Medusa Frequency

26 Roughage

‘I like the texture of it, Herman,’ said Bill Novad. ‘It’s got the right polypeptides if you know what I mean.’

‘Amino acids?’

‘That’s it: primordial soup and all that. All your really deep comics have it, and if you can’t be deep you’ll never make it in comics. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh gets to me.’

‘I was hoping it would.’

‘How do you feel about the backs of cereal boxes?’

‘As noumenon or phenomenon?’

‘As an art form.’

‘They seem to have fallen into disuse; I remember when they had little stories on them.’

‘Right. They’ve gone with our pre-atom-bomb innocence. We’re living in a time that cries out for the reaffirmation of traditional values. Used properly the back of a cereal box is to literature what Buddy Holly is to music: it’s got drive, it’s got soul, it’s got bebop. Look at this.’ He took a box of Holywell Corn Flakes out of a desk drawer and showed me first the front and then the back of it. They were both the same, with a picture of a bowl of corn flakes and the words CORN FLAKES. ‘Do you believe that?’ he said. ‘Two fronts, no back, you don’t know where you are with it, your whole day starts off funny. Put a comic on one side and that’s the back, you eat your corn flakes and you read it, you know where you are.’ He tapped one of the two fronts. ‘Can you see it right there, THE SEEKER FROM NEXO VOLLMA?’ He said it in capital letters.

‘I can see it,’ I said. I could too: the deeps were a strong purply-blue shading off to black. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh, obscure and amorphous, was a dim blue-green. I could see myself reading it at breakfast, could feel the peace and natural order of it. BONGGGGG, rang the great bell of the deep as Nabilca, responsive to the call of Nnvsnu, plunged down, down, down through green and sunlit waters.

‘And you will see it,’ he said. ‘Slithe & Tovey have just given me the Holywell breakfast line to do: that’s corn flakes, bran flakes, and muesli. I think bran is what we want for The Seeker.’

‘It’s more regular.’

‘It’s your Guardian-reader market. Do a good job on this and you can have the corn flakes as well.’

‘What about the muesli?’

‘No comics on the muesli, just recipes. Can you give me six episodes in a fortnight and six more two weeks later?’

‘What kind of money are we talking about?’

‘Five hundred up front for development, one hundred per episode. Flat fee, no royalties.’

‘Seventeen hundred isn’t much for what they’re getting.’

‘It is when you think of how many guys are trying to break into cereal boxes. Plus you’ll probably do the whole twelve in two nights or maybe even one night. Once you’ve got your original premise it’s a piece of cake.’

‘More like a load of bran. Holywell can have first cereal rights but the characters belong to me and if I do a book or a TV series or a line of toys they’ve got no part of it.’

‘You should be so lucky. I’ll talk to Slithe & Tovey and see what kind of a deal we can do and get back to you later. OK?’

The deeps were gone, the hiss and rush of traffic overran the moving of great waters and the darkness. I was standing by the bicycle shop that was under the offices of Novad Ventures in Gray’s Inn Road. It was like coming out of the cinema, I was blinking in the sunlight. The terror and the excitement slid back behind the screen of everyday and I walked slowly to the underground.