Part 4 (2/2)

”What do you know about it?” Sa hold of Joe's arm It was almost seven o'clock Anapol docked your pay if you caood money in comic books I know a kid, Jerry Glovsky-” He pulled Joe toward the hallway that led to the foyer and the front door, knowing exactly what histo say next

”Jerry Glovsky,” she said ”A fine example He's retarded His parents are first cousins”

”Don't listen to her, Joe I knohat I' about”

”He doesn't want to waste his time on any idiotic comic books”

”'It's not your business,'” Sammy hissed, ”what he does Is it?” Sammy hissed, ”what he does Is it?”

This, as Saht up The question of so one's business or not held a central position in the ethics of Ethel Klay one's own Gossips, busybodies, and kibitzers were the fiends of her personal dehbors, and suspicious, to the point of paranoia, of all visiting doctors, salesue committeemen, and tradespeople

She turned now and looked at her nephew ”You want to draw comic books?” she asked hiainst the door fra to study in polite e, but now he looked up, and it was Sammy's turn to feel embarrassed His cousin looked hi and admonitory

”Yes, Aunt,” he said ”I do Only I have one question What is a comic book?”

Sammy reached into his portfolio, pulled out a creased, well-thumbed copy of the latest issue of Action Comics, of Action Comics, and handed it to his cousin and handed it to his cousin

In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its azine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its ideal price of one thin dienerally execrable at best, its covers pretended to son of the slick, and to the brio of the pulp azine The co a drea time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up The covers were often hand-painted, rather than merely inked and colored, by men with solid reputations in the business, journeyirls in chains and languid, detailed jungle jaguars and muscularly correct ht Held in the hand, hefted, those early numbers of Wonder Wonder and and Detective, Detective, with their chroers, their abundant typography at once stylish and crude, seehly nourishi+ng variety All too often, however, the scene depicted on the label bore no relation to the thin soup of material contained within Inside the covers-whence today there wafts an inevitable flea-ia-the coically, in a far in languages, there was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and gra newspaper coazines forand inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel tiled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the one hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other with their chroers, their abundant typography at once stylish and crude, seehly nourishi+ng variety All too often, however, the scene depicted on the label bore no relation to the thin soup of material contained within Inside the covers-whence today there wafts an inevitable flea-ia-the coically, in a far in languages, there was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and gra newspaper coazines forand inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel tiled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the one hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other

Fro educators, psychologists, and the general public to view the co of the newspaper colory, read by presidents and Pullenous vitality and grace, of baseball and jazz Some of the opprobrium and sense of embarrassment that would forever after attach itself to the comic book form was due to the way it at first inevitably suffered, even at its best, by coarth, Alex Raye draftsmanshi+p, with the finely tuned humor and adultish irony of Li'l Abner, Krazy Kat, Abbie 'n' Slats, Li'l Abner, Krazy Kat, Abbie 'n' Slats, with the steady,of Gould and Gray and with the steady,of Gould and Gray and Gasoline Alley, Gasoline Alley, or with the dizzying, never surpassed interplay of verbal and visual narrative in the work of Milton Caniff or with the dizzying, never surpassed interplay of verbal and visual narrative in the work of Milton Caniff

At first, and until very recently in 1939, coests of the more popular strips, uprooted from their newspaper ho, between a pair of cheap glossy covers The strips' ers and Monday recapitulations, suffered in the more spacious confines of the ”funny book,” and what felt stately, thrilling, or hilarious when doled out in spoonfuls on a daily basis seemed a jerky, repetitive, static, and unnecessarily protracted business in the pages of, say, More Fun More Fun (1937), the first coht Partly for this reason, but also to avoid paying the established syndicates for the reprint rights, the early publishers of co artists or packagers of artists to create their own characters and strips These artists, if experienced, were not generally successful or talented; if they had talent, they lacked experience Those in the latter category were ht off the bus They had dreaiven their last na in the lofty world of (1937), the first coht Partly for this reason, but also to avoid paying the established syndicates for the reprint rights, the early publishers of co artists or packagers of artists to create their own characters and strips These artists, if experienced, were not generally successful or talented; if they had talent, they lacked experience Those in the latter category were ht off the bus They had dreaiven their last na in the lofty world of Saturday Evening Post Saturday Evening Post covers and ads for Mazda lightbulbs Many of them, it must be said, could not even draw a realistic picture of the ade hich they hoped to htbulbs Many of them, it must be said, could not even draw a realistic picture of the ade hich they hoped to s

