“The Cape Dripped Red” Part II

Originally published January 5, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1155

“Find out who stole the fun in comics.”

The voice of my client, 12-year-old Billy Gates, echoed in my head, as I trudged through the snow. I couldn’t be wasting my time on a pointless case during pleasant weather. Nope. It had to be snowing. The trouble with snow is that it’s deceptive. It floats gently from overhead with an almost soothing silence. When it falls just right, even the high-decibel crankiness of New York City seems to fade out and be replaced by a respectful silence.

The guy who screeched his car to a halt a couple of feet away from me, his car fishtailing slightly on the slick white surface, didn’t seem respectful. Instead he blasted me with his horn. I decided to show him who’s who. I opened the inside of my threadbare short coat just wide enough for him to catch a glimpse of the butt of my .357, lodged securely in its holster. He was impressed. Impressed enough to reach under his seat and haul out a 12-gauge shotgun, which he waved in the air meaningfully.

His car pulled away, leaving me secure in the knowledge that I had set the record straight as to who was boss.

I stepped up onto the curb on the far side of the street, crossed again, and headed into the comic book store.

It had been ages since I’d set foot in one. A detailed study into the world of comic books—the comics themselves, the marketing, the selling, the fans—seemed about as attractive as a slow descent through the rings of Hëll.

But the kid had piqued my interest, stirred something inside me that I had thought long dead. Actually, that’s not quite true. I can’t help but wonder if, in fact, it was never really alive to begin with.

I stood outside the comics store for a moment. It looked run-down and not particularly attractive. Comics hung in the windows, sun-faded and unwanted. Other bore hefty price tags that had been conspicuously marked down. The window was frosting up, but I could see that there were no customers inside. I pushed open the door. Bells mounted on the door jingled ever so slightly, like windchimes attached to a dying bird.

A guy was standing behind the counter. He had brown hair thinning on top, a slight jowl, and an expression that could have frozen red hot coals.

“Hi. How you doing?” I asked.

He stared at me as if I’d just asked him to marry me. “You have to ask?”

I nodded. “Yup. Have to ask. Goes with the job.”

He stared at me for a time longer, not understanding.

“Usually,” I continued, “asking someone how they’re doing is an opening conversational gambit. It’s not something that requires lengthy consideration.”

“I’m doing lousy,” he said. “Business stinks. Life stinks. Who are you, and who wants to know?”

I slid him my card. He stared at it. “Richard Kosmikian, Private Investigator.” Then he looked up at me with some degree of understanding. “You’re Ðìçk Cosmic. The Cosmic Ðìçk.”

“Someone has to be,” I said, wanting to be agreeable.

“You’re not a comic book kind of guy.”

“Got a client,” I said.

“Yeah? Who?”

I hesitated. Usually clients’ names were confidential, but, strictly speaking, he wasn’t my client, since I hadn’t taken the kid’s money. “A kid. Maybe he’s a customer of yours. Billy Gates?”

He blinked. “The computer guy?”

“He didn’t seem to have a computer on him.”

“Hmmm.” The retailer seemed to ponder it for a moment. “So what’s your client want?”

“He wants to know who took the fun out of comics.”

The retailer looked at me as if I’d lost what I laughingly refer to as my mind. “Who took the fun out of comics?” he said so slowly and incredulously that it was as if he was translating my statement from Urdu.

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s easy. The collectors did.”

“The collectors.” Sounded like one of Dean Martin’s old “Matt Helm” movies. “And they are?”

“Scorched-earth people,” said the retailer. “They flooded into the hobby, looking to make a profit. Titles that some retailers used to sell only a couple of dozen of, they were able to sell a couple of hundred. Collectors would buy entire boxes of a single issue. They turned a nice, quiet little hobby into a feeding frenzy. Drove comic book prices up through the roof. Retail outlets started opening up all over the place, because people saw comics as a good business to get into. And then…” His voice trailed off. He looked wistful.

“And then what?”

