The Last Hand-Letterer of Marvel Bullpen

• Chapter 1 The Smell of Higgins Ink
• Chapter 2 Sixty-Five Madison Avenue
• Chapter 3 The Ames Guide and the Tremor
• Chapter 4 Ghost Lines in Blue Pencil
• Chapter 5 The Arrival of the Compugraphic
• Chapter 6 Tails and Balloons
• Chapter 7 Smoke Breaks on the Fire Escape
• Chapter 8 Pica Rulers and Swollen Joints
• Chapter 9 The Anatomy of a Sound Effect
• Chapter 10 The Kid with the Adhesive Wax
• Chapter 11 Script Revisions at Midnight
• Chapter 12 Paste-Up Ghosts
• Chapter 13 The Weight of the Speedball Nib
• Chapter 14 Cold Type, Cold Hands
• Chapter 15 The Editor's Red Pen
• Chapter 16 A Symphony of White-Out
• Chapter 17 The Bleed Margins
• Chapter 18 Coffee Rings and Broken Leads
• Chapter 19 Proof of Life on Bristol Board
• Chapter 20 The Machine in the Basement
• Chapter 21 The Final Splash Page
• Chapter 22 Holding the Straightedge
• Chapter 23 The Last Kerning
• Chapter 24 The Courier's Bicycle
• Chapter 25 Wiping the Pen
• Chapter 26 Off to the Separators

The smell of Higgins Black Magic waterproof drawing ink was distinct from the smell of fresh coffee, cheap tobacco, or the wet overcoats steaming against the radiator, though by eight in the morning all four had gathered in Abe Schulman’s nostrils to form the official atmosphere of the workweek. Higgins was sharp and faintly medicinal, carrying a vinegary bottom note that hit the back of the palate before the bottle was even uncapped. It smelled like crushed beetles, shellac, and dead trees pressed into cardboard. If a man dipped a steel nib into it four thousand times a week for thirty-five years, the odor permanently leased space in the pores of his thumbs. Abe’s wife, Sarah, claimed she could locate him in a pitch-black apartment simply by following the trail of pine soot and ammonia lingering on his neck.

Abe set his metal lunchbox on the edge of the taboret and pulled the green cord on the twin-tube fluorescent lamp clamped to his drawing board. The fixture buzzed like an angry hornet caught in an empty tin can, flickered twice with a sickly violet wash, and finally settled into a bright, humming glare that turned his fingernails purple. He didn't mind the hum. The hum meant the power was running, the heat might eventually knock the ice off the outer glass of the tenth-floor window, and the ink wouldn't freeze into sludge inside the amber bottles.

On the angled expanse of birch plywood lay three loose pages of two-ply Strathmore regular surface bristol board. They were penciled by Sal Buscema, who drew figures like a carpenter framing a house: thick, sturdy lines, square jaws, and heroic silhouettes with knees like cinderblocks. Abe liked Sal’s pencils. Sal understood where the balloons were supposed to go. He didn't cram the Hulk’s shoulder right into the upper left-hand corner where an opening caption was clearly dictated by the script. Newer kids, the ones coming out of the art institutes who thought they were Michelangelo with a clutch pencil, routinely drew intricate drapery and decorative gargoyles over every single square inch of the page, leaving a letterer forty square picas to cram ninety words of Stan Lee’s most purple prose into a space narrower than a pack of Chesterfields.

Abe reached into the breast pocket of his cardigan and produced a square amber bottle of Higgins. It had a black bakelite cap with an attached dropper that was crusted with dried, iridescent rings of carbon. He tapped the glass bottom against the wood of his desk out of superstition, unscrewed the top, and set it inside an old lead casting he had salvaged from a linotype shop thirty years ago. The casting was a heavy, square slug of scrap metal with a circular well bored into its center. It weighed nearly four pounds. If you put a bottle of Higgins into a lead collar, you could not knock it over with an errant elbow, a misplaced T-square, or a sudden sneeze. If you knocked an unweighted bottle of Higgins over on an original Buscema splash page, you spent your lunch break on your knees in the men’s room trying to lift black lake out of rag cotton with blotter paper and prayers, and then you went down to the delicatessen on Lexington to ask if they needed a dishwasher who was sixty-one years old and possessed ruined posture.

