( updated) 7: Chapter 7: What Is He Even Drawing?
( updated) Morning came down warm and bright over the Queens high school, pooling gold on the classroom desks before first bell.
“Harry.
Harry.” Peter dropped into the seat beside him and held up a magazine like a trophy fish.
“I got Shonen Jump.
Trist’s comic is in it.
Looks like a superhero book.” Harry had been deep in architecture, specifically the design of a sentence that would get Mary Jane to a movie without sounding like it mattered, and being interrupted by this nerd mid-blueprint soured him.
He gave the magazine one sideways glance.
The cover featured a bald man.
His mouth twitched.
“Don’t look at me,” Peter said, catching the twitch.
“I haven’t read it yet either.” Bald was, in fairness, a bold opening.
The market had spent decades molding every hero on Steve the Captain, and the early books hadn’t even bothered to vary the face, just the name over it.
Against a wall of square-jawed clones, a gleaming bald head almost counted as fresh air.
“Read fast and hand it over,” Harry said, recovering his cool.
“I had the butler buy mine this morning.
It’s sitting at home.” Peter was already peeling back the cover, and privately, he braced himself.
The rest of the world could believe whatever it liked about the mysterious new artist.
He and Harry had known Trist since they were kids trading sandwiches, and one fact stood in evidence across all those years: the guy could not draw.
At all.
Stick figures had filed complaints.
Then the first page opened, and Peter forgot what he’d been bracing for.
Red gloves.
A yellowish jumpsuit.
A white cape hanging off the figure’s shoulders, back turned to the reader, alone in a plain of rubble with black smoke crawling up the sky, and something dark and enormous lying broken in the haze beside him.
The linework was beautiful, and the stillness of the figure poured off the page.
Nothing in this world is my enemy, the pose said, and Peter’s heart picked up a beat believing it.
“Whoa.
Okay.
That’s cool.
That’s really cool.” He shot Harry an accusing look.
“He hired somebody.
There’s no way.
Right?” No answer required.
Peter dove back in, already building the map in his head: so the bald caped man was the protagonist, obviously a heavyweight, and the ruined city up front meant the story opened at the end and would loop back.
In medias res.
Classy.
The hero’s first full appearance came with two giant words stamped across the panel, “Justice serves,” and Peter’s certainty hardened into excitement.
This was going to be one of the strong ones.
One of the untouchable, iconic ones.
He turned the page, hungry for the face of this new legend, and nearly tore the magazine in half.
What.
What IS this.
What is he even drawing?!
Where were the eyebrows?
What was that expression?!
Two boiled eggs for eyes, a couple of lines, a circle, and apparently that constituted a face now.
A human face!
Human beings did not look like this!
The book had spent three pages proving its artist could render smoke you could smell, and then unveiled a protagonist drawn with the total effort of a man doodling on hold with the cable company.
Peter sat with his jaw slack.
So this was it.
This was Trist’s actual skill ceiling, and everything before it had been hired hands.
Mystery solved.
He frowned, could not think of a single supportive thing to say for later, and turned the page anyway.
The gorgeous art came flooding straight back, which somehow made it worse.
He declined to even roast the monster’s origin story.
Fine.
Vaccine Man, born of pollution, whatever.
It was the protagonist who was ruining his morning.
Because when the monster demanded his name, the bald man said he was doing this for fun, and Peter took that personally.
Uncle Ben was alive and well, and no one had yet said anything to Peter about power, or responsibility, or the price of having one without the other.
But you didn’t need the words.
Sixteen years of steeping in this world’s idea of a hero had done its work on him the way it had on everyone: heroes gave.
That was what made them heroes.
They bled for people and asked nothing, like the Captain, like every book on every shelf.
A hero who shrugged and said “for fun” ran against the grain of everything, and Peter read the line twice, honestly bothered, wondering where Trist had even picked up thinking like this.
Maybe it was the contrarian streak.
Maybe it was the year he’d had.
Either way, it was going to flop, and Peter would have to find something kind to say about it, and he resented being put in this position.
Then the fight started, and Peter, grudge and all, leaned in.
Fights were the whole meal of a superhero book, and this one set the table properly: Vaccine Man howled, swelled, filled the sky, all fangs and boiling menace, drawn so well the threat came through the paper.
Peter caught his own worry rising on the bald man’s behalf, which annoyed him.
A monster this vicious was final-boss material anywhere else, and they were spending him in chapter one?
He turned the page slowly, savoring the pivot point every comic lived on.
Here it came.
The hero’s power revealed, the counterattack, the…
“HUH?!” It came out of Peter at full volume, in a quiet classroom, in a pitch he would be hearing about for weeks.
Harry levitated an inch out of his chair.
Half the room turned around.
Peter noticed none of it.
Peter had left the classroom entirely.
One page.
One panel, blown out edge to edge.
The bald man swung, almost lazily, and his fist went through Vaccine Man and out the back of him, the monster’s grand speech still dangling unfinished over his own exit wound.
That was it.
That was the fight.
The boss of bosses, one-punched like a passing errand.
Oh God, what was he reading?
Was this an April Fools’ issue?
Peter had read hundreds of these books, and every single one obeyed the sacred sequence: even match, slight disadvantage, brutal beatdown, blazing comeback.
That was how power worked.
That was how stories worked.
This thing had taken the sequence out behind the shed and shot it, and Peter’s heart genuinely hurt, and also he could not stop turning pages.
Both things were true at once and he didn’t have time to reconcile them.
Four chapters.
Andy had loaded four full chapters into the debut issue to launch the book with a bang, and Peter ate them without chewing.
Chapter two gave him the origin, and the words behind “for fun,” and Peter came out the other side of it unsettled in a way he didn’t have shelving for.
He couldn’t have told you which was better, fun or sacrifice.
He could tell you the comic was really, really good, and that this felt like a betrayal of something, and that he was going to reread it tonight.
Chapter four introduced the Subterranean King, and the world flipped again: here, at last, was a monster trading blows with the bald man as an equal.
The one punch failed.
A rival!
Peter closed the back cover flushed and buzzing, four chapters deep and starving for a fifth, and one question had already burrowed under everything else.
Where did the power come from?
Saitama, the caption named him, had no lightning-bolt origin.
No mutation, no lab accident, no gift from the stars.
Just a body, and one punch.
And fantasy always borrowed from reality; half the powers in modern comics were traced off mutants, everyone knew that.
The most famous mutant alive was Magneto, the man who’d shot at a president, a household name, forever cast as the villain in a hundred knockoff books.
So what was Saitama supposed to be borrowed from?
What was the answer?
The itch got unbearable.
Peter flipped back to page one and started hunting for clues.
“Peter.” The voice arrived low and gloomy at his shoulder.
Peter surfaced, blinking, to discover Harry glaring at him from a foot away and a loose semicircle of classmates gathered around his desk, all of them staring with frank scientific interest.
Harry plucked the magazine out of his hands with two fingers.
“My turn.” “Congratulations, Parker,” somebody said.
“Your comic’s been requisitioned.” The rest of the room kept looking at him, because the shyest kid in class had just shrieked like a kettle over a magazine, and they very much wanted to know what was in it.
Peter turned to stone in his chair.
And in classrooms and break rooms and subway cars from one coast to the other, that whole morning, the same scene kept playing, over and over, all across America.