The Funnies (27 page)

“Oh, no!” he said, giggling. “Certainly you must use thought bubbles! Never speech bubbles! Animals can't talk, in the strictest sense.”

There were three other cartoonists up there, identified by little name placards. Dave Guest drew an all-animal strip called “The Island,” about a group of animals stranded on a desert island together. One of the characters was a seagull, who for some reason never flew off to find rescuers. I imagined that Dave Guest caught a lot of crap about this. Another cartoonist was named Jane Wooley. I had never heard of her. The fourth was Tyro.

Tyro was a young turk in the cartooning business. His strip, “The Emerald Forest,” was very popular in college newspapers and urban free weeklies. It had a cast of four: two self-loathing gay woodchucks who lived in a tree and often threatened each other with knives; a cute bunny who never spoke and who endured the unrelenting abuse of the woodchucks; and a sexy human waitress with a ruined face, named Naomi. Naomi worked at the café where the woodchucks and bunny hung out. The bunny was named Eldridge. Both woodchucks were named Laird.

Dave Guest said, “Now, Kelsey, that simply isn't true. My strip is an all-animal strip, you see, and therefore the animals can speak freely to one another using voice bubbles. There is that…suspension of disbelief, you see.” Dave Guest was thin, his face dominated by a wide, gleaming forehead and a pointed chin. “Now our colleague from the dark side here is a different story…”

“Tyro!” said Kelsey Hoon. “Yes, you have both a human and animals in your strips, yet you allow them to speak to one another.”

“And the bunny never speaks!” said Guest.

“Indeed!” said Hoon. “Now why is that?”

Tyro was not entirely visible from the audience, and people were craning their necks to get a glimpse. He was pale, about my age, with no hair, a hard, shellshocked face and a leather jacket. He slouched in his seat, one elbow flung up above the back of the chair.

His voice came clearly, though he was nowhere near his microphone. “It just is. That's the stupidest question I've ever heard.”

“But it can be so
disconcerting
, you see,” said Dave Guest. A murmur boiled through the crowd. Dave Guest was grimacing, holding out his empty hands as if Tyro might put the solution to this problem right into them, like a gaily wrapped present.

“That's the entire
point
,” said Tyro, leaning forward now, the mike amplifying his voice to a stadium-style roar. “It's
supposed
to be disconcerting. That's the
point.”

“But is that what the people want?” asked Hoon.

“I don't give a shit what people want. I'm an artist, not a goddam short order cook.”

This silenced Hoon and Guest for a moment, and threw the crowd into a moderate hubbub. The previously silent Jane Wooley produced, seemingly out of nowhere, a gavel, which she banged on the table. The mikes fed back. The crowd covered their ears. “I like ‘The Emerald Forest,'” she said. “I understand Mr. Tyro's gist, if you will. His strip's not for everybody.”

“You mean it's not for the hoi polloi,” Guest said. “We're just not smart enough?”

“Oh, very good!” said Hoon.

Jane Wooley shook her head. “No, no! I'm just saying it doesn't have to be a popularity contest, is all.” It might have been the name, but Jane really did appear wooly to me, with a thick ball-shaped head of curly hair and soft, sagging, unfocused eyes. “There aren't many humans in my strip, and the animals actually talk to each other, and they think to each other only around the humans. I'm just saying there are a hundred ways to handle this problem.”

“What's your strip called again, Jane?” said Guest, and the crowd booed him. He shrugged, as if he didn't know why they were so upset.

“Now, now, David,” Hoon said.

“Oh, I suppose that may have cut a little too close to the quick.”

Tyro finally interrupted this with a shout. “Who cares?” he yelled. “What fucking difference does it make?” At this, Dave Guest made a stunned, offended face, the kind that is supposed to seem private but is in fact for the benefit of everyone. “I don't know what we're debating about. You people are so attached to your cute little furry animals and your goddam stupid diet jokes that you don't have the time to think about art! You don't care about ambition, or…or genius!” Flustered, he fell back into his chair.

