The Con Artist: A Novel - Softcover

Fred Van Lente is the #1 New York Times best-selling writer of such comics as The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Zombies, Deadpool vs the Punisher, GI Joe, Archer & Armstrong, and many more. He cowrote the graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens, which was made into a film starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.

Cartoonist and illustrator Tom Fowler has worked in comics, advertising, and film and game design for a variety of clients including Disney, Simon & Schuster, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, MAD, Valiant, Marvel, and DC Comics. His best known comics include the MAD Magazine features "Monroe", "Venom",  "Hulk Season One", “Quantum & Woody”, the critically acclaimed "Mysterius the Unfathomable", and the all-ages series HOWTOONS:[re]IGNITION. Tom wrote for, and sometimes drew, the popular Rick & Morty comics series. Currently, Tom inks Doom Patrol for DC’s Young Animal imprint.

I heard about the first death from the girl who picked me up at the airport. She said her name was Violet and she was my biggest fan.
     She looked Hispanic, no older than twenty. She had darkblue eyeliner drawn in a kind of Egyptian curl at the edges of her sad, serious eyes. She was standing at the foot of the escalator holding a cheery hand-drawn sign with my name spelled out in magic-markered rainbows. I couldn’t have missed it even if she hadn’t started jumping up and down and waving it with one hand as soon as my face appeared on the arrivals level above. I was wearing sunglasses and had slung over my shoulder a beatup bike messenger bag filled with art supplies, toiletries, and a single change of clothes. I carried a small, flat, black portfolio of original art from my comic books.
     With my free hand I reached out to shake hers when I stepped off the escalator. “The con sent you?”
     She had to shove the sign under her armpit to take my hand, which was when I realized that she had no left arm—or rather, her left arm stopped just above what would have been her elbow.
     “I am so very very happy to meet you! My name is Violet—as you can see! Violent Violet.”
     I put two and two together finally and her outfit clicked. She was wearing a leather aviator helmet and from her belt jangled a riot of prosthetic arms—one ending in a claw, another in a popgun, another in a weed whacker—just like Violent Violet, one of the main characters from the indie comic book I made my bones on, Gut Check, a post-apocalyptic pro-wrestling action-drama-romance about the titular hero, an American who travels to Edo to learn sumo wrestling and goes on to become a superstar on the televised wrestling circuit before finding himself enlisted in an ancient war against demonic luchadores to prevent the Mayan end-of-days—
     Yeah, the one the movie is based on, right.
     Yeah, they had me on set to help out a little bit.
     No, I—
     Hey, listen, is it cool if we not talk about the movie? Or maybe save it until I get through my whole statement? Because it’s kind of on the long side.
     Thanks.
     Anyway, like the girl picking me up at the airport, the comics version of Violent Violet—Gut Check’s love interest—is a one-armed warrior who wrestles using her wide variety of prosthetic limbs or, from time to time, with none at all, just to prove she requires no technological enhancement to kick your dumb ableist ass.
     “She is my favorite, and you’re my favorite, I mean, seriously, you are my favorite artist of all time, I love Gut Check, I love the comic, I love the movie, I love your amazing run on Mister
Mystery, I mean, I love everything you do.”
      I greet all praise with suspicion and believe every horrible thing ever said about me a hundredfold, so I just smiled vaguely and nodded, more in acknowledgment than agreement. “That’s really nice of you to say, thanks. Thanks for volunteering for the con, that’s really cool of you.”
     “Yeah, no problem. Anything you need, I’m gonna get you. I am, like, going to be right by your Artists’ Alley table at the con, you need me to go get you food, you need me to bring water, you need me to sit at your booth while you go to the men’s room, whatever you need, all of Comic-Con, I am going to be your sidekick, I am there for you, all the way, 24/7.”
     She said all of that without taking a single breath. I couldn’t tell if she was on something or just naturally had the metabolism of a hummingbird. I didn’t really mind one way or another. I’d seen worse. One time, I agreed to do what I was told was a quote-unquote small convention in Eugene, Oregon. I flew in, the owner of the local comic book store picked me up and took me to the quote-unquote show. Not to a convention center, not to a hotel ballroom, not even to his shop, but to the basement of his house, which was lined with framed copies of my comics and some of my original art he had bought online. There was no one else there except these two big, quiet white dudes. After we had been down there for a couple hours, hanging out, drinking beers and eating pizza, I realized, looking into the guy’s eyes, that wait, there is no con. This is the con. He just wanted to meet me and have me hang out with him and his buddies.
     Once you get through a weekend like that without anybody wearing your skin for a hat, the Violent Violets of the world seem fairly normal.
     “I love it,” I said. “Lead on.”
