Metropolis

It’s almost dusk now at the Saturday Morning Cartoon Characters’ Old Folks Home, formerly known as Camp Candy.

Nick “Wish Kid” McClary and Little Rosey are smoking on the front porch, flicking embers as Fat Albert dips his chaw and expounds on the Manichean heresy.

He’s eloquent from all his years of backalley wrangling. How many deaths did his oil-on-the-water ways prevent back in the good old days, in inner-city Philadelphia?

Speaking of war, the Smurfs are at it again, warring with the Snorks over god knows what, probably some point of Menshevik versus Bolshevik collectivism.

Everybody forgot a long time ago. No one cares. Gargamel’s in the basement with Egon Spengler, poring over some antediluvian alchemical text (a common interest) for the secret to make gold.

The old PKE meters of Ray and Peter and Winston, god rest his soul, are humming a sad spectral tune in the corner, but that’s normal: Teen Wolf and Caspar and the paranormal megawatt himself, Beetlejuice, are, after all, in the building. It could be the Ewoks or Droids; there’s something otherworldly about them.

Truth be told, there’s always been a cultural gap at the Old Folks Home between the anthropomorphized animals and humans: Captain Caveman straddled the divide, but there’s only so much one hair-covered Cro-Magnon warlord can do. Sometime when it’s slow and sweaty outside, Josie and the Pussycats team up with Jem and the Holograms — and the Misfits, if they’re sober — and play rockabilly and New Wave hits and bad old blues into the morning, one long discordant note after another mewling off into the final night, storms of static on the horizon. There will be no divorce this year, but no sequel either.

If cancellation is death, rerun is reincarnation. One cannot be “born again,” really, but if you’re lucky, a Renaissance or Baroque painter will daub your greatest hits: a hot plate here, a Catherine wheel there. Isn’t that comforting, to know your work will live on after you? Far, far after you.

We forget that these Platonic entities that we give our hearts to exist, and that to them, death is not the same as it is to us. “Death”? Maybe the wrong word for cancellation. Living without life, then. Far better term. Like hibernation, or whatever Anne Rice had her vampires do whenever they went below the Earth and slept for a century. Hate to bring her up. Like bringing the corpse of Moses into a papal orgy. I needed an example, and now I’ve made one of myself. We get what we wish for.

But for them, the cartoons and comics we don’t remember but, at some level, never forget, there is no death, merely the shadow of life. In the way of the Black Riders of Mordor, dancing forever on the lip between. Only the luckiest of pop culture personages get an all-admission pass to the everlasting undying happy hunting ground of human meme mass consciousness memory; the ur-hallowed hollow in human culture where Achilles, Sherlock Holmes, Hercules, Mother Mary, Superman, Prince Hamlet, Joe Pesci and Leroy Jenkins are kept inviolate like Dick Clark’s youthful codpiece, in Platonic perfection.

Maybe some of the retirees here at the Old Folks Home will make it there. Maybe not.

Occasionally, every twenty years or so, the Irony Bus pulls up to the Home and takes a couple of the gang out, to cycle them back into pop consciousness. By that time, they’re desperate, they are, so on out to T-Shirt factories, Internet Web sites and Hot Topic they go. On to 4chan. Hail, image macros!

To be a joke is better than to be a living death. A laughing stock is still in stock, as they say at the Home. To be anything is better than this ad-hoc American Grey Havens. Everyone here knows what happened to Mandrake the Magician, Jim Crow, White Game Hunter, and Doc Savage on the Sequential Art Home. You’ve seen Toy Story 2, right? That’s what it feels like to be Mandrake: nobody remembers you.

“At least people _hate_ you,” Mandrake tells Jim Crow. “They don’t remember me.”

“Every time I turns about, I jumps Jim Crow,” says Jim.

“Right,” says Doc Savage. “Don’t you get tired of life as a caricature?”

“Don’t you?” says Jim.

Then a car pulls up with Warren Ellis driving. Doc Savage smiles and climbs in, because Ellis is looking for science heroes.

A stream of curses and cigarette smoke emit from the hybrid vehicle, and they’re over the horizon, back into the real.

Mandrake feels sad, but a few seconds later, the shadow of Alan Moore’s airship falls over the lawn and a rope ladder comes down.

Turns out Alan’s looking for Science Heroes. For a while, Alan had a bad relationship for doing nasty things to the old archetypes, but everyone understood that was a period he was going through in the 80’s.

Completely unlike that Garth Ennis fellow. No superheroes will come within ten feet of that guy’s Fiat, no matter how many times the Fenian honks the horn. Why bother? The Irishman only stops on the way to Old West Gully, to meet the twins Cowboy and Injun for his weekly bout of cards.

Jim feels bad. Maybe he’ll go hang with The Hun of War, Wong the August Inscrutable Chinee, Li’l Abner, Gaylord Pedophilius, Mighty Whitey, Straw Feminazi, Juan Sleepez, St. Redski of Communistovsky, Sean O’Drinkus, Pigg the Capitalist, No-Heart Yankee or anybody written by Chris Claremont. Jim also has a bed at Token City. About Token City: the rest of the retirement homes on the Planet of Ideas are villages or at best large towns. Slurs are numerous enough to populate a city.

The Sequential Art Home is called The Dusty Longbox. Everyone knows what that means.

The Irony Bus also comes by the Dusty Longbox every once in a blue moon. But Comic Books have Continuity — Continuity is a social program invented by the government of the Sequential Art nation to keep old folks in circulation. “Circulation” is another word for life, really. If you’re lucky, a nice person from the Comics Journal or the Internet will come and take you back to the world. The Spirit, for example, has never had to go to the Longbox. People are a bit worried about him being on that Frank Miller fellow’s arm, but hey, you dance with them what brought you.