Kelsey Hoon and Dave Guest leaned over the table, exchanging looks past Tyro. “Goodness, Dave,” Hoon asked the microphone. “Do you know any geniuses?”

“Well, let's see, Kelsey, I don't believe I do.”

* * *

I hung around afterward, listening in on people's conversations. Kelsey Hoon's voice was easy to pick out from the general din. It was nasal and high-pitched, like an electric drill. He was holding forth to a small coterie of admirers, which I situated myself on the edge of to listen.

“Oh yes!” he was saying. “There really is a Whiskers! He's a good little boy, a fat little boy.” His face lit up at the mention of his cat, and the faces in the little group lit up with it, in a chain reaction of disturbing good will.

“How old is he?” someone asked.

“We're not so sure, you know, but our vet believes fifteen. Or older!” He launched into a description of the cat's daily activities, which in its advanced age seemed limited to sleeping, eating from a bowl and prowling senselessly around the apartment, bumping into things. Kelsey Hoon was riveted by all this, as were his admirers, but I could only appreciate it on the level of intense ironic detachment, which today I was not up to. I moved on.

I found Tyro lurking in a corner of the room, talking to a teenage girl in a halter top and torn jeans. She was nodding vigorously while he talked, which he did without altering his posture—a precarious slouch against the edge of a table—or expression. When I got closer I saw that his eyes were closed. He didn't open them when the girl pressed a little piece of paper into his hand and slunk away, or when I walked up to him and said hello.

“Hey,” said Tyro, in a parched, uninflected voice, the kind you'd expect to hear from a gas station attendant in a backwater New Mexican town. We were standing next to the unfolded accordion “wall” between this makeshift room and the next, and I could see the motion of feet beneath it.

“I'm Tim Mix,” I said. I told him I was taking over the Family Funnies. He opened his eyes at this. They were dark and small and set far apart on his face.

“Ah,” he said. “The enemy.”

“You were the last person I expected to see at this thing.”

He hauled himself into a standing position and crossed his arms. “If I'd known you existed, I would have been expecting you, I guess.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket—wasn't he overheated in leather?—and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, then lit one. This was probably not allowed, but he didn't seem worried. He didn't offer me one. “So,” he said, entering into conversation with visible emotional strain. “What brings you here?”

I told him about Burn Features and the struggle for my future. I don't know why I wanted to do this. Something made me feel we were on the same side, though it was clear that Tyro didn't consider anyone to be on his side. I breathlessly asked him why he had come.

He said that his syndicate—Fake Comix, Inc.—offered to send him. “Free motherfucking weekend in hell, that's why I'm here, Tim.” He inhaled deeply on the cigarette, obviously enjoying it. “I won't be back next time around, you can bet on that. I might not even be back tomorrow.”

“That was some debate,” I said, with more than a little irony. He didn't catch it.

“It's a minimalist strip. None of these assholes understands the aesthetic.”

“Oh, I do,” I said. “I was in college when you started it. It was my favorite strip.”

He frowned. “What about now?”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now. Like, the present day? Or are you too busy fucking with your bread machine to taste human pain?” He threw the cigarette down on the carpet half-smoked and ground it out with his shoe.

I could easily have been offended, but I found myself sunk into a trenchant sympathy for Tyro. The fact was, I related to him personally much better than I did to his work. “The Emerald Forest” was funny, and wasn't like anything else, but was so aggressively and selfconsciously bleak that it came off, to anyone over the age of twenty-two, as more than a little quaint. Case in point: a recent strip consisted of sixteen panels. In the first, Laird and Laird were joylessly hunting rabbit, with Eldridge along for the trip, smiling his customary wide-eyed, drugged smile. In the second panel they shot a rabbit who looked exactly like Eldridge. In the third they skinned it, and in the fourth they set it aboil in a pot. The next eleven panels were identical: Eldridge watched the pot, grinning. The final panel was just like the previous eleven except that Eldridge had a fat, glistening tear hanging from his left eye.

That was it. Most of the Emerald Forest strips were just like this, so earnestly, familiarly grim that looking at Tyro's work every week could become a form of comfort, like a manicure, or a pint of ice cream eaten in one sitting. In this way the strip was no different from the Family Funnies, which at least had as many as four or five gags going for it, as opposed to Tyro's one.

