The Invisible City by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82914-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Casey loved comic books. He had loved them for as long as he could remember, all the way back to World War II, when he would sit at the door at the top of the hall, the spring rain of Brooklyn drumming on the skylight, and read about the Young Allies and The Boy Commandoes and Captain Marvel, Jr. They were his childhood. He could remember nothing else.

“They were sixty-four pages then,” he said to me once. “They were fat and thick and only a dime. They were really beautiful.”

While soldiers fought the real war, Casey followed Captain America and Bucky as they engaged that most terrible Nazi agent, the Red Skull. Of course, Superman bored him; he was too perfect and Metropolis seemed dull and bright and empty. Batman, on the other hand, lived in New York, a nighttime city of deep shadows, deserted warehouses, speeding cars, pistols, machine guns and cargo hooks, and Casey loved him.

But he also plunged into the world of the Human Torch and his sidekick, Toro, wondering for a long time why the boy’s flame was clear and why the Torch was drawn with scratches over his red body. Years later he realized that the scratches were supposed to be muscles. He alternately loved and hated Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who came from the bottom of the sea, the offspring of Princess Fen of Atlantis and an American naval officer. Sometimes Casey would stand on the roof looking out at New York Harbor and wish that he was able, like the Sub-Mariner, to swim that harbor without breathing, for days, weeks, years. Then he would look at the skyscrapers, remembering the epic struggle in that harbor and above those buildings between Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. It was a draw but Casey knew that Sub-Mariner had the ultimate advantage. He could dive into the sea, where the Torch could not follow. Sometimes Casey wanted to dive into the sea too.

The war ended. For a few more years, his friends would come around in the evening to trade comics. Two without covers for one World’s Finest. One Superman for one Archie. Two Archies for one Batman. It was an intricate process full of judgments both aesthetic and moral. But after a while his friends went to high school, graduated, went into the service, got married, moved away. And, of course, they didn’t read comics anymore. Casey did. And he saved everything.

He stacked the comics in a white metal cabinet in his room, and when the cabinet was filled, he built shelves that covered all the walls, brought cardboard boxes from Roulston’s grocery store and filled them, too, and put them under the bed. The Golden Age had passed: the Torch, Captain America, the Green Lantern, Hawkman, all of them were gone. Superheroes were the first things in his life to go out of style. After a while only Superman and Batman were still being published. Casey started collecting the EC line of comics and became

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