The drop-off in quality that followed the original-content revolution was irew tentative, poses aard, corounds nonexistent Feet, notoriously difficult to draw in realistic depth, all but disappeared from the panels, and noses were reduced to the simplest variations on the twenty-second letter of the alphabet Horses reses, and autouise the fact that they lacked doors, were never drawn to scale, and all looked the same Pretty women, as a requisite arrow in every boy cartoonist's quiver, fared somewhat better, but the men tended to stand around in wrinkleless suits that looked stahone another in their check-iant Hindu le lords invariably sported fanciful musculature, eyeceps and octoceps and beltoids, and abdomens like fifteen racked pool balls Knees and elbows bent at painful, double-jointed angles The color was murky at best, and at worst there was hardly any color at all So was just two tones of red, or two of blue But most of all, comic books suffered not from insufficient artwork-for there was considerable vitality here, too, and a collective Depression-born urge toward self-improvement, and even the occasional talented hard-luck competent pencil was a version, sometimes hardly altered at all, of a newspaper strip or a pulp-radio hero Radio's Green Hornet spawned various colors of wasp, beetle, and bee; the Shadoas hi, felt-hatted, lauised Dragon Lady Consequently, the comic book, alan to languish, lacking purpose or distinction There was nothing here one could not find done better, or cheaper, somewhere else (and on the radio one could have it for free)

Then, in June 1938, Superman appeared He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation The artist, Joe Shuster, while technically just barely apt, seee of the co and composition that were mostly unavailable in the newspapers; he joined three panels vertically into one to display the full parabolic zest of one of Superman's patented skyscraper-hops (the Man of Steel could not, at this point in his career, properly fly), and he chose his angles and arranged his figures with a certain cineh the s intensity of his fanatical love and coical alloy of several previous characters and archetypes froe, one with its own unique properties of tensility, hardness, and luster Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero, Superes of a comic book, where he thrived, and after this e from its transitional funk, and to articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreaaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves Comic books were Rid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the an, after ten years of terrible hardshi+p, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous di

”Fifty dollars a week Maybe more”

”Fifty dollars!” said Ethel, her usual tone of disbelief modified, it seemed to Saeousness of the claiuarantee of its veracity

”Forty at least”

Ethel folded her ar on her lower lip Then she nodded ”I have to find you a better tie,” she said to Joe She turned and went back into the apart the neat little bundle, wrapped in a paper napkin, in which he had secreted his uneaten breakfast He held it up with a little smile ”Where I can throw this?”

2

The offices of the Empire Novelty Co, in a hard-luck stretch of Twenty-fifth Street near Madison Square A fourteen-story office block faced with stone the color of a stained shi+rt collar, its s bearded with soot, ornas, the Kraesture of commercial hopefulness in a block filled with low brick ”taxpayers” (h in rent to pay property taxes on the land they occupied), boarded-up woolens showroo headquarters of benevolent societies that rants froer on the map It had been dedicated in late 1929, then repossessed by the lien-holding bank when the developer leaped from theof his office on the fourteenth floor In the ten years since, it hadtheazines; a distributor of hairpieces, false beards,agents for a third-rate midwestern circus; all of them attracted, as Shelly Anapol had been, by the cut-rate rents and a collegial atmosphere of rascality

Despite the air of failure and disrepute that perhborhood, Sheldon P Anapol-whose brother-in-law Jack Ashkenazy owned Racy Publications, Inc, on the Kramler's seventh floor-was a talented businessone to work for Hye of twenty, as a penniless traveling salesh to buy the company out from under Lazar when the latter ran afoul of his creditors The coly shoddy product line, and the Aet radios, X-ray spectacles, and joy buzzers had enabled Anapol not only to survive the Depression but to keep his two daughters in private school and to support or, as he liked to put it, invoking unconscious iery of battleshi+ps and Cunard liners, to ”float” his ireat salesedy and disappointro relations His physical bulk, inherited fro Anapols, had for much of his early life rendered him the butt of jokes and the object of wo h to hope for a e and the subsequent upkeep on his two dreadnought daughters, Belle and Candace, forced hi All of this left hi of money, but not, so his days on the road, in the lonely shops of the dealers in jokes and novelties, men ere often in their third or fourth line of work and al and disaster, of the ability to knoas aht of Anapol, with his vast, unbuttoned suits anda blond horsehair wig or de a dentifrice that turned the teeth of victi sale in WilkesBarre or Pittsfield

In the last decade, however, he had traveled no farther than Riverdale; and over the past year, following an intensification in his perennial ”difficulties” with his wife, Anapol had rarely even left the Kraht in from Macy's, and he slept in his office, behind an old creork coverlet draped over a length of clothesline Sammy had received his first raise the previous fall when he found an eht and rolled it across town to serve as Anapol's clothes closet Anapol, who had read widely in the literature of sales and was in fact eternally at work on a treatise-curaphy he referred to sometimes as The Science of Opportunity The Science of Opportunity and other times, more ruefully, as and other times, more ruefully, as Sorrow in My Sample Case, Sorrow in My Sample Case, not only preached initiative but rewarded it, an ethos on which Sammy now pinned all his hopes not only preached initiative but rewarded it, an ethos on which Sammy now pinned all his hopes

