“The Cape Dripped Red” Part V (Conclusion)

Originally published February 9, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1160

Previous installments: Part I – Part II – Part III – Part IV

I was staring at the wall.

This entire business had started small with a request by a kid named Billy Gates (who was no relation to some guy that people kept asking me if he was related to) to find out who had taken the fun out of comics.

The trail had led me in a giant circle, going from retailer to speculator to publisher to distributor and back to retailer. Each one pointed the finger of blame at the next. Each one had an answer that passed along responsibility to someone else.

And, in the wake of my investigation, there had been a massive purging of people from one of the major comic book companies. I found myself ankle-deep in devastation.

Then I had faced down two goons at a comic book warehouse—and they had vanished beneath a massive pile of comics.

It was at this point—the point were they had literally disappeared into thin air—that I knew this was more than your standard-issue case: more than just a disillusioned kid and more than a couple of crazed wackos deciding to single-handedly depopulate the comic book industry.

This was no longer the sad case of a kid who had outgrown his hobby. This was a case where considerable forces had been marshaled for one reason and one reason only: to eliminate the beloved super-hero funny books of yore.

You see, bad guys don’t evaporate into nothingness in your standard-issue case. It’s impossible. I’ve always gone by my own version of Sherlock Holmes’ axiom: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And when you eliminated the impossible and the improbable, whatever remains must be a case for Ðìçk Cosmic, the Cosmic Ðìçk.”

I’d done further checking, exploring the possibility of a plot by the smaller independent companies. But that was something of a dead end.

As near as I could tell, the indies were perfectly content to wait for the large companies to die a slow and hideous death. They were even, to some degree, enjoying it. Kind of similar to the thrill one gets from watching a factory fire or, in prehistoric days, of watching a dinosaur sink deep into tar.

I’d gone back to my office and thought about it all. Thought about what anyone had had to gain. As near as I could tell, the supply side had been dominated by greed. Greed up and down the line. Greed that had seen the golden eggs plopping steadily out of the golden goose’s business end.

None of them had understood that that golden egg was really symbolic of the trust and enjoyment that kids had for their four-color hobby, plowing their money and support into the direct market. Instead, everyone who had had a financial stake in the comics market had ruthlessly attacked the golden goose, gutted that poor creature, and found themselves getting the bird.

But there was a pattern to it all. It had all evolved—or mutated—too quickly, one thing on top of another, all combining to destroy the simple joys of the super-hero funny book. Within the past year or so, it had had a sort of evil synchronicity, everything slamming together into one unstoppable juggernaut of destruction.

Who would be served by that? Who stood to benefit?

Who would trash and destroy a comic book company, leaving paper-thin slices all over the body of the smug company head? Who would have henchmen who could vanish, implying a certain status of abnormality?

Who would be so evil as to destroy the carefully crafted belief in super-heroes that had taken years to develop?

Only one answer, really. Impossible. Improbable. But mine.

I telephoned a friend of mine, Schwartz, in the police lab and called in a favor. I said to him, “Where did you find blood from the big boss at the Major Comic Book Company?”

“Mostly concentrated in his office,” said Schwartz. “On the floor, on the shelf, furniture…”

“Anywhere you didn’t expect to find it?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact. You know those big fiberglass cutouts that hung on the wall in the hallway?”

“You mean the life-sized representations of the characters?”

“Right. Well, some of the Big Boss’ blood was on the villain cutout. The heroes were clean, but the villain was smeared with it. It was halfway down the hall, so the blood couldn’t have spattered on it. We think maybe the murderer either used the cutout as a shield to prevent himself from being splattered…”

“That’s improbable,” I said.

“Or he used it as a weapon to club the Boss to death—except there were no indications of bruises that would have been consistent with such a beating. Just those weird thin cuts all over.”

“So that’s impossible.” I nodded, although naturally he couldn’t see me over the phone. “Okay, thanks, Schwartzy,” and I hung up.

And I knew what had happened.

Which was why I was staring at the wall.

It was the wall inside the now-deserted offices of the Major Comic Book Company. The one that had, overnight, turned from a thriving publishing concern into a morgue. A company that had once had a proud history which was now left in smoking ashes. Destroyed by a plan masterminded by someone who had taken it upon himself to take the fun out of comics.

It was fairly dark, since most of the overhead fluorescents had been shattered during the devastating attack the day before. A couple were still functioning, however, flickering like a neon sign outside a fleabag hotel.

