I've collected comics since I was little, when I would read Spider-Man without any sense of irony, and when I would get turned on by Gwen Stacy dying.
She was a pretty girl, Spider-Man's second girlfriend. She wore a big black plastic band that pulled her blond hair back. She wore minidresses and held her books up to her breasts. She wore black boots as she fell from the Brooklyn Bridge, her body like a supple bag of bones, the weight of her head and her shoulders pulling her riverward.
I learned to draw by tracing an old Sal Buscemi drawing of the Invisible Girl (a.k.a. Susan Richards, née Storm, wife of Mr. Fantastic) from The Fantastic Four. Her hips were full, her breasts as round as globes. She wore her hair back, Gwen Stacy-style, with a black plastic headband, the bob curled under just at the nape of her neck. The costume was skintight, so by not drawing a line for her collar, she was effectively naked.
In the fourth grade I got caught by the town bully making sketches on the bus. I had taken to etching the long ess curve of Sue Storm's hip. I was young enough to think nothing of drawing a woman's body in public, but old enough to find myself only drawing women's bodies whenever I picked up a pencil.
"Give her tits," he said. He had pushed into the seat with me, cronies leaning over the top of the seat looking down into the pad on my lap.
I just sat quietly until he started punching me slowly, methodically, in the shoulder. We were like coworkers at that point, not even knowing another way to handle the situation. He wanted something. I waited for him to start abusing. He socked me again and again in the shoulder, a purple bruise like a flushed cheek heating up the thin skin of my arm.
So I drew tits.
"Man, finish the legs."
"Yeah. Awesome," said one of the cronies.
After the form had spread across the page, just so many lines and curves, he yanked my pencil away.
"C'mon, give her a pussy. She needs a pussy."
He scribbled black carbon up the gentle V where her legs met.
He tore the page out of my notebook. "Man, can't you do another one, her legs apart? Spread that pussy." But he was already admiring the work he had in his hand, what had effectively become an exquisite corpse, the product of neither of our own visions, or of both. It was headless, handless, just legs and breasts and a black scrawl of pubic hair. He and the cronies retreated to the back seats where they normally lurked.
The next day I got on the bus and there she was, wadded up on the rubber flooring underneath the spare tire.
Comic collecting evolved alongside porn collecting, a parallel set of paper fetishes and power fantasies. Every comic shop I have ever been to has had hidden in some corner four or five boxes of Playboys, hentai porn from Japan, double-dubbed Korean cartoons featuring pink, glowing erections like vibrant radioactive mushrooms, alongside their Superman posters and their Care Bears collectors' cups.
More disturbing still were the Asian cels of women impaled on penises of steel, on knives, on alien tentacles. Sailor Moon scat. Snuff cartoons featuring Robotech-like robots, their bodies fortified and powerful, their cocks as towering as the bomb over Hiroshima.
At the MotorCity ComicCon, Detroit's biannual comic convention, porn was as important as Star Wars. Alongside the rows of eighties artists, Sergio Aragones from Mad Magazine, Art Adams of The Fantastic Four, Mike Bear of Alpha Flight, and Erik Larsen, who drew Spider-Man for a while, there was a whole table of porn stars.
I remember that they had been lined up by age, the twenty-something Tandis and Chloes, then the end-of-career name actresses, then the has-beens as old as my mother, bursting out of sweater sets or heavy flannel plaids. They had their old eight-by-tens on the table. For twenty dollars you could buy a picture and have it signed. The pictures all had Post-it notes over the nipples and the vaginas, but, like all Post-it notes, the edges curled up and from an angle everything was on display.
From the youngest to the oldest they had makeup that was trowel-applied, and their eyes, while wide and alert, had a stony quality as blank as Gwen Stacy's, accepting death as she plummeted into the icy waters beneath the bridge. For an additional ten dollars you could have a Polaroid taken with one of the women.
A fixture of the convention circuit is the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Bermuda shorts in the dead of winter, T-shirt stitched together out of sheets from a twin bed, the wispy mustache of an early teen, though he is clearly thirty-five. He is the guy pushing around two boxes of old Bernie Wrightson books on a wheeled flat, and carrying a bag of porn that he wants autographed.
I have seen this drama play out every year now for going on fifteen years. He huffs the comics on the dolly off to one side when he gets into the porn line. He thumbs through his stack of Hustlers, licking his thumb as he pulls back each page carefully until he finds the key spread. He shuffles the books into the right order for each woman to lay down her signature. When he bellies up, he exhales a bit to lean forward with the books for the first.
At first, he doesn't smile.
For the young girls, he just gestures across their breasts in the magazines with his fat finger. They sign where he points, along an outstretched leg, in an arc across the raised breasts, just below the puckered rectum of a split-beaver shot. He sighs. He wheezes. They push through the stack with determination and grace, careful in the way they hold the pen he has provided, miraculous in their ability to etch out clean curls and loops in their perfect second-grade penmanship without breaking their lacquered nails.