He reached for his penholder. It was a notched wooden barrel, lacquer worn completely down to the pale grain where his index finger rested, fitted with an ancient Hunt 102 crow quill. The nib had to be burned before its first run; brand-new steel was coated in a thin sheen of protective oil from the factory in Camden that made the ink bead up like grease on an oily skillet. Abe struck a cardboard match from the Stage Delicatessen, held the blue core of the flame beneath the curved belly of the nib for two seconds, and blew it out. A faint ribbon of sulfur joined the Higgins smell. He wiped the blackened tip across the corner of his denim apron, dipped, and drew a single hairline down the scrap margin of page three.

The line broke.

Abe stopped. He didn't curse; cursing was for production assistants who dropped stat cameras or editors whose four-color covers arrived from the chemical separators with the registration three sixteenths of an inch off. Abe simply closed his eyes, took a shallow breath through his nose, and let his right hand drop into his lap. He opened the fingers wide, held them flat against his wool trousers, and counted to ten.

His thumb was behaving itself, but the middle knuckle of his forefinger looked like an unshelled walnut. It had taken ten years for that knuckle to migrate three degrees to the east. In the warm months of July and August, when the humidity off the East River made the boards swell until they wouldn't slide easily into the cardboard mailing tubes, the knuckle was merely thick. In December, when the radiator under the sill hissed dry steam that smelled of rusted pipes and dead mice, the joint clicked every time he pressed down on the flexible downstroke of a letter M or the wide belly of an exclamation point.

"Don't do it today, sweetheart," Abe muttered to his knuckles. "We got twenty-two pages of The Defenders to put to bed before the truck leaves on Thursday."

The bullpen was empty, save for the rhythmic clatter of the teletype down the hall in the circulation office and the low, muffled thump of a radiator valve releasing pressure. It was seven minutes past eight. The kids wouldn't drift in until nine-thirty, smelling of damp canvas sneakers, wet hair, and the toasted onion rolls from the cart on forty-second. They would sit down, sharpen six turquoise pencils down to three-inch stubs, argue for forty-five minutes about whether Jack Kirby’s run on the Fourth World books over at National was a work of divine genius or the unhinged babblings of an overworked old man, and then go out for more coffee.

Abe had started in comic books when they were printed on paper made from discarded pulpwood that smelled like a wet forest fire, back when an outfit called Timely was run out of three crowded rooms where you had to move your chair every time Martin Goodman walked to the water cooler. He had lettered Captain America while men were getting shot on beaches he couldn't spell, sitting in a basement room in Manhattan with four desk lamps heating the air until the grease from his forehead dripped onto the margins. In those days, you got two dollars a page, cash on Friday, and if your lettering looked like it had been punched out by an idiot with a dull chisel, there were three hundred boys from Brooklyn waiting on the landing who had studied mechanical drafting at Pratt and could letter twenty pages before dinner without their hands shaking once.

He picked up the penholder again. His hand felt steady enough. It was all in the wrist and the forearm; you didn't draw the letters with your fingers, or your hand would turn to wood before noon. You locked the small muscles, planted the meat of the palm on a protective sheet of scrap vellum so the skin oils wouldn't contaminate the tooth of the bristol, and moved the whole arm from the elbow, like a pantograph.

He dipped the nib into the Higgins. The surface of the ink was perfectly black, shiny as an oil slick in a gutter. It had surface tension; a tiny meniscus climbed the bright curve of the nib, waiting for the split steel to touch paper and break the seal.

The first balloon was a caption. MEANWHILE, DEEP WITHIN THE SUBTERRANEAN LABYRINTH OF THE MOLE MAN...

