You want to hear about the story conference I had?  How I went in to pitch that idea about-

Hey, let me finish this, all right?  Geez, you never give me a second, you know?

So anyway, first off, I thought I was going to speak to like an assistant editor.  You know how big DM Comics is, with all the titles and the movie properties and stuff how they must have like legions of people there.  You know, the Third Art Assistant for the Scarab titles, someone like that-

No, Mom, I don’t know if they even have that position.  I’m just going off here.

Anyway, I’m waiting for my interview, and when I get on in it’s actually with the big man himself.  Gil Kane, in person.

Yeah, the letter was signed by Mr. Kane, but to have him actually see me?

Mom, I’m not that good.  I did a few stories for AMAZING and WEIRD WORLDS, so how was I to know they’d be serious about my desire to write a comic book?  I thought they’d just ignore the letter I sent to Mr. Kane’s office, or maybe send me a nice rejection letter.  Besides, I said in the letter about how I had unique ideas that didn’t fit into the usual super hero titles they do at DM.  Anyway, I didn’t expect to see the man himself, the guy who back in the fifties took over the company and single-handedly turned it into the big powerhouse it is today.

No, not alone.  He had writers help him, like Stan Lee and Paddy Chayefsky and Alan Moore.  And he wasn’t the only artist there, there was Steve Ditko and Andrew Warhola and Todd MacFarlane.

No, Mom, you’d never have heard of them.  They did comic books.  You know, the stuff with super heroes saving the world that you kept throwing out after a few days.

Yeah, maybe I’m a little sore.  Do you know that comic book I bought almost thirty years ago, Scarab # 256, for only twenty cents?  Do you know that a collector today would pay seven thousand dollars for that?

Yeah, a comic book from 1972.  It was the first time Scarab was written by Stephen King.  He was one of the best writers of comic books ever.  He was an inspiration to me.

No, I’m not really mad at you for throwing that book away.  Who knew, back then?

Anyway, back to Mr. Kane, larger than life himself.  And I said to him,  “You know, I didn’t expect to be meeting you today, sir.”

“Oh, call me Gil,”  he said.  “Have a seat, James.”

“Uh, Jim.  Jim’s fine with me.”

“Suit yourself,”  he said as he took out a cigarette.  “Smoke?”

“No thank you.”

And here I am, in Gil Kane’s office, and I’m thinking he’s like one of the biggest figures in pop culture, and I’m so impressed with him that I’m not hacking up a lung like I do every time I’m in a room with a smoker.

“I read your letter,”  he said,  “and you said you had something.  Something special.”

“Well,”  I said, a little nervous, because I’m thinking I wouldn’t meet someone so high up like this,  “yeah, I do.  I noticed your company’s been doing a series of books under the title DIVERGENCE, where you have history changed-“

Yeah, where they change history.  You know, like what if someone else became the Scarab, or if Paula Ponder hadn’t become the Blue Ferret, or-

Yeah, I mean changes to comic book history.  You know, the way the story could have turned out different?

Yeah, they mean change history.  Like, let’s say there’s a story you wanted to do about changing real history, say, oh…  Like, we never invaded Japan?  Like Operation Overthrow, the whole assault on Japan never took place, or the invasion ended later than 1947?  And then you figure out the other changes from there, like MacArthur not getting elected president in 1948, of China falling to the Commies, stuff like that.

No, Mom, it’s not silly.  It’s fiction.  And it’s what they’ve been doing at DM Comics lately.

Oh forget it.  Anyway, you want to hear what happened?

Fine.  So I said to Mr. Kane,  “I noticed your company’s been doing a series of books under the title DIVERGENCE, where you have history changed and going in a different direction.  I think I have an idea for a title in that series.“

“Okay,”  he said,  “what’s the story?

“It’s involves Paul McCartney.  What happens-“

Paul McCartney.  You know, Paul McCartney; you must have read at least one Scarab comic book, right?

Okay, Paul McCartney, he’s the alter ego of the Scarab.  He was an anthropology student on a dig in Egypt when he discovered the sacred amulet of Osiris-Ra, and when he wears it he becomes the Scarab.  You know, the biggest title DM Comics had after Gil Kane took over, the man with the bullet-proof hide and the strength of a legion, flies through the air, all that good stuff.

Yes, he’s a fictional person.  There is no such real person named Paul McCartney, at least none I know of.  We clear on that?  Good.

Anyway, I said,  “McCartney.  What happens if he never became the Scarab?  Would he have made a difference otherwise?”

