Shadows Out of Time

I opened the other comic. This one, The Sandman, came from the second series of that name, not the original Fox and Christman stuff, not the later, better Gaiman. Instead, Kirby’s garish, grandiose, wide-eyed style stared back. It showed my father and me biking from our apartment in Phoenix to a Rexall Drugstore, way out on the edge of town. We biked a lot together then. In the story, we rode toward a specific goal, my dad trying to help me find the latest issue of a comic I’d actually begun collecting. This one was supposed to have Man-Bat fighting the Dark Knight. On our way home, we pedaled our way through a park and arrived at a creek where my dad tried to jump the lip of a concrete bridge. He flew over the handlebars and landed smack-damn on the middle of his belly. It winded him so much he couldn’t talk. I stood over him, fanning him with World’s Finest.

She-Hulk told the tale of our family trip to Disneyland, when we stopped on the way at the Painted Desert, at the Grand Canyon, and, penultimately, at Bedrock, mock-up of an already outdated cartoon, and the saddest place on earth. All the stone-age homes, carved ostensibly from granite, showed signs of serious degradation. Chicken wire, crumbling stucco, the horrors of time and inattention. A short feature in the back highlighted my dad slapping Delia in front of an Allosaurus. A flash-forward showed him feeling ashamed for years after.

One issue of Heavy Metal contained a series of interconnected tales involving his grade school years, his growing interest in art and shop. His first failure in any class ever, Driver’s Ed. Evidently he had to take his driving test in a school bus. These were stories I’d never known before.

Neal Adams’ Batman told tales of our late nights playing poker with Monopoly money, struggling through the 221B Baker Street boardgame. An extra story, nestled toward the end of the comic, showed my father leaning over his ledgers, crying, trying to deduce the name of a villain, any villain, touching each red number, real money spent on my mom.

Jack Kirby’s Machine Man illustrated the work my dad did in Nichols Hills for years. The beautiful inlays and woodwork he created. All the terrible people who didn’t appreciate it.

Ms. Marvel explored the night he tried to get my mother back, offering to return her diamond property. The epilogue made it clear he failed to read the fine print.

The last comic I released from its polyurethane prison was a first issue of Epic Illustrated. I remembered this one from the Eighties. Full color, fine art, an attempt to steal the market from Heavy Metal.

The cover by Frank Frazetta didn’t connect in any way to the story of an Oklahoma boy who grew up poor and bright and talented, a boy who gave up his dreams for family, who collected comics and tried to pass that love on to his only son, who came to his son’s plays but wanted more for his legacy’s legacy, who, before the marriage and kids and eventual divorce, before the exile to Arizona and a rocky return, before the disillusionment and despair, before years of living alone and the seemingly arbitrary death sentence of Alzheimer’s, one Christmas morning, when he was five, got the one thing he had asked for from his dad…an eraser.

No, the cover, a grey-scale tableau of Roman soldiers bestriding a cliff, didn’t seem to signify that tiny, povertyplagued man who was — is — my father. But the story inside moved me to tears, dredging up the previous morning’s memory, a memory decidedly not comic, the memory I’d tried to avoid all day, all night. The memory of a phone call in whose service I wrecked my car.

“Daniel, we have to move him to a dedicated memory facility.”

“Why? I thought Delia was able to manage him.”

“It’s gotten…difficult. We’re running out of clothes. He isn’t able to…”

“Oh. Okay. But you said…”

“I know. We said a lot of things, Danny. It’s hard.”

“Sorry. Sorry. So what’s the plan?”

“They told us we should take him to the facility for dinner.”

“Um…That’s it?”

“No. We take him to dinner there…” She paused. A long pause. “…and leave him.”

“Leave him?”

“Yeah.” I could hear the horror in her voice. Horror, resignation. “And no contact from any of us for three weeks.”

I felt my heart beating in my brain, my scrotum ballooning into my throat. “Jesus, Regan! Traumatic much?”

“Yes.”

A single saline drop fell on the Epic.

And, finally, the proprietors appeared.

Actually, I wasn’t sure if they were the proprietors, though clearly they worked here. They looked like so many other fine young Hannibals I see piloting the ships of commerce into the rocks these days. Ratty jeans, t-shirts, bed-head. But these three were women, something I hadn’t often come across at a comic book shop. GameStop maybe, or Spencer’s, but uber-geek heaven? Not often at all.