The Funnies (26 page)

The first thing I saw entering was an enormous woman, stout and dense like a cannonball, wearing a studded leather bikini and scabbard. The latter contained an ornate medieval sword. The former contained, barely, the woman. She was standing at a chipped folding buffet table where two men sat wearing Star Trek Federation uniforms and Spock ears. The three looked up at me at once, goggling as if I was the one in the weird getup.

“Uh, is this the conference?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” said one of the men. “Are you a visitor or a participant, or what are you?”

“Mostly a visitor. I'm supposed to be on a panel.”

The other man, who was smaller, began rifling through a clipboardful of papers. “What's your name?” this one said.

“Tim Mix.”

A lot of shuffling and frowning. The big lady sidled off, resting a palm on the hilt of her sword. I looked down the hall in the direction she'd gone and saw a diverse and clumsy menagerie of people, bizzarely costumed: a space suit, some kind of animal with a lot of tentacles, a wizard and a witch ducking hand in hand into a brightly lit doorway. “I don't see you here,” said the small Spock. “M—I—X, right?”

“Yes,” I said, still watching the crowd. Then something occurred to me. “This is the cartoonists' conference, isn't it?”

“Oh, no!” said the tall Spock, and they both laughed. “This is JerCon! We're a science fiction conference! Your con is down the hall.”

“Ah,” I said. “Thanks.”

Sure enough, there was another table at the other end of the hallway. From a distance it appeared to be staffed by contemporary earthlings in conventional clothes. I made my way past the sci-fi people, peeking into ballrooms and meeting rooms. Racks of paperbacks and comic books, loud laughs from panel discussions, where characters in and out of costume spoke from behind microphones set up on table stands. I had no trouble getting registered for the cartoonists' conference, was given a schedule and a hello-my-name-is pin with TIM MIX laser-printed onto it. Next to my name, seemingly questioning the legitimacy of my attendance, was a winking Dogberry, the wily and irreverent canine hero of “Art's Kids.” I looked at my schedule. Art Kearns himself was the grand master of the conference, and would deliver a closing speech at tomorrow night's awards dinner. He would be on hand afterward to give drawings and autographs to his fans.

I scanned the list of participants, and came across some of the most famous names in cartooning: Leslie Parr, Kelsey Hoon, dozens of others I knew from my daily perusal of the funnies.

Which, I suddenly realized, I hadn't read all summer. Pierce didn't subscribe to a newspaper, and apparently neither had my dad. Oddly enough, I hadn't even missed them. I made a mental note to pick up a paper and read it sometime over the weekend, if for no other reason than to see what strips of my father's the syndicate was running, now that he was dead.

Meanwhile, the convention people had apparently gotten the news of his death too late to remove him from the list of participants. There he was, drawing and signing in the Red Room, speaking at a panel in the Blue Room, debating Tyro, author of the minimalist strip “The Emerald Forest,” in the Brown Room. I wondered who they had gotten to replace him: hopefully not me. I looked at the schedule for Sunday and found:

I guessed I was to be in the Green Room at eleven the next day, and decided to attend a panel debate, to see what was expected of me. I was beginning to get excited—not just about the conference, but about cartooning and being a cartoonist. I was feeling, for the first time, a part of something.

I looked at my watch—my father's watch. Ten o'clock. According to the schedule, no panel discussions were going on. All right, fine. Somebody named Sybil Schimmelpfennig was drawing and signing in the Blue Room, and since an open door nearby bore a felt-tip-markered sign reading “Blue,” I went in.

The room was not exactly empty, but it was far from its capacity of about a hundred and fifty people. There were maybe thirty gathered around a table at the front, most of them gnawing on donuts and sipping coffee from paper cups, chatting animatedly to one another. A woman sat at the table, her head of dark shiny hair bent over, twitching with the motion of her drawing arm.