On the wall, just as they had been before, were the wall-mounted cutouts of the company’s pivotal characters. No one had taken the time to clean up the crime scene. In point of fact, no one was supposed to be up here, including a certain tired and saddened private dìçk. But it’s amazing what a well-placed $50 will do in convincing a cash-light janitor to employ his passkey on my behalf.

This meant, of course, that thanks to this case, I was operating about 50 bucks in the hole. More, if I considered a nose job to fix the damage those goons had done by tap-dancing of my face the other day.

There were the heroes, clean of blood, just as they had been before.

And there was the villain, blood on his hands.

The cutout didn’t move.

“It’s pretty obvious, once you leave your mind open to the unusual—which is how most of my cases turn out,” I said. “Who else would be trying to destroy comic books? Who else would be subtly influencing the stories themselves, making them darker, more chaotic? Who else would be manipulating the business side of comics, fostering greed and selfishness?”

The villain simply hung there, immobile, staring at me with his fixed sneer.

“Paper cuts,” I said, hands tucked securely into my coat pockets. “That’s what the Big Boss was covered with. Paper cuts. You satisfied yourself with subtly operating from behind the scenes but, as you became more and more successful, you also became more confident. More arrogant. And then when you realized that someone was poking around—namely me—you decided to go for broke. Just trash the place, cut the staff down to size. Hack and slash, burn and pillage—that’s what your type does, doesn’t it? Nothing else matters except what you want, you selfish, pathetic, sick creeps.”

“All right, that’s enough,” said the villain.

I took a step back and watched as the cutout rippled slightly. And then the villain stepped off from it. He stood in front of me, paper thin. It made sense—he was, after all, a comic book character. If he stood sideways, I wouldn’t even see him.

I looked at the edges of his hands, as wafer-thin as the rest of him. But they were sharp-edged, capable of slicing and dicing with ease.

“You’re very good,” he complimented me. “You realize I will have to kill you.”

“I realize you can try. You going to bring out your goons to help?”

“No, no—I think I can handle you just fine without having to resort to them.”

“Why weren’t they paper-thin, like you?”

“They were. But, you see, they were generic thugs. That type is a dime a dozen.”

“I get it,” I said. “There wasn’t one big gorilla. There were a thousand identical big gorillas, all pushed together flat against one another to give him additional weight and depth. No wonder the punches felt so heavy.”

“Exactly. It’s all that mando—heavy when lots of sheets are compressed together.”

I studied him for a moment. “Aren’t you concerned that, if you destroy super-hero comics, you’ll destroy your own reason for being?”

He spoke to me in an almost detached way, as if barely interested in the fact that I was there. “It will be glorious, you know. Heroes need villains in order to have something to occupy their time. But we villains—we don’t have that problem. Heroes merely get in our way.”

“But if you get rid of comics, then won’t you get rid of yourself, too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snorted contemptuously. Come to think of it, he said and did everything contemptuously. “Villains were around before heroes, and we will be around long after the last hero has faded into oblivion. Our entire world is motivated by evil.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Who was around first? Adam or the serpent?”

My lips thinned into a grimace.

“I rest my case,” he said.

“You took the fun out of comics.”

He shrugged. “It was always an illusion. Do-gooders unselfishly running around in garish outfits, exercising young male power fantasies: It was always stuff and nonsense, idiocy for a dime or 12¢ or $2.95 or whatever it’s up to this week. All I did was slice open an apple that was already rotten to the core.

“Comics have been dying for decades now, dying with the cancer of cynical readers, a downward-spiraling reading level, an upward-spiraling cost factor, a creator base that’s increasingly unable to tell a simple story. A cancer, like I said. Sometimes cancer patients go into remission; that’s what the direct market was. But now the patient’s taken a turn for the worse. The patient’s on his last legs, Cosmic. Face it: The villains have won.”

He took a step toward me, angling his hand, exposing that razor-sharp edge of his.

“Before you kill me,” I told him calmly, “there’s someone who wants to say something to you.”

He frowned, not understanding what I was talking about, and then his attention was caught by the movement of a small form from the shadows.

It was young Billy. Which was hardly a surprise to me, since I’d brought him along.

The villain stared at my young client uneasily. “What’s he doing here?”

“I thought he was entitled.”

Billy’s gaze was unrelenting. He never looked away from the villain. He walked toward him slowly, step by measured step. He was trembling, but whether it was with fear or indignation, it was impossible to tell.

And the villain took a step back—which surprised me, but not entirely.

“What do you want?” demanded the villain. Billy kept looking at him with those big eyes, and now they were starting to moisten. His lower lip was trembling, and the villain saw all that and yelled again, “What do you want?”

