The Wizard's Lair
by Mike Dubisch © 2022
“So, the Wizard has granted you an audience?” the girl behind the counter at the bookstore asked. She rang up my purchase and I studied her chest until she handed me back my change.
“Oh, you’ve heard?”
“I’ve heard he’s an ass-hole. Your friend was in here earlier, I guess you guys are going by today?”
I had my portfolio with me, bulging with comic pages, paintings, sketches, life drawings, and dreams. It hung at my side like a great black anchor.
“Yeah, we’re meeting here. You, um, want to see my stuff?”
She looked at me and cracked her gum, “That’s okay. I don’t really, like, like comic books?”
While her statement formed as a question and hung in the air between us, challenging all my life choices and my very presence in the store and this world, the doorbells jingled.
Thor had about five years on me and had entered the comics biz a while before, taking on the thankless technical chores in the studio. He’d recently been allowed to touch xeroxes of the Wizard’s artwork with basic color that the artist would then work his magic on.
I had eyes on bigger things- I knew I was meant to be one of the great artist illustrators.
I already felt in my heart I was one of those giants, I only sought to prove myself, a master in search of his masterpiece.
I would write and draw my own epic graphic novels, which would become classics of the form. There would be movies made of my stories, books published about my artwork; My success was pre-destined. It was the world that had as yet failed to recognize an immutable fact.
However, the market for illustration and comics had proved tougher for me to crack after art school than I had expected. Something of a child prodigy, I’d lost the element of surprise, when a punk teen brought to the table work that showed the hand of a master. Now I was just another twentysomething art school grad, the wild confidence of my teen artwork tempered by several years of technical training and portfolio building. No element of surprise, just the look of an untested, inexperienced young man.
“You ready bro?” Thor asked. He smiled at the bookstore girl. “Hey.”
The Wizard’s lair was an impressive brownstone in downtown Kingston.
We were met at the door by his assistant, a man named Baily I’d seen around town. He clearly saw our incursion into the Wizard’s lair as a challenge to his marked territory.
Since I’d never been there before, Thor accompanied me as we were led into the studio.
The place was a monument to the paraphernalia of the working artist; One part library, with an arcane non-Dewey approved organizational pattern that included small mountains and towers of books in various configurations. Part medical gallery, where a life size skeleton presided over a population of male and female figurines who had either been half skinned to show the muscles on one side, or in some cases entirely skinned, with one half of their forms dissected to show bones, veins and sinews. And of course, it was part museum gallery, with the walls tiled over in framed paintings, drawings, and lithographic prints, as well as awards, honors, and various other certificates to the authenticity of the Wizard’s brilliance.
Delving deeper into the lair. The Wizard was working his magic at a massive wooden desk situated in the center of the largest downstairs room. It faced the doorway and he looked up at us as Thor and I entered, Baily having dropped back to observe from his desk nearby, where he would work on the Wizard’s pages, erasing stray pencil lines, filling in black areas, and handling the most unctuous of chores, ruling panel borders.
“Hello there, gents!” He greeted us. The Wizard was originally from England. He had even taken his middle name from one of the royal houses, mid-career, claiming it as “An old family name.” It worked, adding to his mystique, yet more proof of his magic powers. He examined us over the rims of his wire-frames, his face framed in a full beard striped with grey, his long hair worn loose, a figure out of Arthurian legend.
Thor introduced us and then clapped my shoulder and headed up to the second-floor studio where he did his work.
The Wizard set aside his wand and other spell-casting instruments. “Well, lad, let’s see what you’ve got.”
I’ve heard tales of the Wizard literally ripping the art of young supplicants in half, rumors of aspiring comic book artists leaving the Wizard’s lair in tears. But I wasn’t like those others. My work had some issues, often from having learned some things so long ago they had become half forgotten. When he finished his critique, I felt wounded, but not mortally.
I was allowed up the staircase and assigned a spot by dour faced Baily, who also introduced me to June, who worked in the opposite workstation as Thor. Thor was dutifully filling in colors on large xeroxes, June worked right on The Wizard’s actual artwork, carefully lettering his magnum opus for him. Like Thor, under his strict direction.
The Wizard did me the honor of allowing me to fiddle with some cast off sketches. I soon made a mess of them. With the first one, I struggled and sweated with the thing for a while, but the Wizard’s magic had worn off and my own tricks weren’t working on his art.
“Look at this guy, “ he said, not unkindly, visiting the upstairs with a glass of wine in hand, “He’s a drawin’ fool!”
On the second I tried to change the things I didn’t understand about what he was handing me into something I understood, but that just made it worse.
