Frank ‘Flimflam’ Fletcher, feted father of funnybooks, fancied by frothing fanatics of four-colour fictions, fetched his febrile foot from the freeway!
He had dodged planting his shoe on shards of broken bottle in the gutter.
Stepping over the snare, the swinging sahib of serial storytelling strode on, superhero shenanigans simmering in his supercharged skull!
He wondered if Mouse Man was due for a comeback. Better tell Lenny to put him in their Cerulean Centurion team-up mag. See if returns from newstands dropped.
The nimble nabob navigated the NY nightmare, nurturing nutty narratives, nervous at the nascent nadir of nonsense novellas!
These days, Frank only went outside if he could wear his sunglasses. It was part of his brand, sure. But you live the comics industry for decades, you see panels everywhere. Apartment windows - that’s a cheating boyfriend confrontation in Shocking Domestic Complications. Bricks on the sidewalk - that’s a fleeing crim in Two-Fisted Police Boy Adventures. The worst was the sky. That’s a double-page spread. And you might see them, zipping between the clouds, dots of ragamuffin motley on bright blue, playing catch with a Dodge Challenger R/T, laughing at all the suckers who still need their legs to scoot around.
The sunglasses helped. Took the edge off any unexpected primary colours. Made the world turn smoothly, without any staccato lurch between moments, like he got from Peru juju, or trying to follow the gabble of fans at the conventions. He could even blot out the ever-watchful eyes of The Powers That Be, impatient for his next billion dollar idea.
Someone’s idea, anyway.
These days, Frank didn’t work on the books himself. Sure, in his time he’d evaporated enough typewriter ribbons pounding out snappy patter to hype the kiddos. And they still had his face on the ‘Madhouse Musings’ column in every issue, even if he didn’t write it anymore. Heck, he hadn’t written it since ‘65. Even if he didn’t work on the books, he still worked for the firm, doing the same thing he always had.
He hustled.
Like last night, at a Soho party, the launch for a boutique record label, he got talking to Mr P. That Mr P, the bouncer turned movie star. Turns out he’s a fan of comics, used to read Maestro Moonlight and Arch Battler. Never mind those were published by the Demented Colleagues. Don’t have to mention that detail. It was still comics! How about we make you the star of a limited series? You’ve already got a catchphrase - “And mine eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity” - though maybe it needs a trim. You can be a superhot superhero superstar. How would you like a cape? You can even lead a team of superpowered kids! Mr P and the… Perennials. Pollywogs… No, ha, I meant to say… Potentates. Potentials. Yeah, Mr P and the Potentials! It has zip! That gee-whiz quality. Maybe we can license the title, it can become a spin-off saturday morning cartoon, or a TV series out in Hollywood, or even a crunchy breakfast cereal. Snap, crackle, pop art and payday in one pulse-pounding, pulchritudinous package, pisano! Whaddaya say?
Ah, well. Can’t win ‘em all.
Hustle. Call it flimflam, the jazzy moniker he gave himself along with a writer credit on every proof copy he glanced over. Product never moves without a striking sales pitch, the ol’ wham bam flimflam thank you ma'am.
These days, the gentle art of the flimflam was his full time job. The persona of friendly big brother ‘Flimflam’ Frank had been his greatest advertising campaign, reserved for his most beloved product, himself. And how it had paid off. A corner office gig. Part cuddly mascot. Part ruthless pioneer of the commercial wilderness. All company man.
That was the reason he was making this trek downtown. It’s not enough to license the intellectual property for cheap plastic dolls. That’s where the real work begins, saith your friend Flimflam. You have to make sure the goods pop in the stores. Exciting displays in the windows. Full shelves of stock. A couple toys unboxed for hands-on temptation. A few products on the bottom rungs so even the smallest tykes can grab a payload and slip it in a basket. And if you have to apply a little gentle inducement for the shopkeeper to make all that happen, that’s what the publisher’s esteemed collaborator Sal ‘The Fridge’ Bocelli is always for.
Frank found the toy store, but didn’t make it inside.
How many years had it been? A decade, maybe. There he was. Stocky but solid, like a boxing glove with a horseshoe inside. Grey on the temples, like one of his humourless and driven professor characters. Sucking on one of his famous lollipops. If you didn’t know who he was, you would think he used to move crates on the docks, before switching to an even more rough and tumble union gig.
Steve ‘Steamshovel’ Singer.
From the Comicnomicon, issue 345, March 2004:
What’s the biggest lost opportunity in the creative arts? Lennon and McCartney’s last weekend together in ‘76, where the pair toyed with a surprise reunion on live TV as a gag? Thomas Chatterton shredding his poems and quaffing arsenic before his 18th birthday? Or that time James Joyce and Lenin stayed at the same hotel, but churned out exactly zero manifestos?
For sequential art boffins, a possible candidate is the chance encounter between ‘Flimflam’ Frank Fletcher and ‘Steamshovel’ Steve Singer outside NY nostalgia landmark Toys on Parade in ‘82.
If you don’t know who they are, you’re not likely to be reading this mag, but if you’ve just crash-landed on our planet, this pair invented America’s collective childhood - everything from the Spurious Human Belt, to Kid Perseus, to the Printer’s Imp, to the Fiscal Five Hundred and Fifty-Four!