Abe didn't need the script propped up on an easel; he had read it on the train ride in from Queens, between Woodside and the platform at Queensboro Plaza. He knew the cadence. Writers like Roy or Steve didn't write dialogue for actors; they wrote dialogue for balloons. They wrote in rhythm: three short words, an adjective that required a drop-shadow, a pause, a semicolon, and then a long, heroic noun that filled out the bottom curve of the circle so the white space around the words stayed even. An oval balloon was the shape of an egg laid on its side; if you let the top line run too long, the letters jammed into the curved corners, and the whole panel looked like a suitcase stuffed with dirty laundry.

He set the pen down. M.

The downstroke was straight, two tenths of an inch high. His stroke was clean. The ink bit into the Strathmore, flowing out of the reservoir with that soft, microscopic scratching sound that Abe had heard in his sleep since 1941. It wasn't silent. If you were close enough, hand-lettering made a dry, rhythmic noise, like a beetle crawling across a piece of dry butcher's paper. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch-a-scritch.

E. Three horizontals, the center bar slightly shorter than the top and bottom to give it balance, tucked precisely three points beneath the crossbar of the M.

A. The crossbar low, leaving a wide, open triangular eye at the top so the black didn't pool up when the mechanical engraver photographed the board down to three-quarters size. If your loops were too small, the zinc engraving plate couldn't keep the metal clear; the acid wouldn't bite clean, and the letter A printed as an ugly black triangle on the newsprint, like a fly had landed on the character's forehead. Abe had seen a whole print run of Kid Colt ruined in 1956 because some rookie letterer made his Os too small and every horse in the county looked like it was shouting zeros.

He finished MEANWHILE. It sat between the invisible pencil lines like a squad of soldiers standing at attention on an asphalt parade ground. He hadn't used an Ames lettering guide for that first word; forty years of mechanical practice were burned into the muscles behind his collarbone. He could drop four lines of eighteen-point sans-serif capital letters across a seven-inch tier without varying the baseline by the width of a human hair.

He reached for the rag to wipe the nib.

"Morning, Abe," said a voice behind him.

Abe didn't look up immediately. You never looked up with a loaded nib six inches from a clean page; one errant twitch of the shoulder, one involuntary nod of greeting, and a single drop of Higgins would roll off the steel heel and land squarely between the eyes of the Sub-Mariner. Abe finished wiping the metal until it squeaked against the dry cotton, set the holder down in the grooved wooden tray beside his bottle, and then turned.

It was Sol Brodsky, wearing his usual grey cardigan with the elbows that had stretched until they bagged around his forearms like small wool hammocks. Sol was carrying an eight-ounce paper cup from the Greek deli down on thirty-ninth, the one with the blue Grecian urns printed on the wax side. The rim was softened by grease and coffee steam.

"Sol," Abe said. "You're early. The printers call about the blue-lines on Iron Man?"

"Printers didn't call," Sol said. He didn't sit down. There was an empty metal stool with a green vinyl seat right behind Abe’s board, but Sol stayed on his feet, shifting his weight from one scuffed orthopedic shoe to the other. "Weather’s turning. Radio said we might get four inches before the five o’clock train."

"Let it snow," Abe said, reaching for his scraper. The scraper was an old surgeon’s scalpel with a number eleven blade, its tip ground down to an oil-stone edge so thin you couldn't see it if you held it sideways against the light. "I’m on page twelve. I do six pages before the sandwich wagon comes, I do six after, I’m out the door at four. Sal’s backgrounds are clean this time. Not like that kid from Brooklyn who thinks every brick in Hell’s Kitchen needs its own zip code."

Sol sipped his coffee. He looked past Abe’s shoulder, his eyes scanning the three finished pages hanging by wooden clothespins from the wire strung along the north wall. They were drying. The ink was losing that greasy, wet sheen and turning into the dead, flat velvet of dry carbon.

"You use the 102 for the captions?" Sol asked.

"Always the 102," Abe said. "Speedball’s too blunt for Sal’s pencil. The B-6 makes the letters look like liverwurst. You know that. Why? What’s wrong with the MEANWHILE?"

"Nothing’s wrong with it, Abe. It looks like you did it. That’s the trouble with it. It looks like a human being sat down with a piece of steel and made twenty-six different shapes."

