The phone on the desk rang.
Trist looked at it for a second before answering.
The body knew the number by heart, and by the time he had the receiver to his ear, the memories had already put a face to it: black hair going gray at the temples, blue eyes, a voice that lived somewhere down in the chest.
“Trist.” The voice sounded worn at the edges.
“I know how much you’re hurting, son.
Believe me, I know.
But this can’t go on.
Your parents’ company needs somebody to carry it, and nobody’s laid eyes on you in a week.
The artists are starting to walk.” Uncle Andy.
His father’s close friend, and the general manager holding the place together.
Whatever week Trist had been having, Andy had been having it too, minus the luxury of disappearing.
Trist rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Uncle Andy.
I’m coming in today.
And let them walk.
I’ve got a better artist.” The line went quiet for a beat.
“Better.” The word came out flat as a dial tone.
“Fine.
We’ll talk when you get here.” Click.
Trist set the receiver down and exhaled.
Fair enough.
From where Andy sat, the heir had spent a week as a ghost while the ship took on water.
He’d earned exactly that much patience and no more.
He put the finished One Piece chapter away in the drawer, laid out a fresh stack of paper, and thought three words into the search bar.
One Punch Man.
The ghost image settled onto the page, and his pencil got to work.
While his hands moved, he sorted through what the memories had to say about the thing he’d inherited.
“Publishing company” dressed it up.
In truth it was a workshop wearing a company’s clothes: four comic artists, six assistants, a thin layer of office staff, fifteen people on its best day.
And that was normal.
That was the whole industry.
Thank the Captain for that.
Ever since officialdom built Steve into a national monument, the hero genre had calcified into the only genre, and the artists working in it had learned that the surest way to lose everything was to try something new.
So nobody tried.
No giant dominated the market and no upstarts fought over it.
Every small firm sat in its own corner, private, family-owned, staff on straight salary, and the money men never even glanced at an industry this sleepy.
New York alone had five or six outfits exactly like his.
As for the artists jumping ship, he understood that too.
Both owners dead in one crash, the heir a teenager who hadn’t shown his face, the economy in a ditch, and comics shrinking year over year.
Sailors leave a sinking boat while their value still floats.
Nothing personal; just weather.
And for a man holding a divine tool, an emptied company was less a crisis than a cleared table.
Four chapters later, he squared the pages, slid them into a backpack, and headed for the door.
New York, 2008.
The center of the world, if you asked New York.
The street hit him with all of it at once: halal-cart smoke, a jackhammer two blocks over, a bus kneeling at the curb with a hydraulic sigh, salsa leaking out of a bodega doorway.
Trist came down the stoop and the current simply took him.
The body knew this block better than he did.
His feet found the gap between the hydrant and the fruit stand without asking permission, his shoulder gave way for a delivery guy he never consciously saw, and at the corner his arm went up for a cab in one smooth motion he watched happen like a spectator.
Handy.
He and this body were going to get along.
Overhead, a plane crawled across the blue on its approach into JFK.
He watched it a beat longer than he needed to, then looked back down and stepped off the curb as a yellow cab cut across two lanes to claim him.
The driver turned out to be a talker, one of those cheerful engines of conversation who needed maybe fifteen percent participation to keep running.
Trist supplied his fifteen percent, watching Manhattan scroll by while the man worked through traffic, the mayor, his brother-in-law, and traffic again.
At the curb, Trist handed over a bill and got out without waiting for change.
Behind him the cab pulled away with the driver singing, loudly and off key, about what a beautiful day it was.
Another rich kid, in the driver’s book.
God bless him.
The office sat near Times Square, the most expensive stretch of real estate Manhattan had to offer.
Crossroads of the World, the guidebooks called it, all theaters and billboards and shops stacked on shops.
His father had paid dearly for the address and, by the feel of the memories, considered every cent of it a statement.
Trist stood at the foot of the tower and looked up.
His road as a comic artist started here.
Seventh floor.
Moss Comics leased the whole level and used maybe half of it.
The empty half had been the plan, once.
Expansion.
Growth.
Then a plane went down, and now the unused space just sat there behind glass, a floor plan for a future that had died with its owners.
You could feel it in the office air, that particular quiet of people updating their resumes at lunch.
A man with uncombed hair walked into the manager’s office and laid an envelope on the desk.
“Andy.
My resignation.” Andy looked at the envelope, then at the man.
