J. Lennon - The Funnies

I swallowed a bite of sausage and watched my brother as he scanned the yard, looking for foolishness. Fresh hatred blossomed in me like a bulb after a long, dull winter. I felt curiously vital.

* * *

“Tim,” said my sister, “this is Mike Maas. I guess you sort of met at the…you know, earlier.”

Mike took his arm from around Bitty and dangled his hand in front of me. I shook it, but already Mike’s attention was elsewhere, on the beer I had carelessly stashed under my dinner arm, and which was now splashing copiously onto my remaining spinach pie.

“Hey, yeah,” he said, still clenching my hand. “Where’d you get that?”

I gestured with my head. He released me, patted Bitty gamely on the arm and angled for the cooler.

“Nice fella,” I couldn’t help saying.

“He’s a private kind of person,” Bitty said, crossing her arms.

“So! Married!”

“Married.”

“And now that makes you…”

She nodded. “Bitty Maas. It’s not bad. I wasn’t too attached to Bitty Mix. If I had any monograms, I could still use them.” She picked at her lip, then moued the lipstick back over it. “So you are dating…”

“Amanda. Living with, actually. Same old place.”

“Wedding bells?”

“Uh, not anytime soon, I’m afraid.” I noticed, over her shouder, the gristly man from earlier peeking in the windows of my father’s drawing studio. The windows were made of frosted glass. My father once told me, while drinking, that he dreamt only in diffused light, that nothing in a perfect world would cast sharp shadows. I remember misunderstanding this and thinking that all the objects were fuzzy in his dreams. I tried without success to draw this dream world many times as a child.

“Do you know that guy?” I said.

She turned. “The squirt from the front row? I was wondering about him.”

Here, from across the yard, came Mike Maas. I took a swig of beer. “I think I’ll go check him out,” I said.

I carried my teetering plate over to the studio door, which the man was pushing against with both hands.

“Hi,” I said.

He didn’t turn around. “Mm-hmm.” His hair was the sickly color of newsprint, and I could see stringy muscles jerking at the back of his neck.

“I don’t think I know you. I’m Tim Mix.”

The man straightened himself — he was maybe five-six, a couple inches below me — and turned slowly, like a horror flick victim. He had a tiny head and clunky tinted glasses with invisible frames, from behind which beady green eyes were cannily bulging. He stuck a hand out, amiably enough, and said something that sounded like “Tandoori.”

“Pardon?”

“Ken Dorn,” he said. He smiled. “I am a big fan of your dad’s work. I came down from New York for the funeral.”

“How’d you know about it?” I said. I tried not to sound wary, but was genuinely curious.

He half-smiled and raised his eyebrows. “I have connections with the syndicate.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re a cartoonist.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you here with Susan?” I pointed to my father’s editor, who was standing in the center of the yard, squinting into the birdbath.

He shook his head no. “I know her,” he said. He advanced another half-smile. I felt like I was supposed to be in on something.

“So what strip do you draw?”

He shrugged. “I ink in some of the biggies. ‘Whiskers,’ ‘Nuts and Bolts,’ ‘The Deep.’”

I was impressed. “The Deep” had long been one of my favorites on the comics page. It took place on the ocean floor, where a variety of aquatic characters exchanged trenchant and witty observations on life in the sea, which naturally were really about the foibles of everyday human life. For a mainstream strip, it was pretty funny.

I’d never met any comic strip inkers. These were people who apprenticed themselves to the popular cartoonists, and did the finishing work on daily strips. How much effort this entailed depended on the cartoonist. Some did much of the inking themselves, and the inkers simply filled in large dark patches, like the night sky repeated from panel to panel. Other cartoonists barely outlined the strips in pencil, and left the detail work to their inkers. Some even let the inkers in on their “jam sessions” with other cartoonists, where gags were conceived. Most inkers did a lot of the grunt work, like doing drawings for merchandise and answering fan letters with approximations of the cartoonist’s signature. My father was a bit of a maverick, though: he had never hired them. He did all his work himself. For this reason, he was a prime target for dissatisfied inkers; they were more likely to land their own strips someday if they attached themselves to somebody famous. I wondered if Ken Dorn had ever pestered my father for a job. I imagined that he had, and for a moment felt bad for him.

“Look,” I said, setting my food down in the grass. “Did you want to see the studio?”

His shoulders fairly pitched forward, toward the door, before he caught himself and translated the gesture into an expansive fake shrug. “Why not?”

I reached up into the eaves, expecting to find the key my father had hidden there for the past twenty-five years. The hook was still there, but the key was gone. I looked down at the door, hoping it might have been left unlocked, but instead I found a typed message on slick cream-colored letterhead. It read:

This property has been temporarily sealed by the executor of the owner’s estate, until such time the owner’s will has been read and the new owner established. Said will shall be read at 9:00 am EST, July 10, at the offices of Silvieri, Earheart and Caldwell, 1430 Market Street, Trenton, New Jersey.

I said, “Well, that’s interesting.”

Ken Dorn rubbed his elbow. “That’s business,” he said.

* * *

Of course I had known about the will. Malcolm Earheart was my father’s lawyer, executor and college buddy, his partner in the old days for golf and tennis. As a child I called him Uncle Mal. He was a tall, willowy, buttoned-down man with a mildly pompous affect that I didn’t recognize as such until I went to college myself. Was he here now? I hadn’t seen him in years, so I mentally added white hair to the picture I already had and browsed the begrieved: a gently churning sea of penguinesques in their mourning dress, their dinner plates bobbing before them. But none of them was Mal. Ken Dorn, meanwhile, had vanished.

Hard as it may seem to believe, I hadn’t given the will a lot of thought. For one thing, I wasn’t sure how much money Dad actually had; for all I knew he had been giving it all away as quickly as it came in. He was not a spendthrift, anyway, as the squalid house had confirmed.

More significantly, I had, since leaving home, mounted the bandwagon of a subculture in which money was supposed to be meaningless — the world of art. Money was said to corrupt, of course, and all anecdotal evidence pointed to the ultimate truth of this maxim; the work of artists who had “sold out” lost favor instantly among their peers, even as it garnered increasing public attention. Relative poverty was a matter of pride to my friends, and much of our talk about art revolved around the emptiness of work made to sell.

Lately, however, I’d begun to have a problem with this. Most of my unease came from a creeping conviction that my work was irrelevant and insular at best, simply awful at worst. I used found objects from the streets of West Philadelphia as my materials, and assembled them in our apartment’s extra room to evoke scenes easily accessible in their original form not thirty feet from where I worked. I was, in other words, making little outsides indoors. I had never sold a single piece.