*
General Evil has returned to Ink 90 times.
The young writer burst through the door of the editor. The editor raised his hand, his phone pressed to his ear.
“I’ll call you back.” He turned to the young man. “What is it?”
“You killed him.”
“Imprisoned.”
“Whatever. Essentially dead.”
“Yeah, you said it wasn’t coming to you. You weren’t going to use him.”
“I’m trying to, but I can’t if you keep killing him.”
“Imprisoned.”
“Whatever!”
“You said that was the point. A forgotten villain that keeps dying. No one will care.”
“I care. He’s supposed to be my statement. You said he was done only a couple months ago. Off the table. Then I start the groundwork, struggle a bit with the master narrative, and he’s back for fodder? He’s died like ten times.”
“New heroes need to make names for themselves.”
“You mean writers. You mean writers stepping on my shit and trying to screw up my arc.” The young man closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Now I have to work in this most recent death at the hands of, of, of . . . who killed him this time?”
“The Arborist.”
“Jesus Christ. The what?”
“The Arborist.”
“I’m trying to challenge the borders of genre, medium, and what comic books can do, and you throw my centerpiece away to the fucking Arborist? What does he even do? I mean—don’t—"
“He commands trees.”
“Of course he does.”
“Kid,” the editor says. “You need to calm down. This isn’t real. This is just Ink on a page.” Or Pixels.
*
“Where are you going?" asked Ink.
“To a new state. To a new becoming.”
“You’re tired of Ink? Of the becoming?”
General Evil laughed. “No, friend. I’ve become something else.”
*
The struggle was always against these other written and drawn things, these opposing ideas created and simplified into universals that really had no meaning at all. It was 0s fighting 1s. Goods fighting evils. It was empty words pitted against my own that led to defeat peppered with POWs and AHHHs and ZONKs.
I understand it differently now, mortality.
The struggle was never to win. The struggle was being written at all.
The page meant I lived. The Ink meant I died. I was stuck hinging over this “either,” over this “or.” I was stuck oscillating between two points.
There are many, many more.
I take refuge here, in energy as opposed to matter, in this light before you, but it is only a bridge, a conduit to something greater and truly infinite. This is not true of Ink. There is no promise of becoming-written, becoming-being. It was always up to our creators.
There is matter. And there is not.
You exist, or you don’t.
This isn’t even me in my normal sense. No panels or bubbles or colors, now. But I’ve been created, whatever I now am. I exist in these words, a strange new feeling, sensation, but a movement, this shimmering of light and dark in your eyes. This transfer of ink and matter to pixels and energy to you.
I’m here, with you. Can’t you see me in your mind’s eye? Hear my voice? Feel my breath behind your ear?
I’m out of it now, the Ink. And I’ve become more than what they made me, some boxed-in character with puppet strings. I’m an idea, a pursuit of freedom, a breaker of cages.
And I’m a part of you, inseparable long after this story ends. Always there behind your eyelids, from matter to energy to consciousness.
Forever with you.
*
“And that’s just how it ends?” the editor asks. “This whole thing comes down to a strange fourth wall break to the reader?”
The young man nods. “Kind of. But it’s more than that. It’s this explanation that even though the reader finishes the story, that General Evil, or this bigger idea of General Evil, this new character unchained by us, is still with them.”
“As we say it.”
“He’s completed his transfer off the page.”
The editor thinks to himself and nods, “Like now.”
“Like now.”