Abe frowned. He picked up his wooden-handled eraser—a wedge of hard green Eberhard Faber that had been notched with a razor so he could sweep out guide lines without disturbing the carbon underneath—and blew a speck of gray rubber off the panel border. "Since when is that a complaint? Stan used to come in here and scream his head off if the balloons looked like National’s. National looked like a bank ledger. National looked like an insurance form. Stan wanted them to jump. 'Give me juice, Abe!' he used to yell. 'Give me lightning bolts! Give me an ARRGH that sounds like a guy having his appendix removed with a shoehorn!'"

Sol smiled, but the smile didn't move the skin around his eyes. It was the same expression he had worn back in ’57 when they had to tell twenty-four freelancers that Goodman was closing down the Atlas distribution arm and they should all go home and try to find work painting signs for supermarket windows.

"Things are moving along, Abe," Sol said quietly. He took another sip from the paper cup, found it empty, and crushed the wax cardboard between his fingers. It made a dry, crackling sound. "Management went up to the fourth floor yesterday. Some guys from the corporate office in Delaware. They had clipboards. Big guys in blue suits who look like they never read a funny book in their lives."

"They're suits," Abe said, dipping his nib again. The steel went tink against the inside of the glass collar. "Suits come, suits go. Cadence took over, now it’s these other people. They don't know the difference between a Ben Day screen and a window screen. Let 'em walk around. As long as the checks don't bounce on Friday, I don't care if they wear top hats and carry canes."

"They were measuring the corner office," Sol said. "The one with the double doors behind the stat camera."

"That’s just the morgue. Nothing in there except ten thousand old silver-prints and half a ton of old promotional circulars from the World’s Fair."

"They're clearing it out, Abe. The building superintendent had three guys from the local in there on Saturday with hand trucks. They threw out the steel flat-files. All of them. Even the ones with the old Millie the Model plates."

Abe paused, the nib hovering an eighth of an inch above the bristol. A tiny droplet of black ink, round and perfect as a seed pearl, hung from the split in the metal. He carefully touched the tip to the scrap paper on his left until the drop flattened out and vanished into the gray rag.

"Why would they want that room?" Abe asked. "The ceiling leaks every time the valve sticks on the eleventh floor. The floorboards are rotted under the radiator."

"They're reinforcing the joists," Sol said. He didn't look at Abe now; he was looking down at his own fingernails, which were stained with the yellow developer fluid from the photostat machine. "They’re bringing in three-phase power. Electrician was here until eight last night pulling heavy cable through the conduit behind the water cooler."

"For what? A bigger camera?"

"No," Sol said. He reached out and touched the edge of Abe’s drawing board, his heavy fingers resting lightly on the pine frame. "Not a camera."

A cold draft came off the street, rattling the iron counterweights inside the window frame. Outside, down on the gray expanse of Madison Avenue, a crosstown bus ground its gears with a shriek that climbed through ten floors of glass and brick, vibrating through Abe’s soles.

"You should take care of that finger, Abe," Sol said, nodding toward Abe's right hand. "You got a little knot there. My cousin Morris had a knot like that. Used to play the fiddle for the Russian ballet down on Fourteenth. He had to switch to the viola. Then he had to switch to nothing."

"My finger’s fine," Abe said, his voice dropping an octave into the flat gravel of the Grand Concourse. "My finger letters six pages a day. How many pages does the kid in the tennis shoes do? Two? And half of his balloons are shaped like Idaho."

"He’s fast on the stat camera, Abe."

"A monkey is fast on a stat camera. You push a button, the bulb goes flash, you stick the paper in the soup. A trained raccoon could do it if you gave him half a bagel every twenty minutes."

Sol didn't answer. He turned the crushed coffee cup over and over in his palm, the blue Grecian border flattening into a jagged gray spiral. "Just... watch the margins on this issue, Abe. They’re very particular about the borders now. Everything has to be uniform. They’re talking about standardizing the gutters. Quarter-inch, dead on. No more variations for the double-spreads unless you clear it with production first."

