The Road Narrows As You Go Read Online Free

the fleck of time he’d used up. Twenty-seven, a leaseholder, renowned in his anonymity, Hick had a syndicated strip revered by his readers, beloved among his colleagues— Pan sets the bar unreasonably high for art and story on the funny pages (Hart), an immense talent (Schulz), a monument against the mediocre (Breathed), an ego-destroyer (Caniff), a bodhisattva of comics (Trudeau), famous as much for the forty-two-foot-long drawing table as his open door (Gould).
    Don’t worry about comics, Wendy said. Right now focus mind on healing body. Forget about daily gags and adventure sequences and to Disney or to not Disney.
    Wendy, don’t waste a breath. Look at me. Go bigger than the biggest? I failed at that. I was too modest when I should have been greedy. You deserve big disgustingly wonderful things, Wendy. You’re my favourite of all the feminine persuasion.
    You’re my one and only fan, man.
    Almost true. Wendy’s syndicated comic strip, Strays , was less than a year old, first appearing in a couple of suburban Bay Area dailies around the time of Ronald Reagan’s nomination for presidential candidate. Set in a dumpy innercity vacant lot populated by lost pets and vermin: acat, a dog, a rabbit, a snake, a parrot, and a raccoon single mother who meet around a flat tire for drinks, eat trash, play Ping-Pong, and try to scam each other, Strays was in fewer than fifty papers and none outside California. A few good laughs (Aziz), another example of funny-pages mediocrity (said Crumb on a popover), you’re going to be huge (her syndicate editor, Gabrielle Scavalda). Compared to Pan ’s twenty-two hundred and twenty subscriptions, the longevity of Strays remained uncertain (Ashbubble).
    I’m serious, Hick said. His voice was down to a wretched croak, wheezing between words. Your fragment of a fragment. What else are you doing today? Work? Are you drawing? Don’t blow the afternoon and go see some dumb matinee. Do something productive.
    She told Hick she did some drawing this morning, nothing so funny as this week’s dumb matinee. After she left here she had a meeting up at Caffe Trieste with Gabrielle Gabby Scavalda, in town for a couple of nights from Manhattan.
    Hick’s cough lasted a minute. Then he said, That sounds good. A meeting about your comic?
    I don’t know. Maybe just social. Gabby’s family still lives in the Bay, I guess.
    Your comic strip, is that what you want to do?
    Yeah, for sure, I guess that’s it, like, obviously of course my strip’s all I want to do, not this other stuff. Freelance beer ads and pizza coupons and cereal boxes, show posters for punks, gee whiz, it’s all so disorganized and I guess you’re right, it adds up to nothing much. Punk playbills pay my bills, though. I have a comp for the show at The Farm tonight but I really don’t want to see people.
    You should. Go. People are fun. I miss The Farm and that funny donkey covered in freeway exhaust.
    Naw.
    Why not? Isn’t that why you ran away from Canada and becameWendy? So you could meet interesting people and live and suck up the toxic American fury for the good life no matter the cost?
    You named me Wendy.
    That’s because you are Wendy. You’re from a different world from the rest of us, more sedate, more mature. You leap the gap. Comics are kids stuff, all about getting rich off doodles. That is the goal. Buster Brown, Popeye, Garfield. Same thing. Bills? See my hospital bills? Seriously, it’s like—it’s like—aha- aha ! Hick was gasping for air, had to stop short, and after a few unrecuperative breaths, shut his eyes.
    She tried to rouse him. You forget you’re this freaky prodigy natural DNA talent like an Einstein in the funny pages or something and, unlike your Disney strip, well, you forget my Strays appears in like not a single paper you or I ever heard of, farm gazettes and freebie advertisers the such, goshers, these