By this time, Steve Singer had left the Mayhem comics ‘madhouse’ for supposedly greener pastures at their Demented Colleagues. Singer was reputed to be bitter over Frank Fletcher’s compulsive glory hogging, not to mention the publisher’s notorious chiseling on pagerates and perennial absent-mindedness on the whereabouts of original art.
Fans still debate how much credit each partner deserved for the prodigious output of their early collaboration, often dubbed the Mayhem Mesozoic. For us at the Comicnomicon, their whole is greater than the sum of all dirt that has been chucked on this topic. The not-so-deep truth is that this pair had an alchemy unmatched in funnybooks, with Flimflam dreaming up exciting fairy floss worlds, and Steamshovel beating life into them with the whammy of his trademark punchy art.
After a decade for tempers to cool, fate had thrown this pair together, and anything could happen. One last collaboration like the old days? The birth of an industry-shaking new omniverse? Or just mentorship for the up and comers?
Alas, like Lennon and McCartney’s phantom TV gig, none of this was to be.
“Frank.”
“Steve! Oh, hey, it’s been an age, when did we last run into each other, I think it was… It was… Uh… Gee… how about this weather, huh? Pretty cold for this time of the year! Call Rockefeller Center, it’s time to defrost the ice skates and hoist up the tree, don’t spare the spangles!”
“Yeah. Pretty cold. Early in the year for it too. Guess so.”
“So how’s the wife?”
“Barbara? You know, good. Still hates your guts.”
“Uh…”
“Me, I get it. It’s always been a tough business. You did things the way you thought you had to. I don’t think many could have done better if they had your gig. Plenty did worse. That’s the way the cookie hits the pavement.”
“Uh… thanks, Steve. I guess. Just so long as the two of us are, uh… simpatico?”
“Five by five. Barbara, though. She’s always going to hate you. Not as forgiving as me.”
Frank could hear the whispers of the Powers That Be - got anything new for us, bucko? Come up with any exciting new characters on your little walk? Come on Mr Flimflam, show us the old magic. Earn that corner office for a change. Wow the peanut gallery.
“So, uh, you, uh, you, uh… Steve, you working on anything new?”
“Nah. Not in comics. I’ve left the biz. I’m in animation now. Designs for cartoons. The kids who work with me, they grew up reading our stuff. Everyone wants a sketch of King Solomon or the Man-Mantis to take home. Doesn’t bother me. Worth it to have actual dental insurance. First time in my life. Need it with my sugar habit.”
“You here to see the toys?”
“The grandkids are.”
“Gee, that’s swell. Day out with the grandkids at the toy store. Hey, howsabout we mosey on in and I show you some of the gimmicks we’ve cooked up at the Mayhem madhouse, maybe I can swing a couple of freebies for you. The gang’s all there - the Cerulean Centurion, the Splotter, Mouse Man… All of our old buds.”
“Nah. I’m good.”
“You’re good?”
“I’m not going in there Frank.”
“You’re not? Why not? You’re not. Ah. OK. Yeah. I guess that figures. It does figure.”
Frank could hear the crunch of a splitting lollipop, louder than a cleft atom.
Just then, two rambunctious kids cartwheeled out of the store, each waving a plastic man imprisoned in a tiny fist.
“Frank. These are the grandkids.”
The crafty creator of childhood culture clapped in a craze like a cheery chimp!
“Hey, that’s Kid Perseus! He’s even got his dreadful disco shield! You know, he used that to fight the mighty Gorgonzilla! You better hold him tight, kiddo, because his elevator shoes are enchanted by Merlin, they let that tiny little guy go sky high, like when he fought the Bee-harpy-bats of Shadowlympus! And is that the Printer’s Imp? As I live and breathe! Say, I hear if you squeeze his legs together, he hurls his trident paintbrush! But you didn’t get that info from me - that’s confidential intel!”
The kids grinned in silence, captivated by the hypnotic patter the way they might be at a polka-dot giraffe riding the Coney Island ferris wheel.
The remains of the lollipop shifted from one side of Steve’s mouth to the other.
“Frank. Let’s have a cold one at my place. Old time’s sake.”
From The People’s Shield, online edition, 1 March 2013, published 11:30am
World conquest has ever been the dream of power-addicted maniacs, yet full spectrum dominance is seldom achieved with the nuclear bang. More often, it is claimed with the suffocating whimper of the strategic pillow in the night.
And so it is with the Mayhem movies mirror maze, an inescapable cultural phenomenon that dominates our lives not through ostentatious quality or dazzling originality but by slurping the oxygen cells from the blood of all foolhardy challengers.
Take this week’s inane offering, a bagatelle dubbed, I kid not, the Prancing Man-Mantis 2. Opening weekend box office, $120 million! And that’s in dollars, not boxtops.
Word on Sunset Boulevard is that the film’s nearest competitor that weekend got $5 and a bus ticket out of town. The message to filmmakers is clear - you’ll churn out superhero flicks, and you’ll like it, savvy?
But what of the entertainment value of this Man-Mantis, prancing or not?
