A.K.A. Goldfish

AKA Goldfish was the first Brian Micheal Bendis comics I ever bought. I did it by accident. I was in college and had made the weekly pilgrimage to my store of choice, Time Warp Comics and Games, and while browsing the new releases, I noticed this comic. The cover was a photo of the King of Hearts playing card being engulfed by flames. It was a fairly thick comic—it looked had at least double the page count of most monthly comics and was only (“only”) $3.95. With infallible logic I decided that a comic with that many pages for four bucks would, at the very least, take long enough to read that it’d be worth the money, even if the story sucked.

Needless to say, AKA Goldfish definitely did not suck. Even in 1995, half a decade before Bendis would really gain prominence as a comicbook writer, all his strengths were evident. His dialogue was spot on; the banter was witty, the cadence of the dialogue was a stylized “natural” rhythm with stutters and pauses and people cutting each other over mid-word. If there was a fault in the fact that everyone spoke the same cadence, Bendis made up for it with a compelling story and characters you felt for.

The story, in a nutshell: con-man David Gold (also known as “Goldfish”) returns to Cleveland, OH, after a ten year absence. He’s come back for his son, whom he left in the custody of ex-girlfriend, Lauren Bacall (yes; named so on purpose) who is both the top crimelord in the city and also completely psychotic.  It’s a film noir story in comicbook form; Bendis has always talked about how he was influenced by detective fiction, but the action sequences, the compositions of the panels, even the intercutting of action with the presentation of the creator credits, is pure cinema. Illustrated by Bendis in black-and-white (noir needs shadows and Bendis does not disappoint in that regard), the story is straight from the Dashiell Hammett playbook, but it never comes across as a blatant rip-off/homage.  Considering this was Bendis’ second published comicbook (the two-issue Fire was published a year before), it’s a very accomplished effort.

I only own three of the five issues that comprise AKA Goldfish. The issue I described buying was actually the final issue of the series; the series did not use issue numbers; I thought I was buying a one-shot story. Sometime after guying that issue, I was able to track down the first (“Ace”) and the fourth (“Joker”) but I couldn’t find the other two issues. It would be five years, once the collected edition of the series was released in 2000, before I was able to read the complete story.

Minor/major digression here: This project is supposed to be about me reading my comicbook collection from A to Z. But even though I haze a one or two hundred trade paperbacks, I always considered them separate from “my collection”. So when I began re-reading Goldfish I had to decide if I would only read the issues I bought or if I would read the collected edition to get the whole story. I’ve decided that, for the most part (because what are rules if there aren’t exceptions to them?) I will only read the individual issues in my collection, ignoring all trade paperbacks/collected editions/graphic novels. So that means, as it happened originally, I re-read an incomplete story.

Not surprisingly, this has its drawbacks. Since it had been at least ten years since I read this, I wound up asking myself the same questions that I had back in the ‘90’s: Why are David and Izzy on the outs after being so friendly in the first issue? How did David know to talk to Adam? What happened to David that he thanked that waitress, etc. etc. The good thing about Bendis’s story is, even with half the story missing, what does happen is enough to make me want to know what I missed, and certainly interested in what happens next.

The final issue, the issue that I started with 16 years ago, still reads a little too over-the-top in my opinion. Bacall’s ranting speech not only brings the action to a screeching halt but also defies belief that the cops would freeze in the middle of their raid just to hear her rant. And the double-homicide that takes place after that feels like Bendis was engaged in a game of “What Would Be More Outrageous Than That?” But the dénouement of Izzy’s interrogation manages to bring the story back to a more personable level.

When I first read that final issue in 1995, what sold me was the monologue the character Izzy delivers at the end. It’s an apocryphal story of a tailor who makes a suit for President Kennedy, who is so impressed with the suit that he invites the man to move to Washintgon D.C. to be the personal tailor for the President, as well as guaranteeing the business of his staff. The tailor agrees to do so, but unfortunately this happens right before Thanksgiving, 1963, so you can imagine how it ends. I’ll quote some of it so you can get the flavor:

If you tell anybody in the entire world that story, they’d say “My, what an interesting aside to the legend of JFK. What an interesting anecdote about JFK.” But to the tailor, this was his life  His entire life. Every single second, every single minute, every day, he lives this tale. To him, it’s his story. His reality, and rightly so. And all anybody will ever see is a story about Kennedy.

At the time, Izzy’s frustration over only being a minor player in someone else’s drama as opposed to being the star of his own story spoke directly to my 20-year-old self; someone full of ambition and dreams and a world-view that was as black-and-white as the comic he was reading.

Reading it now, 15 years later, and it comes across a little worse for wear. For one thing, the meta-commentary about stories and characters is very out of place when compared to the rest of the story. Secondly, Izzy’s self-absorption, while understandable, seems a bit less sympathetic as an adult with a decided more grayed view of the world. And on a structural level, it seems unnecessary for Bendis to have to spell out, literally in bolded letters, the themes of his story. I don’t know if Bendis thought that was necessary or just an example of a writer still learning his craft, but I think the ending would’ve been more powerful had he trusted the readers to see it for themselves.

In retrospect, AKA Goldfish may wear its youthful enthusiasm on its sleeve and tends to be more melodramatic than it needs to, but overall it’s still a powerful, stylish story, especially for someone who, at the time, was so new to writing comics. You can see that what really matters to Bendis is the characters; the way they interact and how those personalities play a part of in the story he’s trying to tell. It’s that quality that helped make Bendis become one of the biggest comicbook writers in the 2000’s and it was a whole lot of fun to re-read one of his earliest works and “remember when….”

Speaking of remember when: for my next post, we see ruminate on how I write my nostalgic ramblings for free on a blog no one reads while Jim Valentino was able to get people to pay to read his nostalgic ramblings and get A Touch of Silver.