San Diego Noir

You look at the four pages and the ink work jumps out at you, black lines flowing over mediocre pencils with an almost magical, mesmerizing gloss. Get too close and the broad, powerful strokes draw you in like a fish, make you forget where you are and what you’re doing until your nose is right up against the paper and you snap out of it, the spell broken.

It’s only at that moment that people understand where I get the nerve, asking them to pay me $1,000 for four pages of a comic book that never made it into print, pages that were written, drawn, and inked by a writer/artist whose name is only vaguely familiar to them, if it’s familiar to them at all. Before then, when their first impression of the clumsy, anatomically incorrect artwork and third-grade dialogue almost has them walking away without hearing my pitch, they think I’m crazy—$250 a page for this drivel? There’s original artwork of a higher, more professional caliber to be found at every third booth at the Con, and at far more reasonable prices.

But then the ink work sinks its teeth into them, without their even knowing it, and they start asking questions. They want to know more about the pages—the who, the what, and the why—not so much because they’re interested in buying, but because they know there must be a story behind them. A story that will help them understand how comic book artwork, so ordinary otherwise, could have such a paralyzing effect upon them.

So I tell them the story, the way it was told to me.

It was Ken Fenderson’s first Comic-Con and he was hoping to God it would be his last. He wasn’t a comic book person. Far from it. He considered himself above such foolishness, costumed superheroes and flimsy, shorthand fantasy stories told with pictures. Fenderson was a writer, not a clown or a child, and he took his work as seriously as a bomb squad tech took his. But comic books were where it was at, the very eye of the latest Hollywood storm where every multimedia and merchandising deal worth a paragraph in the trades was forged, and hell if Ken Fenderson wasn’t going to make a spot for himself at the feeding trough. Fenderson was nothing if not an avid follower of the The Money, wherever it chose to lead.

So here he was in San Diego on this weekend in July, bouncing off and among the freaks and geeks filling every square inch of the San Diego Convention Center like plaque clogging an artery. Spandex in a rainbow of colors was everywhere, taut as a second skin here, as loose as a rumpled bedsheet there, and almost invariably in the service of a body that nobody on a full stomach would have wanted to set eyes upon. Fat Batmen and hairy Wonder Women, bald Wolverines and impish Captain Americas, and hundreds of other, pathetically rendered costumed superheroes and sci-fi movie characters of unrecognizable origin. It was like a madhouse for retired circus performers, a hot and sweaty rodeo corral teeming with nutjobs whose minds had never advanced beyond the age of eleven.

Fenderson was appalled. It was all he could do to keep his breakfast down. This fiasco happened once a year in this place? This gigantic, eight-block long, landlocked cruise ship on Harbor Drive they called a convention center? How was such a thing possible? And what the fuck had happened to San Diego?

Fenderson had no use for the city, he’d been living in Los Angeles ever since his father moved the family there from St. Louis over thirty years ago, but he’d been here once or twice back in the early ’80s when you could still get a thirty-nine cent beer down in Tijuana. Back then, L.A.’s “sister city” was a pit as far as Fenderson was concerned, a navy boomtown way past the boom, as old and slow and lifeless as a Mormon bingo party.

But now? Jesus H. Christ, downtown San Diego looked like Vegas crammed into a mason jar. The nautical-themed convention center anchoring the old navy yard was just the tip of a redevelopment iceberg that had apparently run amok, surrounded as it was by new restaurants and hotels, shops and cafés, and—most incredible of all—a goddamn baseball stadium, PETCO Park, sitting smack dab in the middle of the Gaslamp Quarter like something a tornado had uprooted from the suburbs and dropped from the sky.

Fenderson couldn’t have felt more disoriented were he hanging upside down on a float at the Doo Dah Parade.

But business was business, and business today was here at Comic-Con in San Diego. Distractions aside, Fenderson had to focus and look for what he’d paid a ticket scalper the preposterous fee of $100 to find among all these funny book-obsessed weirdos: a great illustrator willing to work on the cheap.