"I’ve been setting margins since before you had hair, Sol."

"I know," Sol said. He turned to walk back down the corridor toward the production office, his shoes dragging slightly against the linoleum. "I know you have."

Abe watched him go. The gray cardigan disappeared around the corner by the water cooler, where the low hum of the fluorescent tubes seemed to drop in pitch, overtaken by the distant thrum of the traffic below.

Abe sat alone in the circle of cold violet light. The smell of Higgins ink rose from the small open neck of the bottle, familiar, bitter, and thick. He dipped the 102 crow quill again, wiped the side of the barrel against the neck to regulate the flow, and laid the edge of the steel against the second line of the caption.

DEEP WITHIN THE SUBTERRANEAN LABYRINTH...

The pen moved. His knuckle gave a dull, grinding thud, an internal click that didn't make a sound in the room but traveled up the bones of his forearm straight into the hinge of his jaw. He didn't flinch. He pulled the stroke down, straight and true, two tenths of an inch from baseline to cap-height, the ink laying down rich and black on the smooth surface of the board, drying as he watched it into something that looked like it had been carved out of stone.

The building at 575 Madison Avenue had been left behind two years back, but in Abe’s head, the address of Marvel Comics would always be tangled with the memory of narrow elevators that smelled of wet wool and pastrami grease. The current headquarters at 575 Madison was technically modern, but Sixty-Five Madison—the old address that older freelancers still scribbled on return envelopes out of sheer muscle memory—remained the spiritual home of the sweat and ink. The modern office had dropped ceilings with acoustic tiles that always bore a yellow water stain shaped like Lake Michigan, but underneath the thin skin of corporate drywall, it was the same circus.

Abe stood by the tenth-floor window, watching the morning traffic congeal along the slushy asphalt. New York below was gray, salt-crusted, and moving at the pace of an arthritic turtle. Delivery trucks with tire chains rattled past the Madison Avenue entrance, their diesel fumes rising through the morning chill to mix with the smell of scorched toast from the deli on the ground floor. The city looked like an uncolored proof before the Ben Day dots were applied—all soot, chalk, and hard carbon edges.

Behind him, the bullpen was beginning its slow, uncoordinated awakening. The elevator doors slid open with a wheezing sigh, depositing Carmine, one of the junior production assistants, onto the linoleum. Carmine was twenty-two, had sideburns that looked like two slice-cut pumpernickel loaves glued to his jaw, and wore a corduroy jacket that had apparently never made the acquaintance of an iron. He carried an oily brown paper bag that exuded the unmistakable scent of a toasted bialy with scallion cream cheese.

"Abe," Carmine mumbled, shuffling toward the layout tables without taking his hands out of his pockets. "You got a light?"

"Matches are on the corner of the stat bench," Abe said without turning. "Don't drop the sulfur into the developer tray this time. Sol had to dump four gallons of fixer on Tuesday because somebody dropped an entire book of Ohio Blue Tips into the tank."

"Wasn't me," Carmine muttered, though his ears turned the color of raw beef.

Abe watched the boy drop his greasy breakfast onto a stack of mechanical paste-ups for Crazy Magazine. It was like watching a barbarian set down a muddy spear on an altar cloth. Ten years ago, if a boy laid a greasy bag on original art, John Verpoorten would have picked him up by the belt, carried him down the hall, and deposited him into the freight elevator without breaking stride. But Big John was gone, the hallway ceilings seemed lower, and the office was full of boys whose primary qualification appeared to be that they possessed two arms and didn't mind having their fingernails dyed yellow by toxic fixative chemicals for seventy dollars a week.

The bullpen itself was an odd, long room that had clearly been designed for an accounting firm before being colonized by drawing boards, metal flat-files, and stacks of newsprint that had settled into permanent geological strata. Overhead, the acoustic tiles sagged under the weight of air-conditioning ducts that hadn't worked properly since the Nixon administration. The walls had once been painted an institutional seafoam green, but thirty years of cigarette smoke had cured the plaster into the shade of an old tooth.