It might have been a sixth sense, or perhaps just dumb logic, that made me realize this must be
the
Sybil, author of the strip “Sybil.” “Sybil” didn't run in the Philly
Inquirer
, so I didn't get to read it often, but it had spawned a fairly massive T-shirt and coffee mug industry and was therefore familiar. Its basic premise was this: Sybil was a thirtyish woman who worked in an office, and she complained about things. The main things she complained about were men, clothes and food. Recurrent characters were the coworker who always had good luck with men, the department store clerk who sold Sybil clothes, and the deli clerk who made the sandwiches Sybil ate and which made Sybil fat, or so she thought. Sybil always wore black: a black blouse with a white star on the chest, and either black pants or a black skirt. The oddness of the star—what kind of office worker wore such clothes, let alone all the time?—was lost in its ubiquity. Sybil posters were almost inevitable in any office. In them, Sybil was generally seated behind a desk, the papers in her “in” box towering unsteadily over the pile in her “out,” and she wore an expression of resigned exasperation. Or, in an alternate poster, usually hung in office break rooms, Sybil sat behind an enormous slice of pie, grinning coyly and saying something like “I shouldn't…”

I walked to the front of the Blue Room, which was not blue, stepping over a crushed glazed donut that had been ground into the carpet by someone's heel. I listened in for a moment to the conversation coming in stifled bursts through mouthsful of food. People were talking about other conferences they'd been to. Sybil herself finished up the drawing she was working on and handed it to a thickset woman with puffy yellow hair, who thanked her politely. Sybil nodded and grinned. “Any time,” she said. She was dressed exactly the same as her cartoon self, down to the white star. It wasn't the usual pointy American-flag star, but a bulgy one, like a child's toy.

“Hi there,” she said. “How do you want it?”

She was talking to me. I came to the table and rested my hand on the edge. Sybil Schimmelpfennig's face, the thin, translucent kind of face you'd expect would flinch whenever it was looked at, was as twitchless and composed as a hunk of marble, and frozen into a grin so fiercely welcoming that I thought she must be mad. She had an unusually large chin. I said, “Uh, want what?”

“Your drawing. What do you want Sybil to be saying? Something about your girlfriend or boss, maybe? What do you do for a living?”

I considered my answer, as Sybil clearly grew impatient. “I'm a cartoonist, actually.”

“No kidding?” she said. “What strip?”

“I'm taking over the Family Funnies.”

Her expression at last changed, taking on a manipulative edge that unnerved me. She looked like she knew something about me I didn't. “Ohhh. You're Tim Mix.”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry to hear about your dad.”

“Yeah.”

“Right, so…” Expectant smirk.

“So what?”

“So what do you want here?” She swirled her pen hand in the air, pretending to draw. It was a felt-tip, which explained the characteristic fuzziness of “Sybil.” I was thrown, confused that she still assumed I wanted a drawing now that we had been established as professional equals.

“Uh, I don't know,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

She raised her eyebrows, making my statement seem, in retrospect, provocative. Then her hand flashed into action, squeaking across the paper like a cornered rat, leaving heads, hands, faces in its wake. She was the fastest draw I'd ever seen. She talked to me as she worked. “I'll make you as many as you want, Tim. I love doing it. I don't feel like a full person when I'm not drawing.” I noticed now, clipped into her breast pocket beside the star, a row of fresh black pens. “I draw in the steam on the bathroom mirror. I walk past people's cars and draw in the dust on their doors and windows.”

“Wow,” I said.

She finished with a bizarre flourish, continuing the tangled loop-the-loops at the end of her signature right out into the air, where she swirled the pen around for several seconds before showing me the drawing. It was rough, but looked right out of the “Sybil” strip: Sybil sitting on a bar stool next to a man, both of them with outsized martini glasses in their hands. Both figures had those bubbles over their heads that indicated drunkenness: squeans.

“Whaddya think?” she said, twirling the pen between her fingers.

“Great,” I said. “Nice squeans.”

“How about you?”

I looked up, feeling the conversation veer away. “How about me what?”

