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Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs

To Steve Chabon

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

— G. K. CHESTERTON

[I] SECRET HANDSHAKE

For a fee of twenty-five dollars, my mother rented me a multipurpose room in the Wilde Lake Village Center, and I placed an advertisement in the local newspaper, the Columbia Flier. On the appointed Saturday, my mother drove me to the Village Center. She helped me set up a long conference table, surrounding it with a dozen and a half folding chairs. There were more tables ready if I needed them, but I didn’t kid myself. One would probably be enough. I had lettered a sign, and we taped it to the door. It read: COLUMBIA COMIC BOOK CLUB. MEMBERSHIP/ADMISSION $1.

Then my mother went off to run errands, leaving me alone in the big, bare, linoleum-tiled multipurpose room. Half the room was closed off by an accordion-fold door that might, should the need arise, be collapsed to give way to multitudes. I sat behind a stack of newsletters and an El Producto cash box, ready to preside over the fellowship I had called into being.

In its tiny way, this gesture of baseless optimism mirrored the feat of Stan Lee himself.

In the early sixties, when “Stan’s Soapbox” began to apostrophize Marvel fandom, there was no such thing as Marvel fandom. Marvel was a failing company, crushed, strangled, and bullied in the marketplace by its giant rival, DC. Creating “The Fantastic Four”—the first “new” Marvel title — with Jack Kirby was a last-ditch effort by Lee, a mad flapping of the arms before the barrel sailed over the falls.

But in the pages of the Marvel comic books, Lee behaved from the start as if a vast, passionate readership awaited each issue that he and his key collaborators, Kirby and Steve Ditko, churned out. And in a fairly short period of time, this chutzpah — as in all those accounts of magical chutzpah so beloved by solitary boys like me — was rewarded. By pretending to have a vast network of fans, former fan Stanley Leiber found himself in possession of a vast network of fans. In conjuring, out of typewriter ribbon and folding chairs, the C. C. B. C. , I hoped to accomplish a similar alchemy. By pretending to have friends, maybe I could invent some.