For the prime divas, young enough to still be firm, old enough to have an established track record of twenty, fifty, one hundred videos to their credit, women who appear in the title of their videos, he offers a small smile. He bows in a way he probably imagines Gandalf might for Galadriel, stiffly, a subtle move that his girth allows and that he is proud of. And then the pointing, the signing, perhaps a brief joke exchanged that no one can hear but the two.
But when he comes to the old woman at the end, the retired star who is laboring under the permanent mask of too many face-lifts, skin so tight and thin that it looks as though it might tear, he actually blushes. He is her biggest fan. He has seen all of her movies. He mentions obscure minor parts she had in famous porn of decades past. They laugh in a stilted way about something that happened on a Russ Meyer set between her and a "colored" guy. He's smitten with her, and it is with her that he has his picture taken.
He holds her waist, which is girdled, but still youthful. She wears jeans that sculpt her legs, and she struggles to find purchase with her small hands on his massive shoulder. They smile together for the camera. He slips away, taking the photo from the man operating the Polaroid. He pays the man thirty dollars and walks away. He pushes his box of comics along with his toe. She sits back down. He never looks back.
It's like this at every convention.
At the most recent convention this past fall, I watched another set of events unfold.
The first, while disturbing, didn't knock me over any more than the porn stars. Evangeline, a perky-breasted superbabe in leather, stalked the convention center in stiletto heels. The model, her breasts slightly too small for the costume, had her nipples glued to the inside of the patent-leather cups. From the side, you could see her breasts pulled out from her chest, the actuality stretched to fill the dream.
I watched a middle-aged fan alone at the convention with his four-year-old son. The boy, in a green sweater, loafers, a bowl-cut brushed smooth and shiny by his mother, ran up to the model in red leather, his arms outstretched. She smiled and tried to bend over as he came. But she stopped because her breasts were pulling at the leather. The boy stumbled and fell forward, his hands clutching at her knees and the tops of her boots. She smiled. The father laughed. The father paid her twenty dollars and had the boy's picture taken with her. She knelt down carefully and held the boy up so that he had one hand at his side, the other up so his little fingers curled at her clavicle.
The woman walked away after the shot was taken. She stepped out through a fire exit that security had propped open. She shivered in the Michigan autumn and smoked a cigarette.
I watched all of this from a distance, pretending to thumb through pirated DVDs of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, porn cartoons from Thailand featuring Disney characters, European copies of the now banned-in-America Song of the South. It was sick comedy and I just smirked.
But things twisted slightly when I walked across the expo center to the other end where the TV stars were signing autographs.
Cindy Williams had a huge hand-stitched banner over her that read "Cindy Williams of Laverne and Shirley, American Graffiti and many other American classics. Eight-by-tens, twenty dollars; Polaroids with Ms. Williams, thirty dollars." The tubby men, their dollies of comic collections rolling on the floor, clutched at their armloads of pornography and had their pictures taken with a smiling and excited Cindy Williams.
She was old, her face done up and stretched. She was as small as my sister, the men towering over her. She was older than my mother. She wore Mary Janes like a little girl.
She clutched at them, the photo was taken, they paid the man and walked away.
Squeeze the guy. Thirty dollars. Smoke a cigarette. Something about poor Cindy Williams had chilled me.
If it were just fat men and porn stars, I would be able to set it aside. The sadness, the surliness, would be regrettable but disposable. My relationship to it all would only be tangential.
But Cindy Williams. When they looked at her, I saw in the eyes of those fat men a familiar kind of flatness, a dead smile. She just wanted to be seen, but they couldn't see her, wouldn't see her. She had become an absence to those men, to me. Her specificity had been excised, her history dissected, each moment with each man a frozen Polaroid, a snapshot clipped from her life and put behind a pane of glass, either up on a wall like a trophy, or down in a display case next to a price tag. We didn't want anything from her, personally. Not really. We wanted her image, and our memory of her image. We wanted our notion of her smile, our idea of her graciousness. We wanted our memories of her from her. We had, with our eyes, transubstantiated her into a grateful cadaver.
The superbabe, the porn stars, Cindy; I can't see them. There are parts, and flickers, and smells at the edge of memory, but nothing more. Tit. Ass. Leg. Nipple. Black plastic headband, pleated skirt, a knee turned in, vulnerable.
It's at that moment that I am covered in it all.
There is a continuity from wet dreams to power fantasies. Comic books, like porno spreads, exert power over organic events like death and love by regimenting those moments, slicing them apart into constituent images, fragmenting the flow of time, disassembling the human body. Collecting itself, the assembling of series after series of magazines, is a ritual of control. And then the collectors pore over the issues, the dismembered moments spread out for inspection. The faux-innocence of a Playboy pictorial, the full flesh of a farm girl's thigh pink and freckled as the sun filters in through cracks in the hayloft roof. The Green Goblin holding beautiful Gwen over his head, her body limp, her knees parting slightly, the nighttime skyline of New York reflecting off the patent leather of her black boots and her plastic headband. The farm girl is unmoving; Gwen is unmoving.