“You,” she said, pointing. I inspected the drawing a second time and recognized that the man on the stool was me, getting drunk with Sybil. She had rendered me with cruel accuracy, exaggerating the thinness of my face and the obstinate rumpledness of my hair, and had given my eyes and mouth the same puzzled anxiety they were likely to betray were the scene to take place in real life. “Let's get together in the hotel bar tonight. A lot of the other cartoonists are going to be there. Besides, we have a lot to talk about.”

“Really?”

“Our common work, for one thing.”

“Cartooning.”

She handed me the drawing, which I didn't want. I folded it as politely as I could and put it in my pocket, while she moved her head from side to side, indicating my failure to pick up my side of the conversation. “Not
just.”
When I didn't respond, she threw up her hands. “Duh,” she said. “We both draw
ourselves
for a living.”

“Oh! I guess that's true.”

“Duh,” she said again, and then it was someone else's turn to talk to her.

* * *

I figured I should call Bobby, as I needed a place to stay. I found a bank of pay phones in the hallway, right in the middle of the sci-fi conference. It seemed the science fiction people, with their outlandish outfits and elaborate imaginary personae, were having a better time than the cartoonists. They all appeared to know each other from way back, perhaps from chance interactions at far-flung intergalactic spaceports, and greeted one another with everything from solemn high-fives to glottal sputterings in invented languages. Samantha answered my call with the strangely formal “Mix residence, can I help you?”

“Samantha, it's your uncle Tim.”

“Hi…” She dragged out the word, filling up space.

“How are you doing? No school today, right?”

“It's
summer
,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Listen, can I talk to your dad? I'm in the area and I thought I might visit.”

“Is Uncle Pierce coming?”

“I'm afraid not,” I said.

“Oh,” said Samantha, and the phone clunked down and I heard her call Bobby.

JerCon participants passed by as I waited, leaving the smell of makeup and sweat in their wake. Close up, they looked like they had just crawled out from under damp tarps. Presently I heard Bobby pick up the phone and clear his throat. “Hello,” he said, “this is Robert Mix, can I help you?”

“Bobby, it's Tim.” I told him where I was and suggested we meet for dinner. “I'd love to get together with just you guys. You and Nancy and Sam.”

He thought about this awhile. “Dinner,” he said, as if eating in the evening were a quaint, antiquated custom, like wearing goggles while driving a car. “I don't know.”

I was unable to contain myself. “Really?”

“Well. Nancy might be planning something.”

“You could ask her.”

“Hmm.”

“I'll do the dishes.”

If he was offended by this, he made no sign. “Just a moment,” he said, and I heard a beep, and then some quiet, vapid music. I thought:
Hold?!?
He has
hold
at
home?
I was still sorting this out in my head when he came back on the line.

“Why don't you eat with us?” he said, like it was his idea. “We're having roast.”

“Great! Can you come pick me up? Pierce has the car.”

“Pick you up,” he said. “Yes, okay, sure.”

When we hung up, it occurred to me that I had planned to ask him other favors: if I could stay over, if I could perhaps borrow the car during the evening, to go back to the hotel. I was warming up to the drinks-at-the-bar idea. But I thought that Bobby might short-circuit under the strain of such difficult questions, and decided to hold off until we'd eaten. Until around eight, I was set. I consulted my conference schedule and stepped out, into the fray.

I slipped into the Red Room, where a panel discussion was already in progress. It was called “Drawing Animals.” I recognized one of the participants immediately: Kelsey Hoon. Hoon drew “Whiskers,” of course. I knew him from an American Express commercial he once did, in which he ate dinner with an animated version of his cartoon cat. The cat ate everything, including the dinners of the restaurant's other patrons, who seemed unfazed by his presence: their expressions of alarm as he tipped their plates into his mouth gave way to the charmed smiles of the newly lobotomized. Kelsey Hoon had to pay for everyone's meal: thank goodness for American Express. Hoon was a round little person with thick round eyeglasses and a childish affect. In another life he might have been a zealous scoutmaster, the kind of man kids love and adults fear. He was the one talking while I found an empty seat.