“Won’t reconsider?” The man shook his head.
His mouth opened, shut again.
Whatever he’d rehearsed on the way in, he decided against it, and left with the door clicking softly behind him.
“Ah.
This kid.” Andy filed the letter with the others and didn’t need the missing speech spelled out.
He knew the shape of it by now.
The owner’s son inherits the company and doesn’t set foot in it for a week.
No leadership, no stake, no future anyone can point to, in the middle of a downturn, in a dying industry.
Who builds a nest on a boat that’s going down?
He couldn’t even blame them.
He’d buried his best friend eight days ago, and instead of grieving properly he’d spent every hour since with both hands pressed against the leaks, waiting on a boy who wouldn’t answer his phone.
“Uncle Andy.
How bad is it?” Andy looked up.
Trist stood in the doorway with a backpack over one shoulder, and something about him didn’t match the file in Andy’s head.
The kid he remembered was polite, a little soft, a little adrift.
This one held the doorframe like he owned it.
Which, technically, he did.
“You’re finally here.” Andy didn’t bother softening it.
“There are no comic artists left.
None.
Two assistants stayed, five office staff.
Everyone else is gone.” He delivered the numbers like a doctor reads a chart, and behind them sat a week of frustration with nowhere to go.
“Let them go.” Andy’s patience, already thin, tore straight through.
“Let them…
Trist, without artists there is no company!
What do you think we sell?” “You’re looking at one.” Trist swung the backpack off his shoulder, drew out the manuscript, and laid it on the desk.
The corner of his mouth came up.
“I’m enough on my own.” He meant it, too.
The exodus suited him fine.
He’d seen the departed artists’ work in the body’s memories and in this morning’s research, and it was all the same product: competent hands wrapped around dead stories.
Craft without a pulse.
Losing them cost the company nothing worth counting.
Andy, for his part, was one deep breath away from combustion.
He stared at the boy, then at the pages, and ran the arithmetic of everything he knew.
Sixteen years ago he’d watched this kid learn to walk.
At no point in the years since had anyone mentioned the boy could draw.
He was a college student.
He was a child.
He picked up the manuscript anyway, because the alternative was shouting.
The first page stopped him.
A bald man in a white cape stood with his back to the reader, alone in a field of rubble, smoke crawling up the sky behind him.
No face.
No pose to speak of.
And still something came off the figure, a flat, bottomless calm, as if the ruins were somebody else’s problem that he’d already solved.
The linework was professional.
Genuinely professional, on par with anyone who’d just walked out the door.
Andy felt the knot in his chest ease by a notch.
If the kid could really produce at this level, then maybe, maybe, there was something here to save.
Two pages later, his brow folded.
The story opened in a ruined city.
A monster the size of a building strode through it, grotesque and gleeful, and ordinary people simply ceased to exist under the light spheres it threw, erased between one panel and the next.
The art made it ugly, documentary ugly.
Then the page turned, and the tone fell off a cliff.
The bald man sat at home in a t-shirt, reading about the attack.
He pulled on the white cape without hurry, a man putting on a jacket to take out the trash.
One flat line hung beside his blank face.
“Justice serves.” Andy blinked at the panel.
A bald, dead-eyed lead against artwork this rich.
All right.
Odd combination, mild curiosity, he could see a reader giving it a chapter.
But it was still a hero book.
That was the problem.
The genre was saturated to the waterline.
Reader interest had been cooling for a year, the latest survey said so in bold, and every hero story ran the same rails: ordinary man stumbles into power, suffers nobly, rises, fights crime, roll credits.
Andy had read a thousand of them.
He didn’t need to turn the page to know the next thousand panels.
He turned the page.
The bald man arrived at the ruins, plucked a little girl out of the monster’s path, set her down, and then he and the monster just…
talked.
And the talk was wrong.
All of it was wrong, in a way Andy couldn’t file anywhere.
The monster introduced itself as Vaccine Man, born from the Earth’s pollution to punish mankind, which was at least adjacent to the radiation-mutant boilerplate Andy knew how to shelve.
Fine.
Standard villain sermon, oversized ego included.
It was the hero who broke the shelf.
Because when Vaccine Man demanded to know what champion of justice had come to face him, the bald man scratched his cheek and answered, in the tone of a man discussing his weekend plans, that he was just a guy who was a hero for fun.
For fun.
Andy read the bubble twice.
The words declined to become different words.
A hero.
For fun.