”So talk,” said Anapol He earing, as usual at this early hour, only socks, garters, and a pair of brightly patterned boxer shorts wide enough to qualify, Saht, as a mural He was bent over a tiny sink at the back of his office, shaving his face He had been up, as everyon a areb; writing to other solitary lovers of Szyanized into an international appreciation society; penning ill-concealed threats to particularly recalcitrant debtors in his creaky, vivid, half-grae Raft; and co his daily letter to Maura Zell, his mistress, as a chorine in the road company of Pearls of Broadway Pearls of Broadway He alaited until eight o'clock to begin his toilet, and seereat store in the effect his half-naked imperial person had on his employees as they filed in for work ”What's this idea of yours?” He alaited until eight o'clock to begin his toilet, and seereat store in the effect his half-naked imperial person had on his employees as they filed in for work ”What's this idea of yours?”

”Let me ask you this first, Mr Anapol,” Sa his portfolio, on the threadbare oval of Chinese carpet that covered e rooid, Anapol's secretary, and the five shi+pping, inventory, and account clerks by partitions of veneered presswood and glass A hat rack, side chairs, and rolltop desk were all secondhand, scavenged in 1933 fro life-insurance company that went belly-up, and trucked on dollies down the hall to their present location ”What are they charging you over at National for the back cover of Action Comics of Action Comics this month?” this month?”

”No, let me ask you you a question,” Anapol said He stepped back fro, to induce a few long strands of hair to lie flat across the bald top of his head He had said nothing so far about Sae to show hi out there?” a question,” Anapol said He stepped back fro, to induce a few long strands of hair to lie flat across the bald top of his head He had said nothing so far about Sae to show hi out there?”

Anapol did not turn around, and he hadn't taken his eyes fro mirror since Sammy had come into the room, but he could see Joe in theback to back, separated by the glass and wood partition that divided Anapol's office froet a look at his cousin There was a pine drawing board on Joe's lap, a sketchpad, and some pencils On the chair beside hiht in a five-and-dime on Broadway The idea was for Joe to fill it quickly with exciting sketches of muscular heroes while Sammy pitched his idea to Anapol and played for time ”You'll have to work fast,” he had told Joe, and Joe had assured him that in ten minutes he would have assehts But then on the way in, as Said, Joe had wasted precious et Radios whose arrival yesterday e; the whole shi+pment was defective and, even by his relaxed standards, unsaleable

”That's lance over his shoulder Joe was bent over his work, staring at his Fingers and craning his head slowly froht, as if so the tip of the pencil across the page He was sketching in the bulge of a hty shoulder that was connected to a thick left aruidelines, there was nothing on the page ”My ner? Where's he froue How did you know?”

”The haircut”

Anapol stepped over to the pushboy's rack and took a pair of trousers froht,” Sa for a job”

”Well, naturally-”

”I hope, Sammy, that you told him I have no jobs for anybody”

”ActuallyI ain Anapol nodded, as another of his unerring snap judg started to twitch It was the worst-lamed of the two and the first to weaken when he was nervous or about to be caught in a lie

”And all this has soe me over at National for the back cover of Action Comics” Action Comics”

”Or Detective” Detective”

Anapol frowned He lifted his are linen undershi+rt that did not exactly look freshly laundered Sae, a squarish head, a thick, alure had sohty and booted, but the boots were stout workan to shake a little harder now Anapol's head reeed from his undershi+rt He tucked it over his furred walrus belly and down into his trousers He was still frowning He lifted his suspenders up over his shoulders and let them snap into place Then, his eyes fixed on the back of Joe's head, he went over to his desk and flicked a switch

”I need Murray,” he said into the speaker ”It's a sloeek,” he added to Sa you this way”

”I understand,” said Sammy

”Sit down”

Sas, relieved to set it down It was stuffed al with his own sketches, concepts, prototypes, and finished pages

Mavis Magid got Murray Edeler for Empire Novelty told him, as Sammy had known he would because he voluntarily worked extra hours in Edel what he could of the old a rate for the space on the back cover of its bestselling titles-the August issue of Action, Action, the last for which there were figures, had sold close to ato Murray, one reason and one reason alone for the skyrocketing sales of certain titles in the still relatively inchoate coures, had sold close to ato Murray, one reason and one reason alone for the skyrocketing sales of certain titles in the still relatively inchoate comic book market