Every square foot of the office was crammed with paper. There were stacks of finished art tied with rough hemp twine waiting for the courier from the Chemical Bank courier service; there were boxes of discarded printer proofs from the Sparta plant in Illinois; there were yellowing cardboard boxes filled with rejected scripts, unsolicited fan mail from teenagers in Ohio who wanted to know if Spider-Man had ever met Jesus, and promotional buttons that read Merry Marvel Marching Society in slightly faded red enamel. It was an ecosystem built entirely on wood pulp, rubber cement, and the shared delusion that four-color four-square heroic fables were an enterprise of profound national importance.

Abe walked away from the window and made his way down the central aisle between the rows of oak drafting tables. The linoleum underfoot had been stripped and waxed so many times that the pattern had vanished entirely, leaving behind a slick, yellowed surface that showed every rubber heel mark.

At the center desk sat Marie Severin, her light table tilted at an aggressive sixty-degree angle. Marie was hunched over a cover sketch, her cigarette balanced precariously on the edge of a porcelain saucer that held three paper clips, an aspirin, and a half-eaten peppermint. She was working with a Prismacolor pencil, laying down brilliant slash marks of magenta over a faint pencil outline of the Hulk smashing an armored vehicle that looked suspiciously like a Ford Pinto.

"Look at this, Abe," she said, squinting through a cloud of blue smoke from her Salem. She didn't look up, but her wrist flicked with the terrifying economy of a woman who had colored three hundred pages a month since the Eisenhower administration. "They want the tank to be purple. I told them, tanks aren't purple. The military doesn't paint sixteen-ton vehicles the color of an eggplant. You know what the suit from marketing said?"

"He said purple pops against the yellow logo," Abe replied, stopping at the edge of her table.

"He said purple pops against the yellow logo," Marie repeated in a high, nasal parody of a corporate executive. "Like he's selling floor wax. I'm going to give him purple. I'm going to make this tank so purple it's going to look like an advertisement for Welch's grape jelly. If the kids in Dubuque go blind, it's on his conscience, not mine."

"Save some white for the balloons, Marie. Sal put the sound effect right over the turret."

"I saw it. KRAK-A-DOOM. Who writes this stuff now? It’s not even a word. It sounds like an appliance falling down the stairs." She took a drag from the Salem, tapped the ash into the saucer, and finally looked up at Abe, her sharp eyes taking in the tilt of his shoulders and the way he held his right hand curled against his cardigan pocket. "How's the thumb, pop?"

"My thumb is twenty years younger than the rest of me," Abe said, though he kept the hand in his pocket.

"You're a liar, Abe Schulman. You look like you slept on an ironing board." Marie turned back to her board, her pencil strokes broadening into a rhythmic, scratchy sweep. "Sol’s looking for you. He’s in with the suits. They got the floor plan from the architect laid out across the light box in the back."

"Architect for what?"

"For the future, honey," Marie said, her voice dry as an autumn leaf. "For progress. You know how progress smells? Smells like ozone and brand-new linoleum. They’re tearing out the coat closet by the women’s can to make room for a transformer. A real transformer, Abe. Not the kind that blows up in The Avengers. The kind that makes your teeth hum when you walk past the wall."

Abe felt a cold knot tighten in the small of his back, right where his lumbar spine had ground against the hard edge of his drafting stool for three decades. He didn't answer. He walked past the light tables, past the stat camera enclosure with its heavy black velvet curtain smelling of vinegar and dry rot, toward the small conference room at the rear of the floor.

The door was half-open. Through the frosted glass, Abe could see three silhouettes. One was Sol Brodsky, his shoulders slumped in the unmistakable silhouette of a man who had spent forty years serving as the shock absorber between temperamental geniuses and penny-pinching publishers. The other two figures were taller, thinner, and wore jackets that didn't have eraser shavings embedded in the wool.

Abe stopped outside the frame. He didn't mean to eavesdrop—in the bullpen, privacy was an abstract concept that had been abandoned somewhere around 1963—but the voices carried clearly over the rumble of the ventilation system.