     Catching a ride from the airport with one of my own characters would ordinarily qualify as strange, except that fiction starts devouring reality pretty much as soon as you step off the plane at San Diego International Airport during the week of Comic-Con. The escalators leading down to baggage claim had been covered in vinyl and made to look like on- and off-ramps ferrying you into and out of the bowels of a massive gray spaceship: Up was labeled To Abduction and down was labeled Post Abduction. The baggage kiosks had been skinned to look like spinning UFOs. The whole thing was promoting some new extraterrestrial romance streaming on Netflix in two weeks.
     I followed Violent Violet through the automatic glass doors of the terminal. The weather in San Diego was, per usual, insultingly perfect: cool, blue skies, a vague sweetness in the air. Across the palm-lined taxi stand was a squat concrete parking garage where we found her candy-colored Toyota Corolla.
     “I have to warn you,” she said, holding up her hand before getting inside, “the interior of my car is a reflection of my internal psyche.”
     I opened the passenger door to find what would have been my seat covered in In-N-Out Burger cartons, an empty Coke Zero bottle, and a half-eaten bag of Smartfood, among other dorm-room detritus.
     “Oh, shit, shit, sorry, sorry.” She reached across from the driver’s side and swept the garbage onto the floor of the car. “I was going to do that before coming to meet you but I was so excited and my brain just started racing and—brrrruuuggghhh!” She mimed an EMP explosion mushrooming out of her cranium, or at least that’s what I assumed it was.
     “Believe me, I’ve been there.” I got in the car, keeping my bags in my lap. My shoe soles settled atop the pile of garbage with an audible crunch.
     Violent Violet maneuvered us out of the airport’s pretzeled traffic. The car had an automatic transmission, unsurprisingly, and she only ever took her one hand off the steering to use her turn signal, at which point she leaned forward ever so slightly to brace the wheel with the tip of her stump. It looked like the most natural thing in the world.
     “There is one thing I should probably tell you, though,” she said once we got on the highway, and took a deep breath. 
     Before she could say more I interjected:
     “Actually, real quick, if you’re serious about being my helper, I’ve got a mission for you.”
     “I accept it. I pledge my honor and my life to its completion!”
     “You are officially my hero. Thank you. There’s this self-storage place, A1 U-Store, off I-5? I need you to go into my unit, it’s number 616, and grab my banner, a FedEx box filled with prints, and a small suitcase and bring them to me at my table, okay?” I wrote the address on a Starbucks receipt I found in my pocket and put that plus the key on the dashboard where Violent Violet could see them. “Normally I’d do this myself, but I want to make it to my table before preview night ends.”
     “Oh . . . kay.” She frowned, puzzled. “You keep that stuff here when you’re not in town?”
     “Yeah, I have storage units all over the country. Charlotte, Chicago, Seattle, Orlando. Wherever the big comic cons are.”
     “You don’t keep them at home?”
     “This is my home.”
     “Pardon?”
     “I gave up my house three years ago. Now I live entirely at cons. They fly me out, put me up in hotels, and I go to my Artists’ Alley table and draw sketches for people, and then another con flies me somewhere else. I just ask them to extend my stay past the weekend in either direction, instead of an appearance fee.”
     “So you were just coming from another con when you arrived here?”
     “Yeah, a small one, in Cleveland. There was a ballroom dancing competition and a brewers’ convention going on in the same hotel, which made for some interesting conversations at
the breakfast buffet.”
     “You . . . live at comic book conventions.” Violent Violet blinked. “Is that really, really awesome . . . or really, really sad?”
     “Yes,” I said with conviction.
     Violent Violet didn’t say anything, she just drove.
     “I store my prints in the unit because they can get completely destroyed on flights, either in the overhead bins or from the barbarians in baggage handling. And I scatter changes of clothes everywhere because I find doing laundry in hotels super depressing.
     “And another thing, Violet, if you’d be so kind. If you see me trying to talk to my ex-wife, or call her, or wave her over to me, I need you to take that arm on your belt with the spike on the end and ram it directly through my eyeball and into my brain. If you could do that for me, I’d really appreciate it.”
     “I, uh . . . ” She swallowed. I met her five minutes ago and already discovered the limits of her devotion. I excel at that. “I don’t really know what your ex-wife looks like, though? Besides,
all my weapons are Styrofoam.”
     “Ah, well. My loss.” I looked out the window. The Corolla was winging its way toward downtown, a modest row of skyscrapers rising up beyond a harbor dotted with sailboats and U.S. Navy warships. “I wasn’t even going to come to this show when I heard through the grapevine she was going to be here too. For the first time in three years, we’re going to be in close physical proximity to each other, like matter and antimatter. That’s dangerous stuff. Like, cosmically dangerous.”
     “Why’d you change your mind?” Violent Violet’s voice had softened to a peep.
     “The committee that runs the Kirby Awards asked me to give a lifetime achievement award to Benjamin Kurtz—you know, Ben K, the creator of Mister Mystery? He’s like my oldest friend and mentor in this business, so I couldn’t say no.”
     “Oh.” She practically swallowed the word.
     “Oh?” I turned to her with a frown. “Oh, what oh?”
     After a moment’s hesitation she said:
     “You haven’t seen Twitter?”