How Did We get Here?: Starguards, Chapter 9

September 11, 2024

Editor’s Note: The fictional story of “Inky” Grant and his comic strip will appear here every week or two (or sometimes three). Read the whole saga from the beginning, if you wish. WARNING: This one is a little bit not safe for work, for comic strip violence and comic strip “content.”

By February 1924, Henry R. (“Inky”) Grant, disgraced and unemployed cartoonist, would-be Hollywood screenwriter, had completed what he called a “comic book” (or, less presciently, a “comic strip novel”), which would have been ready for publication, if anyone were willing to publish it, a sweeping story of the Solar System a hundred years hence, in the first quarter of the 21^st century.

Before closing the book on his book, however, Inky wrote a chapter entitled “How Did We Get Here?” which documented the Solar System’s descent (or rise, depending on one’s perspective) from an imperfect democracy in the early 20th century to a well-run authoritarian regime stamping out pockets of freedom here and there in 2024.

While Inky included “How Did We Get Here?” as an introduction to his comic book, we are publishing it last, since that was when he wrote it chronologically. Narratively, the introduction changes the tone of the story that follows. In the narrative structure of Inky’s life, it shows a view of his story that was not inevitable and reveals his final deterioration.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment, of course.

“Just as ‘Starguards’ is not evidence that Inky was a murderer,” comics historian Eugene Kovalenko (1930-1985) claimed in a 1976 interview with the Boogernose fanzine, “this introduction is not evidence that Inky was a totalitarian. A science fiction writer speculates. If you are what you write, then [Robert A.] Heinlein is a fascist, for writing Starship Troopers, a hippy, for writing Stranger in a Strange Land, and a transexual, for writing I Will Fear No Evil. Of course, Heinlein was not all three of those things, nor even one of them. He was a writer. And so was Inky. Inky was thinking about global trends towards authoritarianism, presciently I might add, and the rationalizations that authoritarians might use to justify their tyranny. Inky furthermore applied all of this to a space age colonial system.”

But, as Dax Faraday noted in 2024, as they perused the aisles of the Galaxy Collectibles store in Brooklyn, “If Inky were alive today, he’d be MAGA all the way.” (That venerable comic book shop, of course, is just one long block west of the rumored 1920s home of the infamous “Powlen,” the perhaps-apocryphal Jazz Age mob fixer who played such a role in Inky’s life and art.)

Just as Inky’s detractors and fans will never agree on whether Inky was a fascist, they will also never agree about what happened on February 6, 1924; it is true there is no definitive proof that Inky murdered anyone that day, but it is equally true that by later in the week, he was wealthy enough to publish his “comic book,” and there is no proof that his new gains were not ill-gotten. Where did the money come from, if not from murder?

Indeed, as of February 7, 1924, he was a writer with enough money to self-finance the publication and tri-state distribution of a full-color science fiction comic book with an introduction and eight chapters, the very first of its kind.

This will either make my name, he wrote in his diary on February 19, or it will destroy me for good and forever.

Or both?