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Artwork: Hide and Seek by Will Jacques

Drawn to Marvel Part One
Bryan Dietrich

I

Doug’s dead now and I don’t know how to feel.
I grew up wearing his clothes, wanting
his toys, learning to love—from superheroes
to Star Trek—all he loved of the world, each
wrecked and suspect mystery. I remember
the first night I saw his parents slipping him
into diapers before bed. The look on his face.
He was four years older than me. It took time
to understand his disease, how they’d given
him, all told, twenty years. And I can still see us,
tethered to that TV, two boys cut from the same
crayon, same sheen, drawing aliens. Pine Green.

A friend says regret is a grown up
emotion. I don’t know. Is it emotion?
Is envy, surprise? In all those years of Star Trek,
half of what Spock avoided always seemed
like something else to me. Reaction maybe,
autonomic. Like whacking your crazybone
with a crowbar. Wasn’t he only half human
anyway? And me? Staring down this worm
hole, the warp tunnel of fifty, asteroids
looming in the forward viewscreen, only half
my humanity to go, well… I find myself missing
something, everything. Marvel. It’s important.

Remote control dinosaurs slugging it out
under the Christmas tree. Mini Mad Doctor lab:
COMES WITH TILT-TABLE, BODY PARTS. No friends
till I was ten. But then a whole complement
of cousins. And none cool as Doug. His taste
in TV, movies, toys. Green Hornet, Green Ghost, Ghost
in the Graveyard. Late night fright festivals at Aunt
Sissy’s. Contacting her dead eldest, Jerry,
with a Ouija board. The wooden swords another
cousin, dead now too, made for us. The dying
mole we found in a hole. Rock’em Sock’em Robots.
Box of rubber hearts, back of his closet, under the insulin.

So, the real question… Is there anything
to regret? The way I’ve treated women,
a few friends. The toys I left when I left
my first marriage. Two divorces. Adolescent
resin, Bryan barnacles. Never getting
to Egypt. Leaving a lump like a mud dobber’s
nest on my Father’s forehead. Missing my old
nanny’s funeral, my two cousins’, Doug’s.
All I know is I caught myself surfing
the net today, looking for “classic” toys,
some I had as a kid, some my parents
never sprang for. I miss so many things.

Baron Karza comes with three rubber-tipped
chest missiles, firing fists (four included),
rocket pack and magno-powered joint adapters.
He can be made more monstrous by removing
his legs, his horse’s head and plugging the body
into the cavity left behind. Colonel Steve Austin
features bionic eye (wide-angle lens), bionic
arm able to lift an engine block (included).
The arm itself sports removable bionic modules
beneath retractable rubber skin. JUST LIKE YOU
HAVE SEEN ON TV! “We can make him better
than he was before. Better…stronger…faster.”

But why? A commercial for the new
Beetle says the Sixties are gone. Now you
can buy them back. Is that what this is?
Nostalgia, not regret? Is there a difference?
Why should I give a shit about Lee Majors,
his synthetic simulacrum? Or Karza
or Kirk or any marvel whose identity lies
in being broken? Those boxing robots were made
to reassemble after rapture. Steve Austin himself
was never happy with being anything less
than whole. So why am I set on OPERATION®,
on buying it back, returning to the ruin of what remains?

Take Dr. Don Blake. Until he happened
on his hammer, Mjölnir, he was lame. The devil
that dared tights and horns, ecstatic handsprings,
death-defying tucks and rolls, no eyeholes
in his mask? Blind. Stephen Strange? Nerve damaged.
Tony Stark? Bad heart. Sergeant Fury, agent
of S.H.I.E.L.D.? One eye. And Captain Marvel
Jr. and Batgirl and Professor X and, okay, all
the mutants… Regret. Regret. It’s not just
toys. All my favorite marvels, every hero I had—
Jerry Lewis, Gilligan, Spock, Doug, the Abominable
Dr. Phibes—none of them ever finished.

Did Doug feel alien? Do I? Is losing the past
like losing legs? Is losing Doug anything
like what Doug lost every day, a tad more
each time he tensed at needle’s touch? I try
to imagine those last months, wondering
at the aptness of a life that dismembers itself
as it goes. Lying in bed remembering my own
lack of real loss, I imagine myself him, watch
the world shrink down to a pale green dot,
itch to scratch what can’t be called, in good
conscience, human. Is this all emotion is?
Regret for whatever’s left, everything that isn’t?

Fourth grade. Long before the gangrene, the lost
limbs, Doug drew desire every day. I don’t mean
simple sketches, a few licks of licked lead in a spiral-
bound, blue lined notebook, no, he drafted whole,
new comics—twenty pages, gutters, panel zooms,
three point perspective, dialogue balloons—the real
thing, honest, in maybe an hour. What I recall most,
though, is power, the sheer abandon of it, the way
he threw his body back and forth across his desk,
drew as if whipped from within, as if the story
had begun its beating, not on paper, but fist to fist,
as flesh, pounding out its future on his heart.

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