The Wizard looked over my shoulder and shook his head.
I tried emulating specific elements of his style, he was unimpressed. By the third try I was lost in unknown lands, trying out contrasting devices and bereft of any vision of my own for the work.
I began to suspect I didn’t know anything at all about this craft. Achieving greatness wasn’t just barely within my grasp, it was a yawning chasm away. I realized I didn’t even know how to draw.
My own art suffered. At home in my little studio, desk wedged into a corner, the long arm of the lamp lit a testament to my decline in confidence. A project begun as an attempt at that masterpiece I’d been chasing became a dreary, pointless slog.
I hadn’t had a girlfriend since art school but had poured myself into my artwork as I always had. Now that turned against me as I struggled not just with my work, but with my identity. Was I the genius artist, or just the sorcerer’s apprentice?
The Wizard sipped wine and scratched at his drawing with the technical pen. I’d had time to sift through his art in progress, work going back years. Rejected, abandoned projects the Wizard was attempting to revive. The fluid line was ever present in his figures, his hands. The incredible detail and illusion of solidity, the ability to make the mundane exciting, the abstract pattern of light and dark intuitive.
But I’d gotten deep inside, and I found there was a creeping insecurity and of late, a crippling apathy there as well. He had blanked out the heads of many of the characters to be redrawn later, in these lost pieces.
In his greatest works, the Wizard’s pieces were like something touched by God, his women handsome and his men divine. Characters from Greek myth came alive under his hand, pulp heroes transcended form; A mere comic book, pop art, leap-frogged over fine art to become something more: Classical art.
The man who had accomplished this was forgetting how to draw faces.
Women had become particularly difficult, he didn’t know where to put the line for their noses anymore, and the eyes wouldn’t line up.
Even more insidious, his perfect line had been corrupted. Rather than a seamless blend of stylized rendering, flowing contours that worked in harmony with sweeping lines, forms rendered in dots and dashes all from the same reservoir of energy and perfectionism, executed in nib, the tool of a master, the Wizard had picked up a blunt instrument, the rapidograph pen.
Now he not only scratched out some of the outlines in his work- but he had begun cross hatching.
Cross hatching. A flat hatch that adds value but not form. Aware it was an aberration of his current state, to my horror, he began working the lifeless hatch into earlier, previously unseen works, to create a false narrative of stylistic continuity.
The Wizard, even as he was to be passing his spell-casting skills on to me, was losing his magic.
I became friends with June, the letterer. She was a cartoonist too. We’d stay late hanging out smoking pot in the studio after everyone else went home. I’d have asked her out, but she wasn’t into guys. I ‘d see her riding around town on her bike as well. One day I found her outside the bookstore by her bicycle quietly crying.
“I know you all worship him… But he’s not a nice person.”
June wasn’t there the next day, but the Wizard’s favorite model was. From the entryway to the stair well I could see into the studio. The sweet hourglass form of the model was framed in the door, blond hair swept down to her exposed rear. The Wizard leaned into the frame and eyeballed me, motioning me upstairs to the job.
Later, I was cleaning up my table, ready to pack it in for the day. Maybe longer. Thor had already left, his social life was heating up recently, leaving me alone in the upstairs studio.
“Hi! I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Linda”
The Wizard’s model was pulling her robe closed as she came up the spiral stairs. She was older than me, it seemed like everyone was back then, but gorgeous. She came over to the drafting table.
“So, you're an artist too?” I managed a nod. “Can I see your work?”
I had left my overstuffed portfolio in the corner that first day and it was still there. I opened it up on the table. She began to leaf through it. “Wow, you’re good. Really good.”
As she leaned in to look closer at one drawing, her robe opened just a little, the perfect curve of her breast to the point of her nipple before her hand slid up and clutched the robe closed again.
“Thank you.”
She smiled and proceeded up the stairs to the next level, where there was a place for her to change.
I went over to the bookshelf. I had organized some of the shelves, an effort to be indispensable in the studio, knowing I was floundering. Dour faced Bailey had already suggested that I stop coming by with Thor, and Thor would be on his way out soon as well, unable to rise to the Wizard’s standards and distracted by his new girlfriend, the bookshop girl.
I took one of the Wizard’s publications off the shelf. I had been collecting and studying his work for some time, but this was a volume I’d missed. I put the book in my portfolio and zipped it up.
I never went back to the Wizard’s lair. Still studying his work years later, I don’t feel like he ever got all his magic back. Sometimes I imagine I see a little of his wizardry mixed into my bag of tricks, but I borrowed from many artists, had many muses, and stolen from other sorcerers.