"The unit requires twenty-eight amps on a dedicated breaker," one of the unfamiliar voices said. It was an educated voice, smooth and clean, completely devoid of the flat, nasal dip of the boroughs. "The paper feed is continuous web, but the developer cartridge is sealed. No wet baths. That eliminates the plumbing problem entirely."

"We still need the wet bath for the stats," Sol’s voice came back, flat and tired. "We can't shoot line-art reductions without the darkroom."

"For now," the second corporate voice chimed in. "Once the phototypesetting is integrated with the paste-up line, the line art goes straight to the separator on four-color film. We bypass the mechanical lettering entirely on seventy percent of the reprints, and the new titles will phase in the font libraries by the third quarter. The savings on the page rate alone pays for the lease on the keyboard console in eleven months."

"Abe does twenty-two pages a week," Sol said. His voice was lower now, almost lost behind the rattle of a passing subway train that vibrated up through the Madison Avenue bedrock. "He’s been here since Timely, Jim. He lettered the first issue of The Human Torch when we were still on forty-second street."

"Nobody is disputing Mr. Schulman's service, Sol," the first voice replied, the tone sliding into that practiced, patronizing warmth that lawyers use when they are about to foreclose on a farm. "He’s a craftsman. But the industry is changing. National is already testing computer-generated fonts for their European syndicate packages. The British editions are entirely cold type now. You can't run a monthly publishing operation with three hundred titles on piecework done with crow quills. It’s an anachronism."

Abe stepped away from the door before Sol could catch him standing there. He walked back toward the production room, his boots making no sound on the worn linoleum.

The bullpen was filling up now. Danny, a young penciler whose work was mostly confined to three-page filler stories for Ghost Rider, was sitting on the edge of a desk, trying to convince one of the colorist assistants that Jack Kirby was secretly an extraterrestrial being sent to prepare mankind for cosmic consciousness. Down the corridor, the mechanical rhythm of the electric typewriters in the editorial offices was beginning to chatter, a sharp, metallic percussion that sounded like a dozen miniature machine guns firing through wet cotton.

Abe reached his board. The green fluorescent light still buzzed, casting its violet glare over the clean surface of Strathmore bristol. Page twelve was still there, sitting between the lead weight and the T-square, the black MEANWHILE looking up at him like a challenge.

He sat down on the round wooden stool. The seat had been hollowed out by forty years of his own weight until the pine had molded itself to the shape of his hips. On the wall beside him, tacked to the fiberboard divider with rusty pushpins, were his references: an old calendar from an auto repair shop in Flushing that had ceased to exist in 1968, a yellowed newspaper clipping of the 1969 Mets, and a small, perfectly square scrap of paper on which he had lettered a single line of poetry from an old schoolbook: The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.

Abe reached out and touched the brass adjustment knob on his drafting arm. It was worn bright and slick from the sweat of his thumb.

Across the room, through the wide double doors that led to the freight vestibule, two men in gray coveralls were wheeling a large wooden crate on a heavy hydraulic dolly. The crate was roughly the size of an upright piano, wrapped in thick waterproof kraft paper and bound with heavy steel bands that had been crimped with lead seals. Stenciled in red capital letters across the front of the pine slats was a single word: COMPUGRAPHIC.

Carmine stopped with his bialy halfway to his mouth, watching the men maneuver the crate through the doorway. "What the hell is that?" he asked nobody in particular. "Looks like a safe."

"It's not a safe, kid," Abe said softly, not looking up from his board. He reached for the wooden bottle holder and picked up his crow quill. "That's an eviction notice with a plug on the end of it."

The men with the dolly grunted as they hit the metal threshold of the production morgue. The crate bounced, the iron wheels clattering against the concrete floor beneath the linoleum, sending a sharp, heavy shudder through the floorboards that made Abe’s bottle of Higgins shiver inside its lead collar. A single drop of black ink detached itself from the rubber dropper and fell into the open mouth of the jar, vanishing into the dark pool with a tiny, imperceptible splash.