The crack about the bread machine took the wind out of him. He slumped back against the table. We were in the same boat: about to make a buck and glad of it. I had heard rumors that there was going to be an Emerald Forest television cartoon; in it, the Lairds were said to be heterosexual and a new character was in the works, a fast-talking chipmunk with a Japanese accent. Tyro had not publicly denied this.

“No, I still like it,” I said. “Really.” I reached out and touched the arm of his leather jacket. I couldn't feel a real arm under there. “Hey, do you know Sybil Schimmelpfennig?” I surprised myself at how fluidly the name rolled off my tongue, like a much-rehearsed line from a German opera.

“‘Sybil' Sybil?”

“Yeah,” I said. I pulled the drawing she had made me out of my pants pocket. “She said people are going to be drinking at the hotel bar. You ought to go.”

He took the drawing and gave it a cursory look before handing it back. “I hear she's a man-eater.”

“I kind of doubt that,” I said.

* * *

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around, looking for Art Kearns. He was supposed to be at a debate about the thematic shift in comics after the second World War, but somebody in the Blue Room told me he had laryngitis and was roaming the Ballroom floor instead. The Ballroom was set up as a huge fair, with booth upon booth of comics dealers, merchandise hucksters and collecting freaks arranged in long rows. A few people from the sci-fi conference had wandered in, and loomed near the outer-space-related comic books, pawing over piles of rarities and obscurities tucked into acetate envelopes. I didn't see Art Kearns anywhere, although I hadn't seen a recent photo and was looking, mostly, for an old man wearing glasses.

Several times I thought that the experience would be a lot more fun with Susan around. She would have stories about people. We could get some food together, and probably she would pay for it. My missing her had manifested itself, thus far, only in terms of doing things—looking for people, eating, taking in the novel or unusual—and was therefore, I thought, safe. At the same time it seemed unwise to dwell on her. What difference did it make, I thought, if I was with her or by myself? I could have a good time alone.

And so I did, sort of. I polished off the final hours of the day sitting on a canvas stool next to one collector's booth, reading. The collector had only “Art's Kids” paraphernalia, and had apparently gone to high school with Kearns in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was a willowy, grayhaired old man with a high, mirthful laugh, and he let me flip through everything.

There was one, a full-color Sunday strip, that I read over and over. In it, Dogberry is lying on the floor, waiting to be fed. He licks his chops, scans the room just like an ordinary dog. Then, exasperated, he walks to the kitchen, opens the cupboard, takes out a can of food, opens it with an electric can opener, and dumps it into his own bowl, where he sets upon it with delighted relish. The thought bubble above him reads: “Persistent problems demand extraordinary measures.”

As I walked out to the lobby to meet Bobby, that's what stuck with me: persistent problems demand extraordinary measures. That, and the image of a dog, your common retriever, effortlessly manipulating a human tool with his clumsy paws, steadying the rotating can with a single extended toenail.

Bobby pulled up alone. He was wearing a pair of pleated khaki slacks, a green golf shirt and elaborate running shoes, and looked like someone he'd hire to spray insecticide on the lawn. The air conditioning in the car was going full blast and it chilled the evaporating sweat off my arms fast enough to make me swoon.

“Bobby!” I said. “It's great to see you.”

“Good!” He patted my leg, just above the knee, then used the same hand to scratch his nose. He pulled out onto the road and pointed us toward Bridgewater proper. “So!” he said, frowning. “A conference, eh?”

“My editor thought it would be a good idea.”

“Sure, sure. Cartoons and all.”

“You bet.”

There was a tape playing on the radio of some New Age music accompanied by the sound, alternately, of crashing waves, a rainforest and wind. It was like being whisked from Nantucket to Borneo to the Canadian prairie, over and over. With growing horror, I realized that we had already exhausted our supply of conversation, and I fell into a mild panic. “What's this music?” I asked Bobby, whom I had never known to listen to any music at all.