The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Annuals and Wars you satisfied, at least provisionally, questions of who could take who . Hulk and Iron Man would face-off for a page or two, always vowing to settle it for good another time.
    Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen, had been killed by the Goblin, it wasn’t funny in the least. That’s why Spider-Man was so depressed all the time.
    Captain Marvel wasn’t Shazam, it was confusing. He’d been revived to assert a copyright on the name, and nobody could say whether he really fit into the Marvel Universe all that well. DC Comics, Marvel Comics’ antithesis, presented a laughable, flattened reality—Superman and Batman were jokes, ruined by television.
    In truth, Superman in his Fortress of Solitude reminded you all too much of Abraham in his high studio, brooding over nothing.
    Swamp Thing was a rip-off of Man-Thing , or vice versa.
    An uneasiness hung over certain titles. Different artists drew the same characters different ways—you could hurt your eyes trying to account for it, to grant continuity to these hobbled stories. Weaker superheroes were propped up with guest appearances by Spider-Man or the Hulk, confusing chronology terribly. An Einstein could lose his mind trying to explain how the Fantastic Four had helped the Inhumans fight the Mole Men when by clear testimony of their own magazine they were trapped in the Negative Zone the whole time.
    The Incredible Hulk, if you followed him closely over time, lost the use of pronouns.
    Two afternoons a week, sitting in the dimming light on Dylan’s stoop, never discussing fifth or sixth grade, stuff too basic and mysterious to mention. Instead just paging through, shoulders hunched to protect the flimsy covers from the wind, puzzling out the last dram, the last square inch of information, the credits, the letters page, the copyright, the Sea-Monkeys ads, the insult that made a man out of Mac . Then, just when you thought you were alone, Dean Street came back to life, Mingus Rude knowing everyone, saying Yo to a million different kids coming out of Ramirez’s store with a Yoo-Hoo or a Pixy Stix, to Alberto fetching Schlitz and Marlboros for his older brother and his older brother’s girlfriend. The block an island of time, school a million miles away, mothers calling kids inside, the bus lit inside now, fat ladies coming home from offices at the Board of Education on Livingston Street, their weary shapes like black teeth inside the glowing mouth of the bus, Marilla strolling by a million times singing It’s true, hah, sometimes you rilly do abuse me, you get me in a crowd of high-class pee-pul, then you act real rude to me , the light fading anxiously, streetlights buzzing as they lit, their arched poles decorated with boomeranged-up sneakers, and Mingus Rude saying, one dying afternoon, eyes never ungluing from a panel in Marvel’s Greatest Comics in which Mr. Fantastic had balled himself into an orb the size of a baseball, his tiny face including signature gray temple hair still visible in incredible wrinkled detail, in order to be shot from a bazooka into the vulnerable mouth of an otherwise impervious fifty-foot-tall robot named Toomazooma, the Living Totem , “Your moms is still gone?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Dang, man. That’s fucked up.”
    chapter   5
    A fter five weeks he was ready to sell the nudes. They nagged at his mind, they spoke to each other from opposite walls in distorted whispers, they reflected him back to himself like fun-house mirrors, they, along with the ringing telephone, the abandoned kitchen counter, the stale unemptied ashtrays, made the parlor floor of the brownstone seem a skull lacking a brain, an empty skull decorated with memories, déjà vu. She wasn’t coming back, and his knowledge of it throbbed from the canvases like heat traces.
    Erlan Hagopian, an Armenian collector who lived on the Upper East Side, had looked at the paintings two years before. He’d asked to see them after one had been hung in a group show on Prince