Read Online A Hundred Thousand Worlds by Bob Proehl - Free Book Online

expect from someone who’d been in his college’s glee club, which, although he’d never admit it to anyone, Ed had. She’d interviewed him by phone back then, holding the receiveraway from her ear to buffer the treble. But when he’d made his major breakthrough with the detective series
Cleave,
which followed the investigation into the murder of a minor National Comics superhero, he’d taken on a public persona inspired by Dashiell Hammett, and now that he’d taken over
Red Emma
at Timely and been hailed as the founder of the “New Grit” aesthetic by PanelAddict.com, his private-dick act, which included the fedora and a pack of Lucky Strikes poking carefully out from the pocket of his vintage shirt, had become dominant. “I was under the impression we had agreed we were not talking about this.”
    “So you’ve had offers,” Gail says. Ed’s currently writing three monthly books for Timely. Only
Red Emma
’s in the top twenty, but all three have “vocal fans,” meaning fans who spend a lot of time commenting on the Internet and would be likely to make an editor’s life unpleasant if any of the books were to get canceled. Geoff writes two titles for National and consults on four others, while remaining tight-lipped as to what it means to consult. Or what it pays.
    Gail’s situation is a little dicier. For three years, she’s been writing
The Speck & Iota
. Thinking about it, she’s written a whole lot of
The Speck & Iota
. Twenty pages a month for thirty-six months, for a total of seven hundred twenty pages about a pair of scientists who can shrink down to the size of dust motes. That’s a Tolstoy kind of page count. And she could have done more.
    Gail hasn’t told either of them that National is moving her off
The Speck & Iota
in three months. “On to bigger and better things,” her editor quipped, his desiccated sense of humor explaining how so many of Gail’s best jokes end up butchered before they make it into print. They didn’t tell her where she’d land, but she was given three issues to wrap up the storylines she’s been working on so the title can be handed off.
    “I don’t think I could jump,” says Geoff.
    “Don’t start,” says Gail, “You could write for anybody.” Before she was hired at National, Gail ran a feminist and sometimes misandrist website called BrainsOverBreasts.com. In the comments sections, Geoff wouldadd to her teardowns of a particular comic by pointing out continuity errors, moments when a story contradicted a story published ten, twenty years ago. National had originally hired him as a kind of fact-checker before giving him a tryout on
The Galactioneer,
about a dashing space pirate who’d appeared in one issue of
OuterMan
in 1978. Back then, Geoff and Gail would run into each other in hotel bars like this at small-time conventions like this and compare the day’s haul of autographs and sketches. They even made out once, in Pittsburgh, one evening when Gail had enough beer to dip her toe back into the tepid pool of heterosexuality, but luckily it hadn’t gone any further than that. When she was toured around the National office in New York for the first time after she’d been hired, Geoff was hiding in the men’s room. She still likes to bring up “that time you took advantage of me,” to see him go sheepish.
    “That’s not true,” Geoff says. “That’s not.
You
could. You’re more versatile than I am.”
    “Less distinctive is what he’s saying,” she explains to Ed, who laughs grimly. Ed does many things grimly.
    “You have a very distinctive style,” Geoff insists, a little too strenuously.
    “Female is not a distinctive style,” says Gail.
    “You bring a real compassion to your characters,” Geoff says.
    “It’s my mothering impulse,” says Gail.
    “So why couldn’t you write for Timely?” Ed asks Geoff. Ed has taken a cigarette from his pack and is using it to play a safer version of mumblety-peg, tapping it nimbly in the