“Go on,”  said Mr. Kane, taking a big drag on his cigarette.

“Well, remember how years ago, when Chris Claremont and Boris Valejo did the series, how we found out that Paul had wanted to be a musician before he became a super hero?”

“But nobody ever did anything with it when John Grisham and George Perez took over the title.”

No, Mom, I’ll talk about those guys who did the comic later.  Let me finish, okay?

“Well,”  I said to Mr. Kane,  “I know some of the things that Claremont did got abandoned by later writers, but that one throw away bit just hit a chord with me.  And I’m thinking, for the DIVERGENCE series, why not something that would really blow people away?”

“So how does Paul McCartney become a musician?”  he asked.

“Well, first, he’s not that good a student.  Maybe his family grew up somewhere other than in high New York society.  Maybe a gritty seaport, like, say, Boston.  Anyway, he doesn’t go to Harvard, he never gets a chance to go to Egypt, but he plays music.”

“All by himself?  Or does he join an orchestra?”

“Ah, well, he’s young, he’s anxious to play music, and who does he meet but, now get this…  John Lennon?”

No, Mom, John Lennon’s also not a real person.  He was the Fools-Cap.  You know, the main villain that the Blue Ferret fought.  He was a genius who loved to make people look ridiculous while he robbed them blind, but she’d show up in the Ferret-mobile and with her whips and throwing spikes make him look silly and send him off to jail.

Well, Mr. Kane knew who John Lennon was, it’s his damn company!

Okay, Okay, I’m sorry I yelled.  I’m just a little revved, after this meeting.  Where was I?

Yeah, thanks, so I continued,  “Well, we have the earnest and good Paul McCartney, and the brazen and sharp-witted John Lennon, and they decide that they’d make a great team.”

“Doing what,”  asked Mr. Kane,  “robbing banks?”

“Actually, they become… songwriters.  And not just any kind of song writers, sending out pieces to combos.  They actually do their own music, themselves.”

“So they front an orchestra?”  he asked.

“Actually, they do bop-and-roll music.”

That got Mr. Kane to smile.  “Two guys, all alone?”

“Well, they could have some help.  Maybe another guitar player, and a drummer.”

“And what hero or villain would you use for them?”

Now I got a little nervous here, because I didn’t think I’d have to do a full pitch to Mr. Kane himself right away and thought I’d have a little more time.  “Oh, he could be a nobody.  Call him, oh, Harry Georgeson.”

“And who’s our fourth guy?”  he asked quickly.

I blanked a little and blurted out,  “Uh, Ringo?”

“The Ringo Kid?  One of our western heroes?”

“Maybe a descendent,”  I threw out.  “Anyway, the four of them, playing the music together.  Maybe they get even bigger than Sinatra or Crosby, make bop-and-roll a real musical force and do music without needing a horns section and fourteen guys in identical jackets.  And because it’s so unique they just really, really change all the rules on music, the way the Scarab touched everyone, but not through heroic deeds, just music.”

“So you’re suggesting, that the alter ego to the greatest hero on Earth be re-imagined as a musician, and that instead of his face being covered by the bug helmet it’s known instantly around the world.”

“Well, ever since Steve Ditko first drew him, he always was kind of cute looking.  And maybe he’d grab a chance to be well-known and famous, and not keep turning away whenever his girlfriend Heather Jane Eastman tried to look into his eyes.”

“Would she be in the story?”

“Maybe.  She is a photographer and model in the main comic series, and if Paul and his bop group get famous and she exists in this alternate world she might want to meet with him since he is a celebrity.  Maybe they’d get married, which is something that the real Paul and Heather Jane keep getting prevented from doing either because he doesn’t want to give up his secret ID or she gets traumatized when his arch enemy Ra-Set uses her as bait every few issues.”

“And I suppose John falls for Paula Pounder?”

“I don’t know.  Because this is Paul’s group, I figured most of the interesting stuff happens to him.  And here’s the beauty:  the four of them name this bop-and-roll combo… the Scarabs!”

I swear, Mom, there was such a long silence when I finished the pitch, I thought either he was calculating how many issues he thought he could sell because he liked it so much, or he hated it so badly he was looking for the worst possible things he could say to me.

“Bop-and-roll, huh?”  he finally asked me.  “Why that?”