The Goblin's arms fall. Gwen is cast down. Amazing Spider-Man 121 (June, 1973): Gwen falls for three panels. Spider-Man's webbing stretches out. We see Gwen's hand, alone in a panel, as she plummets, the web-line extending toward but not quite reaching her wrist.
Then the death panel, a long stretch of an image: Gwen, upside down, her head tilted back, her hair fluttering, one leg outstretched with the toe of her black boot pointed, the other knee crooked, turned in. The webbing is wrapped around the calf of the outstretched leg. Three bits of text run down the panel. At the top, in a word balloon, Spider-Man exclaims, "I DID IT!" In the middle of the panel, at the point where the web and the leg meet, the sound effect: "SWIK!" Near the bottom, behind Gwen's neck, amongst her hair, another sound effect, in smaller letters: "SNAP!"
Spider-Man never hears the snap. In the next panel, as he is pulling her body upward along the brick exterior of the bridge tower, Spider-Man is jubilant. "Spider-Powers," he exclaims, "I love you!" Gwen hangs limp from the web. Her head dangles, her mouth agape. There are thin lines around her to denote movement, her body swaying. Two curved marks like inky smirks indicate the movement of her breasts.
Four issues later, in the letter column of ASM 125, the editors issued this very weak mea culpa:
"[Š] we feel obliged to take a paragraph or two to explain a few points of contention:
"First, [Š] it saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey's webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her. In short, it was impossible for Peter to save her. He couldn't have swung down in time; the action he did take resulted in her death; if he had done nothing, she would certainly have perished. There was no way out.
"Secondly, the why of it all. We gotta be honest and admit it wasn't Gerry's idea alone. Kip Hiltz is very close when, in his letter above, he calls it 'necessary.' Gerry had been reading over the past few years' issues and had come to the conclusion that something was wrong‹or, more accurately, missing. The relationship between Pete and Gwen had been through a lot of inconsequential ups and downs, and unless the two were married, there was nowhere else to take it. But marriage seemed wrong, too. Peter just wasn't ready.
"So Gerry, Roy, and Stan debated the question long and hard Š and it turned out that all had reached the same inescapable conclusion. Gwen's death was simply fated to happen.
"We've said before that our stories just seem to write themselves, that we often don't have any control over them. This was such a case. Events had shaped themselves in such a way that their only logical resolution was tragedy. And the rest, as they say, is history.
"So don't blame Gerry. Don' [sic] blame Stan. Don't blame anyone. Only the inscrutable, inexorable workings of circumstance are culpable this time. "And no one regrets it more than we. It was a hard, hard story to write."
Gwen was a convenient distraction for as long as she remained convenient. She stopped being convenient, so they looked past her. In certain subsequent reprints of the "Death of Gwen Stacy," the fateful "SNAP!" was removed. Even her death was taken from her. The Green Goblin dies in a brutal accident in ASM 122 (August, 1973). As is the tradition in comic books, Goblin comes back from the dead periodically to taunt the hero, some mix-up at the morgue allowing for the villain to always come back for one more fight. Gwen never comes back.
Ed Gein, ostensibly America's first serial killer and the inspiration for virtually all slasher pictures from Psycho (1960) to Silence of the Lambs (1991), was caught by Planefield, Wisconsin, law enforcement in 1957. Gein's arrest was an inflection point for pulp. Gein's story, through Hitchcock to Hooper to Demme, transformed the pulp landscape. After Gein, porn got harsher, comics got darker, movies got bloodier. It was this darker, more adult world that the Marvel Comics editorial team was responding to.
When Gein finished with the bodies of his victims, he would dismember them. One of the deputy sheriffs who was part of the team that caught Gein was the son of a woman who had been abducted. After storming the ratty Wisconsin farm where Gein had holed up, they searched high and low for the bodies, and at first they couldn't find anything. But finally, after going in and out of the barn ten times, the deputy realized he was looking at his mother.
She hung on a hook right in the middle of the barn, but Gein had split her open and skinned her. He had decapitated her, cut off her feet and hands and breasts. The deputy, the son of that hanging body, had thought it was a deer that Gein had cleaned. Gein had taken all of the women apart, made soup bowls out of their skulls, a belt from their nipples, upholstery for a chair from their tanned skin.
And at first the cops couldn't see any of it.
The Invisible Girl: Her superpower was to disappear at the most convenient moments. Gwen Stacy plummeting to the black water full of broken bicycles, demolished cars, used condoms, miscarriages, scum. A noble, sexy, fuck-me-boot death. Used and then discarded to make way for a new Peter Parker love interest. So hot.
The headless nude, crumpled and stuffed under a spare tire, modesty as thin as a single line of graphite on the page.
? All done!