The Launch

Chapter Seven

The smell of sweat cooling on my wife's skin after we make love is one of the best smells there is, hands down. I pull the sheet up over us and hold her close so I can breathe her in. All those times when I was scared or worried over the last few days, I missed this feeling right here. I try to imagine the look on her face if I had been caught or arrested, or the looks on my parents' faces. Hurt, confused... disappointed maybe. There were a lot of great reasons for not doing what we did, but just the thought of Ray cooling his heels in my parents' basement and the entire editorial staff of Royal Features waking up to a new February launch feature tomorrow fills me with giddiness and satisfaction. It was the rage that had bullied the fear and caution into a box and then sat on the lid. After I worked out some of that rage on Ray's face, it went into a cocoon, and now, safe and sound and spent, elation is the butterfly that has emerged—still kinda sticky and unsure of these new wings.

"I still can't believe it," says my Jessica. She rolls over and props herself up on her elbows to look at my face. "It all worked out just like you thought it would. It seemed like such a long shot."

"Yeah," I say. I lie here and I lie and I keep on lying. Why stop now?

"Baby, it's amazing! I'm so happy for you."

"Me, too."

We told our wives we were going to the comic convention to corner Ray Bennett at the Royal Features booth and get some answers from him. The truth is that he wouldn't be caught dead at an event like that where the fanboys could have a piece of him. There were a couple of junior staffers from the marketing department, one of whom wasn't bad looking, which helps a lot at an event like that, and a couple of random comic strip artists. We actually didn't stop in at their booth in case one of them was later asked to pick us out of a lineup.

With our new stun guns in our pockets, we left the Allentown Gun Show and drove east on I78 towards Manhattan. We emerged from the Holland Tunnel about 12:30 and headed north on the West Side Highway towards the Javits Center, 700,000 square feet of comics nirvana. The Javits is a beautiful metal frame and glass facility overlooking the Hudson River, with four floors of convention space. There were meeting rooms and the IGN Theater on the first level, the Galleria on the fourth floor and the main focus of everyone's attention on the third: the exhibit floor. All the toy, comic, movie, manga, gaming, book, costume, art, TV and sci-fi companies you could think of had booths and over in Artist Alley, everybody's favorite artists were signing autographs around the clock. The New York Comic Convention was one of the biggest and we had always wanted to go. We didn't stay long.

We paid our entrance and then headed up to the third floor, just flew around the many booths, grabbed some flyers and promos, gawked at all the hot girls, got a couple of autographs from people we had never heard of, took our programs and left. We really only wanted to prove that we'd been there, but honestly I don't know how you'd see everything if you didn't travel as fast as we had. The place was huge and I couldn't believe the talent: Grant Morrison, Terry Moore, Art Spiegelman, Joss Whedon, and Dave Gibbons, who was hawking his Watchmen sketchbook. We'll have to go back again someday. Maybe we'll be there as guest artists, signing autographs ourselves. They're going to have to improve that Royal Features booth if they want me sitting there. I'll have to send a couple of e-mails from Ray and get them working on that for next year.

"So, you guys are going to be famous comic strip artists," says Jessica. "This bodes well for my shoe habit." She closes her eyes and sighs as if imagining herself at the DSW Shoe Warehouse, which she probably is. My wife has the most fantastic dark eyes with long lashes and full lips, which make for an incredible smile like the one she's wearing now. Good teeth thanks to braces in adolescence. Very petite nose and ears, making her face very expressive in all the right places. Her dark hair falls to about shoulder length, no curl, but cut at a stylish angle at the back. She has a curvy figure that I find very squeeze-worthy all over with about a medium boob. A couple of good handfuls, which if they were too big for my hands I wouldn't complain, but still ample and I don't share that kind of detail with her anyway.