“Well, I mean, if we imagine that this is Paul McCartney, after all, a man who’s done some amazing things as the Scarab, there’s always been that question of whether what makes the man a hero is his magic amulet or his own inner being.  So here’s a chance to see Paul McCartney without his magic amulet, where he is just some common guy, but someone with real force of personality.  And if he’s trying to make it in a form of music that people ignored back in the fifties, something that otherwise without him would not exist, that would show just how truly powerful his inner person is.”

“But bop-and-roll?  Would he even have heard of it, since no one’s played it in over forty years?”

“Actually, I imagined the story taking place in the late fifties-early sixties, about the time SCARAB #1 was published, back when there were still some of the bop artists around like Buddy Holly and Miles Davis.”

Mr. Kane nodded, then said,  “Okay, I’ll buy that.  So how far would the story go?”

“Probably for the whole of his career.  As I see it, he’d do some good years, maybe the whole of the 1960s.”

“Ah, during the Agnew administration.”

“Yeah’”  I said,  “maybe even throw in the Chilean War.  Have the music stir the people, try to forget the awful fighting in the mountains all those US troops faced.”

“You mean you see the Scarabs being even more popular than the Art Garfunkel Orchestra?”

“Yeah, bigger than the Reed Richards Band, even, but the group would break up by decade’s end, maybe because that’s when Paul finally marries Heather Jane.  I toyed with the idea of going forward from that, of Paul and Heather Jane forming a new bop group after the Scarabs, but that seemed silly.”

Then Mr. Kane gave this noise that scared me.  It wasn’t like some cough or growl, but the way it sounded curdling in the back of his throat, like the crack of doom, and I thought he was going to just rip me apart the way the mob killed Brezhnev when the Soviet Union fell apart in the seventies.

“Jim,”  he asked me,  “can you draw?”

I didn’t know what to say, Mom, I think I just gagged. 

“The reason I asked,”  Mr. Kane continued,  “is that this is the comic book business.  We tell stories, you see, with both words and pictures.  We need the pictures to tell our tales, and we need words to explain our pictures.”

“Okay,”  I said, unsure of where he was going. 

“Now, what you have there, is a lot of good words.  But, how would you draw them?  How would you make Paul McCartney look?  You mentioned he’s been cute since the Ditko days, but what exactly does that mean?  Do you mean he looks like Clark Kent, the actor?  What?”

“So you think my idea is a bad one?”

“Well, Jim, I think your idea makes for a good story, if it were just words.  But as I said, we need pictures to tell our tales, and frankly I don’t know if there’s an artist out there now who’d know what to draw to do that story right.  I’m not saying it’s a bad story, and the whole idea of Paul McCartney as a musician and the leader of the Scarabs sounds fine, but without an artist, where would you go with it?”

I sighed and started to get myself together to go.  “So I guess I don’t have a future in the comics business, then?”

“Well, as I said, we need pictures, and we need words.  As it so happens, I’ve read the copies of your short fiction you included with your letter, and we have a one-shot title that the writer just gave up on.  We have an artist who’s desperate for some one to take over, and I think you might be the person.”

“So I’m getting the job, Mr. Kane?”

“Think of it more as a try-out.  It’s a chance to see if you’re actually comfortable with writing for comic books.  It’s a different form of writing, kind of like doing a screenplay, but filling in the words after the director shot the film.  This is the number of the artist, you should give her a call.”

Her name, Mom?  Um, Susan something-or-other.  I have to call her later.

Oh, the book Mr. Kane gave me?  It’s a team-up of two minor characters in the DM universe, Magneto and Titanium Man.  Magneto used to be called the Human Lodestone, a mechanic named Lenny Kravitz who got struck by lightning and got magnetic powers.  Titanium Man was this guy named Joe Walsh who fell into a molten metal furnace and got his skin grafted to a steel shell.

No, Mom, they don’t exist either except in the comic books.  And I have to get details from this Susan about what she’s drawn so far.  Mr. Kane said it involves the city of Seattle being threatened by a blonde villain named Nirvana.

No, he couldn’t tell me if it was a guy or a girl, all he said was blonde.

James Ryan has been on the verge of actually being recognized as a writer in the past; who knows, someday it may happen.... His work has appeared in such places as Dragon magazine, Lacunae, the Urbanite, the New York Times, and some of the better men's room walls across the state of New York. Until he gets the chance to follow the program for disenfranchised neurotic writers, he's doing the regular job and grad school schtick. His wife Susan and son Jamie just nod and smile when he starts to rant, which, all said, makes things that much easier.