Let me only say that even fortification from the most fortified of wines could not numb my soul sufficiently for the torture of this alleged celluloid, which displayed the cinematic elan of a bubblegum wrapper design, and the robust plotting of a prize printed on an icecream stick.
In all fairness, Scarlett Johansson’s cameo as tree deity Tanglebeard was thoughtful and deftly unfurled.
Lest you think I am programmed to be cruel to all pop vigilante cinema, this critic thought the first Cerulean Centurion movie had its moments, with a witty application of the classical Roman virtues to the challenges of the modern era, like managing KPIs at an off-shore call centre.
Like that hero out of time, after subjecting myself to the Prancing Man-Mantis 2, I can now say that I have seen the future, and it is spandex undies giving the crack of cinema a wedgie for all eternity.
Frank couldn't believe his sunglasses.
Not one bit of memorabilia. No statues, or posters. Not even any framed art. No hint that this was the house of a giant of comics.
Just ordinary stuff. An orange sofa with brown stripes. An ashtray with a half-sucked lollipop jutting out. White and blue china in the display cabinet, for when the Vice-President came a-knocking.
“Hey, Steve, what’s that on the wall?”
“That’s a samurai sword. Got it in the war.”
“Oh, a souvenir, hey? Let me give it a whirl. Yaaaaah! Yaaaaah!”
“Frank.”
“Yes, oh illustrious one?”
“I said I got it in the war. I didn’t say it was a souvenir.”
“Oh, huh… The war. I guess I’ll just… Put this back then.”
Beer for Steve, soda for Frank. The pair chatted about old times. When Pat Powers demonstrated how to slip out of a straightjacket while simultaneously drinking a glass of water and doing ventriloquism. Talking Mary Berrycloth down off the eighth story ledge after she’d been given notice. The incident at the third Americon with the rogue staple remover and the alligator leather briefcase.
It was nice.
Then Frank remembered the mission. The Powers That Be had to be obeyed.
“Say, Steve, how about you show me your studio?”
“Sure. Not much to see, though.”
It was almost empty. Just a tilted drawing desk, a wooden chair, and a side table for art materials. Each of them had seen thirty years of hard use, and it showed in the nicks and stains. Nothing displayed on the brick walls. No cubby holes or shelves with old drawings or works in progress.
“Aw, your old desk, this brings back the glory days. Steve… Draw something for me, like you used to. Weren’t we the greatest comics team of all time? Let’s make a character again, one last time. For the record books.”
“One last time? Sure. Let me get the fireplace going first. It’s nippy.”
Frank began to talk. A dribble, then a deluge, demarcating dazzling designs. Let this hero hurdle, let them hop, heft their hulk in histrionic hurdy-gurdy! But they’re bashful, can’t boast, behave as though beset by burdens. Their graveness grounds them, they can’t gyrate or gesticulate or get the gal. Not without… THE OMEGA PILL! One-off oral omnipotence! Then they throw trucks and think tremendous thoughts! And lo there shall be… the HURDY-GURDER!!!
“OK. Got it. Just a little more. Done.”
Frank crept up to the drawing table and peaked over Steve’s shoulder.
A ballet dancer’s slender legs propping up a huge trunk and shoulders, like a top only balanced by constant motion. A screaming mouth, spit-flecked with fury. A hand reaching out at the viewer, fingers closing, like it was going to pull in anyone who got too close. A mane like a lion’s fringing the hero’s enormous trunk, the fur somehow rippling on the page. And the best touch, those eyes. They had this sadness, like this guy knew he was out of control, but couldn’t stop. That small touch. That’s what made it real.
“Wow, Steve, it’s just… Honestly, it’s perfect. A Flimflam/Steamshovel original. After all these years.”
“Eh. It’s a quickie. Could do five just like it in an hour.”
Steve scrunched up the page and pitched it into the fire.
“Huh? Whaddyado that for? You’re throwing away free money!”
“I told you. I’ve left the biz.”
Here, Frank said words. Words as only he could - fulsome but sincere, a little sharp perhaps, but nimble as a tap dancer, and relentless and implacable as a blast of water from an elephant’s trunk. The response was polite, but brief. Yet still the words continued, following Steve outside into the manicured front garden. The words continued, even as Steve shook his head, yet still the words tumbled on, a Thanksgiving Day Parade of colourful corporate hot air.
The words only stopped with the punch.
Fragments of tinted glass floated through the air like shrapnel from a grenade.
Frank stumbled away. On the corner, he saw the Printer’s Imp, offering him a hand, in return for his signature on a contract promising he would help fight crime and degeneracy in all its myriad forms.
When he reached the bus, he saw it was being driven by the Cerulean Centurion, who offered him the legendary salute of his blue gladius.
Looking out the window, he realised he was inside a panel, looking out. The people on the streets all waved to him. Called him Flimflam. All of the great characters were there, even Mouse Man waving his tail, all of them cheering for him. How bright it all was, brighter than he remembered. They loved him. Really loved him. All they wanted in return was the next big thing, to bring back a flicker of that old childhood joy. He could give them that, right? Right?
If he squinted, he could see all the little dots.
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