Marvelmanic, Part II

Originally published December 4, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1307

 

A PETER DAVID FILM
MARVELMANIC

(conclusion)

Jack and Rose gasped and threw themselves back against the wall, unable to take their eyes off the spectacle of hundreds upon thousands of spiders. They were skittering along the ceiling, a black mass heading toward, presumably, safety.

Jack watched where they were headed, turned to Rose, and said, “If the spiders are going that way, it’s good enough for me. Come on!” He grabbed Rose’s hand and pulled, and the girl needed no further urging.

“Follow us!” she called over her shoulder to the poor, surviving editors who were huddled together in a frightened mass. As the water moved up to ankle depth, they quivered in fear but otherwise didn’t move. “Hurry!” she shouted again, but still there was no response. It was as if they were still in denial over what was happening, clinging to the notion that somehow, in some way, it was all going to work out.

Jack and Rose pounded up the twisting staircase. The stream of spiders was moving so quickly that they were hard-pressed to keep up with it. They passed another floor—and paused. There was a large door of etched glass, and on the other side of the door, they spotted the architect. He was simply standing there, his back to them, and he seemed to be looking at something with great intensity. The young fans cast a glance at each other and then at the water. They had managed to outrun it temporarily. It would be catch up, certainly, nothing could stop that, but for a moment they were safe. They ran up to the door and shoved it open. Sure enough, there was the architect. He was staring at a painting of a man with graying hair, seated at a drawing board and scowling as if annoyed that someone had interrupted him to paint his portrait. The architect was smiling sadly. He had a box tucked under his arm.

“Mr. Architect,” Rose called out. “Aren’t you going to make a try for it?”

He looked at her, and it took a moment for him to truly focus on her. “I’m sorry, young Rose,” he said ruefully. “I should have built you a better company.”

“You did everything you could.”

“There’s no point in going down with it,” Jack said urgently.

He glanced at the lad. “I didn’t catch your name?”

“Jack.”

“Jack.” This seemed to amuse him, and he looked at the painting as if sharing some secret joke. “You’d better go,” he said softly.

But the spiders had disappeared. Jack cursed the detour they’d taken, prompted by their interest in stopping to chat, at a most inopportune time, with the architect. “We’re lost. We don’t know which way to go.”

He took each of them gently by a shoulder and pointed them in one direction. “Go that way. And just keep facing front, true believers.”

He handed to Rose the box he’d been holding. She took it, clearly puzzled. She shook it slightly. It was very light and it sounded as if something was rattling around in it. “What’s in here?” she asked.

He smiled. “Excelsior.” And that was the last thing she heard him say, as he turned back to the painting and seemed to have forgotten that anybody else was there.

*

The owner watched from a safe distance, as the Marvelmanic sank lower and lower on the horizon.

He sat in his lifeboat, bobbing up and down, unable to believe what he was witnessing. He heard the screams of those who had counted on him. He’d let them down, let them all down. He had had such plans for the place, had intended to accomplish so much. How could he possibly have made such a muddle of it all? He was a rich man, a powerful man. He had become so by making a series of steady, intelligent, and savvy decisions. What had it been about Marvelmanic that had so tampered with his usually impeccable judgment? He had no idea; he might never have an idea.

He wasn’t able to look. All alone, he turned away so that he wouldn’t have to watch. His face was a mess. Fortunately enough, he had a lot of spare make-up around that he could use to touch himself up.

*

Perched atop the Marvelmanic, Jack and Rose had nowhere to go. “I jump, you jump, right, Jack?” Rose called to him over the tremendous roar of the water.

“But where are we jumping to?”

“DC! Or—or WildStorm!”

“That’s also DC!”

“Oh! Well, uh, Image! And maybe Dark Horse!”

“Here it comes!” Jack called to her. They held hands with desperate urgency, as Marvelmanic sank, faster and faster—and then they leaped. Moments later, as they clutched desperately onto the box of excelsior which was miraculously keeping them afloat, they watched in horror as Marvelmanic sank beneath the surface and disappeared beneath a massive sea of red ink.

Neither of them had ever tested any waters other than Marvelmanic, because they were both unvarnished, dyed-in-the-wood Marvelmanic Zombies. It was cold, though, colder than they could possibly have imagined. Cold because, with Marvelmanic gone, so, too, had more than 30% of the market vanished. All around them, store owners were paddling furiously, trying not to sink from sight beneath the waves along with the Marvelmanic.

Rose turned to Jack, who was already shivering from the absence of the Marvelmanic. “Rose…Rose, you must…you must make me this promise… you must… you must…”

“Oh, knock it off!”

Jack, Rose, and everyone else who was within hearing distance, looked at the approaching sight, and it was definitely something to see.

It was a dog, a huge toy dog. A toy dog with an unusually large tail. What was really impressive was that the tail was wagging the dog.

The lapping ocean did not seem to bother him. “People and their histrionics,” said the tail wagging the dog. “Everything is going to be fine. We know what we’re doing. We’re turning the Marvelmanic around. So it seems to have gone under. We can raise it again—raise it and make it float, bigger and better than ever.”

He shook a firm paw and Jack and Rose. “And don’t let anybody else tell you different. Good day, folks.” And he paddled away.

“He thinks he walks on water,” Jack said with a disdainful shrug.

“Could he be right? The tail wagging the dog—could he be right? Will Marvelmanic surface? I love their comics—but will our love go on?” Rose asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said cautiously. “I hope so.”

He looked around and saw a mass of dead spiders dotting the ocean, a vista that seemed endless. And he intoned in a low voice, “I… hope so…”

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)