’t as much fun as we thought it was going to be.
Danny sized me up and the fear left his face, along with the anger, replaced by contempt: the default setting of the bully. He knew I knew I wasn’t going to do shit to him because I thought I was above that; I thought I was better than him. That was what gave the Danny Liebers of the world a leg over you and me: they were whatever they needed to be, good, bad, or indifferent.
“I don’t even know what you’re doing here. This show is for comic book artists—you haven’t drawn an actual comic book in years.”
“I was supposed to give Ben K a lifetime achievement award.”
“Little late now,” Danny sneered as he tried to walk away.
That did it, as far as I was concerned.
I punched him.
Which is to say, I tried to punch him. It was more of an attempted punching. I’m not a violent person, I swear. I don’t know what the other witnesses told you, but I’ve never even been in an actual fight before.
Up until this point of which we’re speaking, I mean. I’m not counting the one I get into later on.
I was drunk, the lighting was dim, we were on the apex of a curved bridge, and Danny saw my fist coming from Tijuana. He easily dodged out of the way. He kind of slappe
d at me and missed, and I instinctually understood the easiest way for me to lay a glove on him would be if I was literally on top of him, so I bear-hugged him in that pathetic bar-parking-lot-fight sort of way.
I was dragged off by Ian and some of the other guys, joined by a very large bald black man in a green Oxford with the word SECURITY on the back. A phalanx of dudes separated Danny from me, and the security guard hustled me away from the bar, pool, and hotel, toward a gate in the low fence beyond the palmetto-concealed in-ground Jacuzzi. From the outside, you needed a Marriott room keycard to get in. From inside, a large security guard could just open the door with one free hand and eject a drunk cartoonist with the other.
I stumbled down a half dozen steps but was spared the indignity of sprawling onto my face. When I turned back the guard was slamming the gate closed.
The Con Artist Page 3