Lee and Kirby.  Moore and Gibbons.  Kirkman and Moore.  There’s clearly something in the zeitgeist about comic book partnerships disintegrating. Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay) has (perhaps inadvertently) tapped into it in his short story CITIZEN CONN, in this week’s New Yorker (sorry, link is to an abstract, as the article is behind a paywall). 

  CITIZEN CONN is a brilliant and devastating piece that I’m surprised hasn’t gotten attention in the comics press that I know of.  The art above, which accompanies Chabon’s prose, is by Jashar Awan, who talks about the process behind it on his blog.

   The story itself is about a female rabbi trying to reconcile comics writer Artie Conn (read Stan Lee) with his estranged partner, the dying artist Mort Feather (a stand in for Jack Kirby if there ever was one).  There’s also a Justice League/Avengers analogue called “The New Frontiersman”…ironic given Darwyn Cooke’s writing of The Minutemen prequel to Watchmen.

  I’m offering the following excerpts, with the caveat that what follows could be something of a SPOILER:

   “Perhaps what had snuffed out the flame of Mort Feather’s wild and minor genius was not the fact that Conn had sold out their partnership, and their possible legal claim to a considerable fortune, but that, with a stroke of his pen, he had wiped out the history of a blessing, refuted—to make a balloon payment—the lone, certifiable miracle of Morty Feather’s life: his friendship with Artie Conn.  Maybe that’s what made him so angry.’…

  …’You know what?”’ he said.  “That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.  He always took everything so goddam seriously…”

…He shook his head, smiling a little, as if mocking himself for still caring so much about Mort Feather’s forgiveness when there was no longer any mortal chance of getting it…

…I didn’t know what to say, how to explain to him that this—our everlasting human cluelessness—was his unforgivable sin.”

   That last line (not the last line of the story itself) stabs at me, keeps me up as I transcribe it at 4 AM.  It’s the frustrating notion that in almost a century of the comics business, we haven’t learned a goddamn thing, and we’re still repeating comics original sin when we should no better.  And a reminder that there’s a human, as well as financial and artistic cost to all this controversy.