“And then, when they found that they couldn’t resell their comics for a huge amount of money, they got out of comics completely. Retailers who had expanded their business based on speculator dollars, or had come to base their ordering habits on the inflated quantities required to service the speculators, wound up overextended. Most of the new retailers who materialized because of the speculator craze evaporated, and many others either had to scale way back or go out of business entirely. Either way, the entire thing cast a pall over the industry.”

I could see what he was talking about. I was supposed to be a detective and, at the moment, the main thing I was detecting was a distant, rancid smell wafting through the air: the smell of plummeting sales, of decay, and of mounting panic. People were wondering just how much more sales could drop.

Sales kept hitting rock bottom and crashing through it, like characters in a Jules Verne novel descending to the Earth’s core. Except the way the comic book industry was going, it seemed as if they would burrow straight through the earth’s core, come out the other side, and fall off the planet altogether.

“Is anybody doing well?” I asked.

He shrugged. “People who have a really solid customer base are managing to hold their own. They haven’t gone under. But I don’t think anybody is expanding any more. The only thing expanding is the level of debt people owe.”

“Thanks,” I said, nodding. I turned and headed for the door, then stopped briefly to glance back at the retailer. He looked much as he had when I first entered, so I walked back, picked up a comic book almost at random, and plunked down 10¢.

If I’d placed a moon rock in front of him for payment, he couldn’t have looked more surprised. “Are you kidding?” he asked.

I looked at the dime. “It’s American money. This is America. You telling me it’s no good?”

“Check the price, oh great detective.”

I did and couldn’t believe it. “A buck ninety-five?” I choked out.

“That’s one of the cheaper ones.”

I couldn’t believe it. When I was a kid, you plunked down a dime and got a thick funnybook with a story about guys in funny costumes beating the snot out of each other. This thing was a thin, nothing of a comic. I flipped through it. Barely two dozen pages. The art looked a lot more frenetic than the old days, and the paper was so shiny that James Bond could have used it to deflect a laser beam. The only similarity to the old days was that there were still guys in funny costumes beating the snot out of each other. The only difference in that seemed to be, at a cursory glance, that there wasn’t a story: just the beating.

Two bucks for 10 minutes’ entertainment?

Still, I should really be doing my research.

I pulled out two bucks and forked them over. “Keep the change,” I said.

“I was going to,” said the retailer. “Every nickel matters.”

I left the store and its air of desperation behind me, taking in the comparatively bracing smell of the falling snow. I could easily see why the Gates kid felt as if the fun was slipping away from him. Comic book stores, once upon a time, must have been a haven for kids like that: a “home away from home,” where they could chat with retailers and other fans, get excited about their hobby. But with the air of desperation throughout the industry, comic book stores were no longer a safe harbor any more. Indeed, it seemed nowhere was safe.

I stepped under a nearby awning and flipped to an advertisement in the back. There I discovered a couple of “private collectors” advertising their collections for sale. All of them were through post office boxes, and I recognized one as being at a post office about two blocks away. I had a friend (a former fiancée, in point of fact) who worked there. She was extremely valuable to me, because she was disgruntled and, therefore, willing to help me out with the little project I had in mind (although, being disgruntled, she did have an unhealthy tendency to eye my gun longingly).

An hour and a half later, I was at the apartment of one Chet Watkins. He seemed eager to have me into his apartment, which put my guard up immediately. Watkins was as fat as a beach ball and seemed to have a similar bounce as he ricocheted around his crammed domicile. There were baseball cards all over the place, crammed into box after box. Comic books were stacked up in boxes. I reached into another box and pulled out a small round disk with a picture of somebody I didn’t recognize on it.

“Pogs,” said Chet. “Still big in some places, but I think it’s going to be time to unload soon. I haven’t always been the greatest when it comes to picking a time to dump.”

I glanced around at his box-filled domicile and couldn’t help but nod my head. I glanced at a box of foil-wrapped packages that appeared to be cards, but the box was decorated differently. “More baseball cards?”

“Magic cards.”

“Do they still make a ‘thwip thwip’ sound if you stick them in your bicycle spokes?”

He looked at me oddly. I get that a lot. “I guess they would.”

