As I said, those are the vast majority of fans.
Then there are the exceptions.
Like the Voyeurs, the people who just like to watch people draw, as if they could somehow capture with their eyes whatever alchemy it is that allows the artist to put what is in her head onto a formerly blank piece of paper via her arm. A lot of them will film you with their phones while you’re doing it, which is more than a little creepy. My favorite Voyeurs are the parents of bored children who make their kids stop and stare, as though I was churning butter in a bonnet at Colonial Williamsburg:
Look, kids, here’s someone actually making something. With his hands.
Also common are the Lurkers, the ones who flip through every page of your portfolio of original art on the table. They’ll pick up and stare at each print for so long you’d think they were imagining what it would look like hanging on every wall in their house. Lurkers spend upwards of an hour at each table in Artists’ Alley and never say anything to anyone and absolutely never, ever buy anything.
For a long time the cohort I despised the most were the Models, the cosplayers who seemed to be laboring under the delusion that they were actually the con’s main attraction. They leave their poster tubes or swag bags on top of my table, on top of my portfolio, on top of my prints, without asking, and stand and pose for a succession of photos from other randos’ smart-phones, completely blocking my table and preventing my own fans from getting near me. For the first few years after the whole cosplaying thing really took off I had fantasies about sweeping them away from my booth with a giant hockey stick. But after a while I learned to accept them as part of the landscape. Honestly, a lot of people do come to cons to cosplay or gawk at cosplayers, and if I can’t convert those people into customers, I guess that’s on me. I do wonder when cosplayers will figure out that they don’t have to pay ridiculous entry fees and stand in line for forty-five minutes for a twelve-dollar hot dog; they could just mill about taking photos of each other in the parking lot to basically the same effect. Of course, as soon as enough of them decided to do that, the comic con industry would collapse and I would have to find some other way to make a living, but I almost think it would be worth it.
The Fetishists always want a super-specific sex-themed commission of some character they made first contact with when their hormones started bouncing around in puberty; their initial attraction to that fictional love had never quite faded. These requests range from the relatively harmless (“Cheryl Blossom lifting her skirt up so you can see her panties”) to mildly disturbing (“Catwoman, on all fours, lapping up a dish of milk with her tongue but, like, she’s spilling some of the milk on her boobs”) to I’m calling the cops (“Can you do Freddy Krueger standing on a hotel balcony railing jerking off into the swimming pool?”). I almost always turn down the Fetishists, even though they are willing to pay way, way, way above the going market rate to have their kinks indulged. The problem is that rarely is the money quite enough to have whatever crazy image they want out of their head put into my head while I’m working on the damn drawing.
When the Disco Mummy guy walked up to my Artists’ Alley table, I thought at first he was another classic con type: the Narrator. These guys can never not tell you exactly what thoughts are going through their heads at any given moment. They will also immediately begin talking to you as if they’ve known you all their lives; they might continue a conversation they’d started with you two cons ago, as if you’d been in cryogenic suspension since the last time they laid eyes on you.
The kid was in his early twenties, African American, with lenses so thick it looked like his pupils were painted right onto the glasses. He had no chin or shoulders to speak of; his head and neck just kind of oozed right into his torso like a partly melted candle. He was wearing what appeared to be a replica of Ryan Gosling’s silk scorpion jacket from Drive over a striped Izod shirt. A gold VIP badge dangled from a lanyard around his neck.
“I don’t know why there isn’t a Plastic Man movie,” this dude said as soon as he walked up to my table, without any introduction or salutation whatsoever: classic Narrator move.
I didn’t look up from the commission I was drawing into a fan’s sketchbook, which was full of various artists depicting Batman perched on a gargoyle. Not the most original theme for a fan sketchbook in history, I guess, but I like drawing Batman so I didn’t really care. “I know, right?” I said. “Plastic Man is a great character. The Kyle Baker run is one of my all-time favorites.”
A conversation with a Narrator is entirely one-way; they could be having the exact same talk with the wall. The lack of eye contact and rushed monotone led me to believe that this particular Narrator fell somewhere on the Spectrum. Or Spectra, for that matter. “I mean, I don’t understand why, I mean, superheroes have to be so serious all the time, you know? Like, I mean, they all have guns and tragic origins or whatever.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Reverend,” I said, still without looking up. Half the time a Narrator will just wander away if you avoid eye contract, still talking as if you’re still there, giving you a good idea of how crucial you were to the conversation in the first place.
This one was just getting started, though. “I mean, Plastic Man’s powers are really cool, and, like, back in the day, in the eighties, maybe the effects would be pretty bad, I mean pretty cheesy, but CGI has gotten really good now and with computers you could do stretchy powers really good, not like that lame Fantastic Four movie, I mean, but better.”
“Computers! Is there anything they can’t do?” I started to render the cathedral looming behind Batman in completely unnecessary levels of detail just so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with this guy, who was starting to get on my nerves a little, to be honest.
“And I mean Plastic Man has a lot of great villains too, like Disco Mummy. It’d be great to see Disco Mummy in live action.”