In a voice choked with emotion, Billy said, so low that I could barely hear him, “How—how could you?”

“Get him away from me, Cosmic,” warned the villain, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the look of undiluted misery on the boy’s face.

“This is what you wanted,” I told the villain. “Misery. Unhappiness. The triumph of evil. But it’s not on comic book terms anymore. Here he is: a real flesh-and-blood kid, and all the heroes meant something to him. They really meant something that no stock shares, no quarterly reports, no heartless villains or corporate bigwigs could possibly begin to understand. It was something more than a business. It was an ideal.”

I indicated Billy with a gesture as I told the villain, “You screwed with an ideal, and this is the result: unvarnished, undiluted, human unhappiness. Look at it. Deal with it. This is what you did.”

And the tears gushed, uncontrolled, from Billy’s eyes. He tried to wipe them away because he had pretensions of being a macho kid, but he wasn’t successful. As fast as he wiped them away, ten times more tears replaced them. His chest heaved with emotion, and all he kept saying over and over was, “How could you? How could you?”

The villain backpedaled, bumped his back against the wall. “Stop it! Stop that sniveling!”

“You’ve ruined everything!” wailed Billy and he charged forward and began to slam his small fists into the villain’s flat midsection. “I hate you! I hate you!”

His tears fell onto the villain.

The villain screamed, the boy’s tears like acid to him. He rolled back and away, and there were wrinkles all over his torso where the tears had caused him to shrivel. He was gasping for breath, or whatever it was he gasped for. Then he rallied, staggering to his feet. That surprised me; I thought the kid had had him on the ropes.

Like a wounded animal, the villain drew back his paper-thin, razor-like hand. “You almost had me,” he said and swung his hand toward me.

I stepped back, his hand slicing through the dangling collar of my coat, and I pulled out my cigarette lighter. It flared to life and I held it up in front of us, pulling the sobbing Billy back behind me.

“Oooh, I’m scared,” said the villain. And he blew out the flame.

“You should be,” I said, and from inside the lining of my jacket I pulled out my acetylene torch. His eyes widened in fear as he scrambled back, too late.

“Hot off the presses,” I said and unleashed a jet of flame that engulfed him. He staggered, shrieking, as flames tore through his body, twisted and writhed. Little pieces of him flew off in all directions. The sprinkler system went off, but he wasn’t going to get away that easily. I kept feeding the fire into him, his every effort to get up thwarted by another blast of flame. The carpet caught fire, took on a life of its own. I could swear I heard the fire laughing at the villain, laughing at me. Who knew what was possible in this place, after all, because, once upon a time, dreams had lived there?

He had stopped moving, his body nothing but ashes, and the fire continued. There was no stopping it. I grabbed Billy up, tucking him under my arm as if he were a football, with the fire in—you should pardon the expression—hot pursuit. I charged down the corridor as all around me furniture, carpeting, artwork hanging from the walls—all of it—went up in flames.

I slammed through the fire door, nearly dislocating my shoulder, and darted down the fire exit steps. I put Billy on his feet and he followed me, silent now, as if he’d cried his heart out and had nothing left to produce.

By the time we made it to the front sidewalk, we could hear the wail of fire sirens in the distance. “Might not be a bad idea to get moving, kid,” I said. “I got a feeling there’s going to be lots of questions we’d be a lot more comfortable not answering.”

We took a cab to his home. His parents thought he was at a friend’s house playing video games, which was probably all they should know. He said nothing the entire ride, but when we got to his doorstep he turned to me and simply said, “Wait here.”

I shrugged and waited.

He went into the house and a minute or so later came out carrying a large box. I opened the cab door and he dropped the box onto the seat. I looked inside.

“Comics?” I asked.

He nodded. “I know you didn’t want to take my money. Take these, okay? They’re my best comics. Maybe they’ll be worth something in resale. Or maybe you’ll want to keep them. Whatever you want.”

“Look, kid, I’m not going to…”

And he put up a hand to silence me and said, “They don’t mean anything to me any more. Maybe they’ll mean something to you.”

Without another word he turned and walked away. I sat there as the door closed behind him.

I pulled out a comic book at random and looked at the cover.

It was an old one, with a character whom I hadn’t thought about in years—except now he came back to me with all the imaginative force that a childhood fancy can invest.

Maybe they’ll mean something to you.

“Y’know,” I said softly, “maybe they will, at that.”

And I went back to my office, where I slept these days. I kept it dark at night so as not to attract attention, except that this night I lay on the floor with a flashlight and read until I fell asleep.

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