“That’s the only magic cards ever had for me.” I couldn’t help but stare. In every corner there seemed to be something else. Action figures, model kits, and toys, all in their original packaging. Various editions of books—even galley proofs. I said, “A retailer told me that collectors have stolen the fun in comics. What do you say to that?”

“That’s ridiculous,” he snorted. “First off, collectors and speculation have been part of comics for decades. Look.” He pulled off the top of one box and hauled out a plastic-bagged comic. I squinted at the title.

“Howard the Duck? Wasn’t that a really bad movie?”

“Eventually. Once upon a time, this comic book was worth a ton. Now nobody cares.” He tossed it back in the box. “We made people a ton of money, went out on limbs. We were out there with everybody else, helped expand the market. And does anybody appreciate us? Does anybody care? No. They try to pin it on us, and it’s not our fault.”

“So whose is it, then?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? The publishers. Sure, there was a collector’s feeding frenzy for a while, but they catered to it. Tried to milk it for all they could, jacked the prices higher and higher, came out with multiple editions, fancy covers, everything they could to suck as much money out of us as they could. We were the freakin’ golden goose, man—and, just like in the story, they gutted us for all they could get. And all they wound up with was egg on their faces.”

“So it’s the publishers, then.”

“That’s where to look, my friend: the publishers. And when you talk to them—give them one for me.”

I nodded and tossed him a little salute that I hoped came across as mildly ironic. As I was heading out, a large bottle caught my eye. I looked at it more closely. “Is that a human brain?”

“Yes. I collect all manner of stuff.”

“Whose is it?”

“Belongs to the chairman on the board of a women’s cosmetic company. I’ve had it for about five, six years now. And his heart’s in the next room.” He looked at me darkly. “Explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

It would have if I’d known what he was talking about. Deciding not to pursue it, I simply nodded and left.

I stepped out onto the street, and the snow was coming down harder. I lit up a cigarette, trying to get this sorted out. Thus far, this case seemed like the most impressive waste of time ever—and that in a career that had had a lot of wasted time in it.

The snow was coming down harder as I took a drag, blissful smoke filling my lungs. I took stock of where I stood. The reality was that I had a non-paying client who had asked me to check out what amounted to a loss of innocence on his part. There was some major-league finger-pointing going on. Beyond that, I really didn’t have much of anything to go on. Didn’t have much of a case. Didn’t even really know or understand what the case was.

I decided that I’d had more than enough. What was I supposed to do? Go stomping into the office of some publisher and demand restitution for the hurt feelings of a dissatisfied customer? Enough was enough. Ðìçk Cosmic, the Cosmic Ðìçk, was going to pack it in, head back to the office, go over the latest array of bills, toss them in the trash, and call it a night.

I took about two steps in the direction of the subway, and then a fist the size of a canned ham caught me just under the jaw. Never even saw it coming. I didn’t even have a chance to get a word out. I just went down like I’d been pole-axed.

I was face down in the snow, observing from a mental distance that it was odd the snow was red rather than its customary dirty white. Just about the time I realized the reason for the coloration—namely that my nose was in the process of redesigning the color scheme—the same meaty fist hauled me to my feet. The plug ugly glared at me with eyes that somehow had managed to elude a couple million years of evolution. Standing next to him, he had a crony who seem marginally more advanced. Early Cro-Magnon, by my guess.

“Drop this comic book case,” grunted Alley Oop.

“Okay,” I said. I’d found in the past, in instances like this, that it paid to be agreeable.

It didn’t help this time. They looked at each other, decided without saying a word that they were dissatisfied with my response (verbal communication not being necessary, since I believed they shared one brain), and proceeded to smear me all over the landscape.

They left me lying in the snow once again. As I heard them trudge off through the snow, the last thing that occurred to me before I slid into a black haze was that if the collector wanted any more brains, I should offer to sell him mine. God knows I wasn’t making any use of it.

To Be Continued

Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, by the way, reports that the response to this column’s little fund-raising campaign has been phenomenal. Keep those cards and dollars rolling in.