I looked up instantly. “I’m sorry, I thought you just said Disco Mummy?”
“Yeah, Disco Mummy, she’s a great character.”
I set aside my Bristol board. “Please continue. In fact, I insist.”
On cue, the Narrator swung his backpack off the knobby protuberances that were not entirely shoulders and dropped it at his feet. From it he produced a dog-eared manila file folder and from that file folder he removed a half dozen screenshots ink-jet printed off the internet from the 1979 Filmation Plastic Man cartoon. In one, Plas was talking to a curvaceous woman with black hair and a purple half jacket. Beneath these she was covered from head to toe in mummy wrappings. In another, she appeared to be disco dancing to a jukebox in an underground cavern. They all looked utterly bananas.
“I’ll need a full body drawing of her,” he said, “dancing, or whatever, but with her butt facing us and turning back, you know. Dancing.”
And this was how I discovered that this Narrator was actually a Fetishist.
I picked up the printout of Disco Mummy disco dancing: the animators had indeed designed her with a perfect apple-shaped butt beneath her bandages. I could see the appeal to a hormonally discombobulated tween. “Sorry, man, I’m only doing black and white sketches this con, my list is too long.”
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars,” the Narrator/Fetishist said without missing a beat.
I blinked. As Fetishist requests went, this one was fairly milquetoast. I didn’t even feel all that ethically challenged by it; after all, I’d be drawing Disco Mummy fully clothed. The wrappings completely covering her body were how you knew she was a mummy in the first place.
“Okay, you’ve got a deal,” I said. “But I have a pretty long list, so I may not be done with it until Sunday.”
I shook the guy’s hand to seal the deal and tried not to make a face. The Fetishist’s palm was cold, sticky, and wet all at once, as though not twenty minutes ago he had been licking it.
* * *
– – – –
Katie Poole was drawing; I was drawing; there was an eddy in the crowd around our tables, a gap where no one was around.
Two women dressed as the same Steven Universe character spotted each other across our aisle and ran to meet, screaming like long-lost sisters.
A man sat to one side of my table rebagging all of his signed comics, the tear of the Scotch tape on Mylar not quite drowned out by the Doctor Who and Game of Thrones themes played on an endless loop.
A train of Handmaids filed by in their crimson habits, dour faces framed by winged white bonnets, silent harbingers of oppression.
“Did you see the article on Bleeding Cool?” Katie said, not looking up from her DCAU Batgirl done in a very un–Bruce Timm realistic style. “About Danny Lieber?”
My pencil froze halfway through completion of Black Widow’s hourglass belt-buckle design (the John Romita Sr. redesign from Amazing Spider-Man #86, that is, not the ScarJo MCU version, per my patron’s request). Out of the corner of my eye I could see Katie wasn’t looking at me, so I didn’t have to worry whether or not my expression was giving anything away.
“Yeah?” I said with what I hoped was no discernible emotion.
“Be honest,” she said, and it was only then she set her Bristol board aside and grinned directly at me. “Did you click your heels for joy? Or just squeal silently like a little fangirl?”
The roots of my hair tingled with heat. I wanted to keep working out the drawing, but I had to set it aside too. “C’mon, Katie. A guy’s dead.”
“Shut. Up. You don’t fool me for a second, boy scout. I mean, look, am I happy he’s dead, like, actively? No. But then people die all over the world, little kids in some hut somewhere from a disease you get from, like, drinking out of the same pond where the water buffalo poop. People die daily in wars and terrorist attacks and having flying robots drop bombs on your wedding party from the sky because somebody said the groomsman was ISIS. Those are abstract people I feel sad for in the abstract. But Danny Lieber? Come on. You don’t get to spend so much of your life being such an unfathomable prick and get the same amount of sympathy as little kids who die in a bus crash in Mongolia or wherever. You don’t get that! It’s not fair. Otherwise what’s the point of doing the right thing in your life at all?”
I frowned. “What did Danny do to you? I’m afraid to ask.”
“Oh, my God, I’ve never told you this story? Really? Well. Anyway:
“Three years ago, when I was just starting out, I was tabling at WonderCon in Anaheim and he comes over to me and goes through my portfolio and is all like, you’ve got really good sequentials. I’m all freaking out because I know who he is, he’s a big deal at Atlas, he gives me a card, and he takes my number so he can bring me over to meet some line editors at their booth later in the weekend, Sunday, maybe, when it’s less crazy.”
I made a face. “Uh-oh.”
“So, like, later that night I’m at dinner, I can barely eat I’m so excited. Then I get a call. It’s, like, eight at night and it’s Danny and he goes—you’re not even gonna believe what he says—”
Just then a colorful giant lumbered through our aisle. He wore yellow armor and a bright red winged helmet, clown makeup and a red nose, a long gold beard and gold cape, red boots, and a war hammer with an oversized foam Big Mac for a head. Happy Meal boxes garlanded his belt like Rob Liefeld pouches.
“McThor!” Katie screamed when she saw him and clapped her hands together. “Wait wait wait!” She pulled out her phone and handed it to me.
