Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa(23)

Another prize was S. D. Robinson’s The History of Art, published through Wyeth Press in Boston, 2011. This boasted either a legit- imate previous owner’s name or a dadaist pisstake —‘Dick Mutt’ — scrawled inside the front cover in thick black ink. Some of the pages had been loose, but he sticky-taped these into submission.

Not to forget the Unabridged Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Classic Cars: The Globe’s Most Fabulous and Innovative Cars and Hot Rods, 1920 to 2000, edited by Buster Camshaft. Given the length of this tome (it clocked in at six hundred pages), the publishers were able to fit the exceptionally long title on the spine.

But Jacob’s pride and joy was another kind of printed matter.

Several plasti-board boxes sat in the middle of the room, packed with hundreds of ancient comics from the 1960s. These particular containers, unlike the residential boxes hereabouts — which were sterile and lacklustre — sheltered a sense of wonder.

To deter the constant humidity and dampness, every issue was individually wrapped in a plastic sheath, each a full sixty microns thick, seven and a quarter inches wide by ten and a half inches high, bearing a one and a half inch tuck-in lip.

Between books, the boy would slip out a random comic, throw himself on the worn floral carpet that pretended to hide the concrete slab beneath, and flick through pages defining an alien realm in which justice was king and superheroes fought the good fight to uphold dignity and equality. There was laidback humour in them, too, a sunny-side-up sense of cheeky bravado — since the world wasn’t the dystopia that existed just outside the door to his box.

Jacob read by plasti-wax candlelight or, depending on the time of day, via the distorted illumination courtesy of a giant Hylax neon advertisement outside the only window. And he knew a happiness he otherwise didn’t think could exist.

On the walls inside his box, on every bit of existing space of the dirty beige wallpaper, between bookcases and stacks of books, were paintings of superheroes and monstrous villains in action and in flight.

Since Jack wasn’t the finest artist, these were glorious, idyll-defining eyesores.

On the rare occasion, Jacob broke away from escapist paperwork and murals to stare at the single, square mirror above the sink.

This was filthy, stained with toothpaste, soap, morsels of rotted food. He hadn’t cleaned it since his mum went away. Beyond the gunk, he could make out his reflection: overgrown, mousey-brown hair past his shoulders that hadn’t seen scissors or a brush in two years, join-the-dot freckles scattered across a pale face. The tiny beginnings of downy hair on the chin. Skinny as. Shorter than other kids the same age.

His dad’s razor-set lay abandoned at the bottom of a plastic basket next to the sink, but the remaining blades were rusty and he’d wasted the can of shaving foam doing decorations on the window last Christmas.

Jacob regarded his brown eyes. They looked hollow, dark rings beneath, nothing to sustain them aside from reading matter.

While roving about the box, the boy usually wore one of his father’s t-shirts, a faded black number a couple of sizes too big, threadbare, unwashed for months — it still somehow reassuringly smelled of his dad’s cologne.

Even though the screen-printed writing on the tee sat in reverse in the mirror, he could recite the slogan in his sleep:

‘Go to Hell? I’m Already There.’





#111


There was a letter that Jacob read and re-read, on dozens of occasions — so many times that it was worn out and the words faded in the folds. This correspondence had been written using a manual typewriter on foolscap, and the writer resorted far too often to semicolons, but even so it caught his imagination and went thus:

TO: MR STAN LEE,

PUBLISHER, MARVEL COMICS


Dear Stan,

Please find enclosed an idea.

I suppose I’ve directed this letter and the accompanying idea to you personally because of the admiration I bear towards you in the creation and fermenting of such ideas as The Fantastic Four, Thor, The Avengers, The X-Men, et al. That, and the hope that you will see something of use in the enclosed idea, or perhaps pass it on to someone else to consider it. P’raps even just glance at it?

I’ve been an ardent fan of Marvel since 1974, at the tender age of nine, when I chanced to pick up my first copy of Captain America; and ever since then I’ve wondered why Australia couldn’t have its own icon of superherodom. Britain has gained union   Jack and Captain Britain; Canada has Vindicator/Guardian; Africa the Black Panther. Yet we down here in Australia find ourselves cheering on Americans, Brits, Canadians,

Africans, Irelanders, Norse myths, heroes of Grecian antiquity — but no Australians. At times it gets frustrating because there’s no-one from “here” to follow. Marvel at least recently gave us the character of Gateway, but his is a minor role, and the only one in each of the major comics production houses. Australia is a country of over sixteen million people, of which 90% live in the cities. Is one person all we would have in the superhero market?