The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

in this?”

      Which brings me back to weeping.

      REFUGEES FROM AN IMAGINARY COUNTRY

      I first met Stephen Taylor in college, shortly after his first comic strip nearly got the entire staff of the campus newspaper fired, if not expelled. I found it leaning against the door of The Villanovan office one morning, in a large, flat envelope he must have placed there the previous night. As I sat at my desk, examining panel after panel in slack-jawed amazement, realized I had something very special here. There were ten panels in all, each on a separate piece of stiff poster board, way oversized, filled with hundreds of figures, fantastic detail, images spreading along the edges like the marginal doodles in Mad magazine.

      Fellow staffers gathered around. Joe Meese, the editor, mumbled something to the effect that the intricate line-work might not reproduce. (“We’ll do it real big,” I said. “A two-page spread.”) Fran Hamilton’s comment best summed up what we all were feeling.

      “Holy shit…”

      The strip was called Stephanus. It wasn’t signed, but the artist had executed a what I guessed was intended to be a self-portrait in the first panel, depicting himself dangling naked in a dungeon, nailed to an overhead beam by a single spike through both wrists. The face was round, soft, and boyish, with dark, tangled hair and huge dark eyes; the expression one of absolute, wrenching despair and bewilderment. He looked a little like Dondi, the war-orphan from that sappy newspaper strip, only older—Dondi grows up and goes to Hell, I thought.

      It got worse. Blood streamed down his emaciated body and pooled in a patch of light several inches below his feet, where rats gathered to drink. The blood became a river, pouring along the margins and into the next panel. Monsters swam in it, devouring escapees from burning ships. The ships themselves were shaped like idiotic, vacuous human faces, or like cupped hands or severed, upside-down feet. Menacing, dark cities loomed along the river’s banks, rooftops silhouetted against background fires, the flame-lit streets crammed with absurdly hideous images: Burning heads on spikes over doorways, their features stapled or safety-pinned into happy-face smiles. In a public square, a cute cartoon duck in a sailor suit was being broken on the wheel by masked executioners, while kiddie ducklings writhed in a semi-circle around them, impaled up the anus on spears.

      Rat-faced citizens fornicated on rooftops or in upstairs rooms, but always with malicious intent, sometimes devouring one another. One male-thing had apparently achieved simultaneous climax and death by chopping off its lover’s head with a cleaver, then burying its face so deeply in the spurting neck that it drowned. Meanwhile, a cartoon bomb covered with lipstick kisses fizzled away under the bed. Human and rat children alike cut their parents (and infant siblings) apart with chain saws or drove spikes through their eyes. In a hospital maternity ward, one rat mother sat up in bed, flaying her newborn with surgical knives, without even detaching the umbilical cord first. In the background, a nurse went from crib to crib with a smoking pot, ladling hot oil on the screaming infants.

      “This guy is really sick,” said Joe Meese.

      “Yeah, but he’s great,” I said.

      Imagine Hieronymous Bosch as a follower of Robert Crumb, and you’ll begin to understand what I held in my hands. It must have taken the artist weeks to create all this: elderly humans naked but for funny hats like something out of Dr. Seuss, chained waist-deep in rain barrels of fly-swarming offal; rat-things vomiting from the city wharfs. The bloody river flowed on into the final panel—a huge, half-page vertical—and there splashed over the pearl-encrusted slippers of a monstrous rat in royal robes with a wreath of thorns growing out of its head. In one hand, the rat king held a scepter—on which the artist’s gaping, hopeless face was again reproduced—and in the other, a dripping severed penis.

      At the bottom of the panel, in big, ragged letters: NEXT WEEK! MORE HOLIDAY FUN IN THE INFERNAL REPUBLIC OF CHORAZIN!

      “I mean, fucked up,” said Joe Meese, in tones of awed admiration.

      This was, after all, the age of underground comics: Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Vaughn Bode, Gilbert Shelton, and the rest. If Zap Comics could run Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates, we could run Stephanus.

      So we did, and a day later the college president had the whole lot of us in on the carpet. Our academic careers hung in the balance. Fortunately no one took a bold stand for freedom in the arts just then.

      No further installments appeared. Somehow the artist must have known what was happening, because he didn’t submit any more. He did leave a note, though, asking that his originals be left in a specific locker in Bartley Hall. He provided a lock, opened, to which he presumably had a key. Nobody even suggested staking the place out to find out who he was. We all had a sense of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

      That might have been the end of that, but a week later I was in the remotest recesses of the periodical stacks of the college library, the part you can only reach through a door behind an enclosure on the first floor. The place has little cubbyhole desks, but the light is dim and no one ever studies there.

      I chanced to peek over the top of one of these cubbyholes and saw an open page of a sketch book. Then a pale face looked up at me, startled. The sketch book slammed shut. The owner started sweeping pens, rulers, books, into a bag with frantic haste. He stood up, and I recognized him immediately, of course, from his drawing. The name on the notebook read STEPHEN TAYLOR in block letters.

      The only thing that surprised me was how tiny he was. I was already six-four and pretty big then, but I do not exaggerate by weighing in Stephen at little more than a third my size, maybe five-six and a hundred pounds. He could have passed for an eighth-grader. When he stood hunched-down, he looked even smaller.

      He clutched his sketch book to himself protectively, giving me that same wide-eyed, frightened stare he’d drawn so expressively.

      “Uh, if I’m in your way…I’ll just go somewhere else.”

      I was blocking his escape.

      “Please…don’t hurt me,” he said.

      That startled me. I put down the big periodical volume I was carrying and pulled up a chair and sat, now deliberately hemming him in. I indicated that he should sit back down. He pushed his chair as far away from me as he could in the tiny enclosure and faced me, sketch book and bag in his lap.

      “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said gently. I told him that I was Ben Schwartz and, despite everything, still art editor of The Villanovan. “I just wanted to see what you were doing.”

      He glared at me sullenly.

      “Your work is…unique. I think you’re a genius.”

      He was still looking for a chance to bolt. It didn’t take any particular insight for me to recognize that this kid wasn’t, ah, “normal.” I did my best to put him at his ease. I told him I was a history major. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him I was in psych. People always assume that you’re going to analyze them for a class project. That, I was certain, Stephen Taylor would not stand for.

      I tried to make small talk.

      “I’m a junior. You must be a freshman. Aren’t you?”

      He shrugged.

      “Well, how do you like Villanova?”

      Another shrug. “Okay, I guess.”

      “Steve—your friends do call you Steve, don’t they?”

      He seemed completely flabbergasted. He groped in the air and pointed to himself and said, “But…I don’t have any friends.”

      “Oh, come on now. You’ve been on campus almost three months now.”

      “I don’t know anybody.”

      “Well then maybe you should meet a few people. Why don’t you come over to the Pie Shoppe and we’ll have a hoagie and I’ll introduce you to the newspaper crowd?”

      I pushed my chair back and made to leave. He stood up, still defensive,