She ran into the aisle and threw her arm around McThor’s shoulders and I took the picture.
“Your costume is amazing,” Katie said.
“It really is,” I said.
“Thanks, guys,” he said and glanced at the prints on Katie’s table. “Your art’s really good too.”
“Thanks, man!” she said. “Have a good con!”
She walked around to her table, took her phone back from me, and returned to her Batgirl drawing. Because of the size of her pregnant belly she couldn’t pull herself all the way up to the edge of table, so she had one of those lap desks with the beanbag underneath that tilted the Bristol toward her, and even then she had to hold her wrist at an odd angle to lay down the lines where she wanted. “Some really good cosplay this year, don’t you think?”
“Katie,” I said after a minute.
“Uhmmh?”
“You were telling me a story?”
“Oh! Sorry.” She set her pad aside and turned toward me again. “Where was I?”
“Danny called you at dinner.”
“Yeah, so he calls me at dinner and he’s like, yeah, I wanted to take a closer look at your sequentials before we take it to the other editors, here’s my hotel room number, come up around ten.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Right? And I’m totally, like, thunderstruck, I don’t even remember what I said. I was like, sorry, I can’t, I’m tired, I’ve got commissions to finish, whatever. I think I even tried to make a joke about having a husband. And he’s like—’Your loss’—and just hangs up on me.”
“‘Your loss.’ Yikes. This guy.”
“Wait, it gets worse.”
“He really wanted to get into your sequentials.”
“Seriously. My husband was like, I’ve never heard someone use ‘come up and show me your etchings’ as a pick-up line before. Anyway, the next day, I’m talking with a bunch of other people in Artists’ Alley, mostly women, like Ming and Colleen, and he sees me across the room, and maybe he thinks we’re girltalking about him or something? Because I just happen to catch his eye and before I can look away he waves and booms out—so all of Artists’ Alley can hear him, mind you—‘Good luck with your career!’”
“God. What a piece of work.”
“And I was devastated. I mean, just devastated. I cried in the ladies’ room for a half hour, and I never cry like that. I thought my career was over. After I got back home I didn’t get out of bed for a week. And it wasn’t, you know, until I did that X-Files stuff at IDW and a completely different Atlas editor hired me that I got anywhere. They asked for me, and Danny couldn’t just arbitrarily block me, you know, so here we are, but it took two freaking years after I refused to go up to his hotel room.”
“I’m sorry.”
“A bunch of people in Artists’ Alley have stories like that. They’re not all about Danny Lieber, but a lot of them are. That mugger doesn’t know how many comics people he made happy by accident last night.”
She winked at me before returning to her Batgirl. “But you better hope you have an alibi. After that whole thing with Christine.”
Fuck me.
* * *
– – – –
I got off the Space Elevator a little before six in the evening and turned the corner to head to my room and saw Twitch standing in front of it, barking instructions to someone inside. My heart sank.
Twitch saw me coming halfway down the hall and nodded. “Good afternoon. How is your day going?”
“Getting better and better all the time,” I said. Inside my room, uniformed SDPD officers were going through my drawers and my suitcase and my toiletry bag. Sam was nowhere to be seen.
“Glad to hear it.” Twitch put a search warrant from the superior court of the State of California into my free hand. I looked at it. It looked to be signed by a judge; at the very least, it had been signed by somebody.
“Have you even bothered to check my alibi?”
“You mean the phantom lady pedicabbie? Yeah, you gave us a lot to go on with that one, thanks, we’ll get right on it.”
I lifted the portfolio in my hand. “You mind if I drop my stuff off?” The only things I’d bothered to bring back from the con floor were my messenger bag full of art supplies and my portfolio filled with original art and commission sketches.
“You mind if we search anything you leave in your room?” said Twitch.
“Knock yourself out,” I said. I could afford to be cocky because I knew there was nothing to find.
The uniforms stood still and watched as I dropped the portfolio and messenger bag on my unmade bed. In the mirror I touched up my hair with water and then nearly left without my sketchbook, but thought better of it. I went back to the bed and fished it out of the bag, along with a couple of pencils and pens.
“Thank you for your cooperation, sir,” Twitch said as I walked out the door.
“If I complained, wouldn’t you tell me you were just doing your job?” I called back.
“I never just do my job, sir,” Twitch said to the back of my head. “I love my job.”
* * *
– – – –
A Google search for “San Diego pedicab” garnered shockingly thin results—both were listed as “advertising agency,” and only one was within walking distance. I could’ve called first, but going there was an excuse to stretch my legs.
Directly across the street from the convention center were trolley tracks where traffic cops blew whistles and kept the masses of cosplayers and large concentrations of black T-shirts and glasses from ducking under the clanging barbershop-striped crossing barriers as they lowered so the San Diego MTS trolley could roll past. Some shame-challenged studio marketer had decided it would be a smart idea to reskin the cars as a high-tech concentration camp transport for the Man in the High Castle: Ten Years Later TV movie.
The Con Artist Page 6