Broken Frontier

Chances are, if you’ve ever been on a road trip, you’ve stopped at a Stuckey’s, a roadside shop stocked with candy and pecan logs and Madlibs and roadmaps and comic books. My family spent a lot of time traveling—either visiting family in Georgia and South Carolina or tagging along on one of my dad’s many cross-country business trips. When I think about those trips, visions of Stuckey’s dance in my head.

My family stopped at a Stuckey’s sometime around 1980 while heading to Georgia to visit family. My brother and I, tired of being cooped up in the back seat, piled out of the car and assaulted the store’s selection of confections and novelties with reckless abandon. My brother headed straight for a bunch of little dancing statuettes. By pressing the bottom of the toy’s base, you could make the animal character flop around in a spasmodic dance. I, on the other hand, sought out some reading material.

One of the greatest inventions in comic book history was, as far as I’m concerned, the 3-pack. Three randomly selected comics sealed in a plastic bag and sold for a discounted price. You could see two of the books faced out on either side, but the third remained a mystery. These packs could be found at grocery, convenience, and department stores... and Stuckey’s.

I bought one of those packs to occupy my time on the long drive yet to come. On one side was Shogun Warriors. On the other was The Incredible Hulk. Both sounded pretty good to me. As we pulled away from Stuckey’s, my little brother sat next to me and gleefully made a little plastic tiger do the Funky Chicken. I did my best to ignore him as I ripped open the 3-pack. What a delightful surprise to find Micronauts #13 sandwiched between Hulk and Shogun Warriors .

The last issue of Micronauts I’d read had been #7, but I remembered the book quite fondly. (The notebook I used as a sketch journal was full of drawings of the Micronauts.) As I read the latest issue, I realized just how much I had missed in the intervening months.

This issue kicks off with Bug crash-landing on his home planet of Kalikak. Still clutching his trusty rocket lance, sprawled face-down in the grass, Bug wakes believing he’s died and gone to Heaven.

“Less than a day has passed,” read the caption, “since the combined forces of the Microverse overthrew the tyranny of Baron Karza!”

I couldn’t believe it. Baron Karza’s defeat at the hands of the Micronauts and—just like Bug, who had been space-warped away from the battle before its conclusion—I had missed it!

It’s amazing Bug fell through space to crash on his home planet in the first place... but he also lands not far from his old lair... and the first person he meets is the master thief who instructed him years ago. I attribute the coincidences to Bug’s blind robber’s luck. Bug’s good fortune doesn’t hold for long, though. He soon learns that while he’s been gone, he’s lost control of his merry band of robbers to his rival Wartstaff.  Slipping past the (rather shoddy) defenses of the Robber’s Roost, Bug gets a glimpse of how far his gang has fallen.

“Dangling down over the lair’s entrance, Bug sees what’s left of his gang of cutthroats, thieves, nest-snatchers, and political malcontents engaged in a gluttonous bacchanalia.”

I looked up from the comic and asked, “Mom, what’s a bacchanalia?”

“If that’s the kind of language you’re learning from comic books,” she said, “I’m not sure you should be reading them.”

I’m almost certain she knew I wasn’t using profanity, but she didn’t want to debate the meaning of that tongue-twister, either. At the time, she sounded pretty serious, though. Afraid my comic privileges might be revoked, I shut my mouth and returned to the story.

Bug strides right into the middle of the drunken revelry, much to the surprise of Wartstaff (and his lady love, Jasmine). He makes short work of his rival and the gang-members who mistakenly believe their once-beloved leader sold them out.

“No, Bug!” Wartstaff pleas. “Don’t!  *t-tik*  It--it was only a little joke... Honest!  Just a little test I staged to make sure it was really you an’ not some imposter!  You can’t be too careful nowadays what with the colonial troopers makin’ life for an honest thief nigh impossible!”

“You seem to be livin’ awful *tik* high, blubber belly,” says Bug. “In fact, you’re doing a far sight better than you were when we *tik* headed opposing gangs! Seems to me, if anybody had a reason to profit by *tik* betrayin’ me to the governor’s colonial troopers, it was you!”

“Now, boy, that’s an unkind thing to imply about your *tik* father what loves you!”

“I’ve been trying to forget you sired me *tik* since the day of my hatching—so cut the bilge, daddy!”

So much for fatherly love, though, because Wartstaff draws a hidden dagger, intent on plunging it into his son’s heart. Jasmine spots him just in time and, in what I thought to be an incredibly gruesome scene, Jasmine cuts Wartstaff’s antennae off. 

“That’s that then!” Bug cheers. “Alright, my bully-boys! This is your *tik* captain speaking! I’m home *tik* an’ we got us some work to do!”

The work Bug mentions is an assault on the Colonial Air Terminus, the nexus of the colonial governor’s power. By taking control of the terminus, Bug plans on freeing Kaliklak from the rule of evil men.

“Are you crazy?!” Jasmine asks. “A handful of thieves take on Colonial Troopers and Baron Karza’s dog soldiers?? It’s suicide.”

“Hah!” Bug laughs. “I’ve got it all planned! Stick with *tik* me, toots, an’ ol’ Bug’ll show ya a hot time in the old town tonight!”

I, for one, believed him, but unless I found the next issue, I’d never get to take Bug up on his offer. While I don’t think this was the best issue of the series, it certainly left me wondering what I’d missed in issues 8 through 12... and I knew I didn’t want to miss out on anything else that might happen in the future.

Thanks in part to my constant whining and nagging, we stopped at nearly every Stuckey’s we passed. Some of them had a few comic 3-packs in stock. Some didn’t.  My parents bought a few for me, but none of them contained an issue of Micronauts. For every pack I opened without finding the comic I wanted, my frenzy grew. Eventually, I decided to use my sketch journal to make myself a checklist of all the issues of Micronauts I needed. I listed the numbers alongside meticulously drawn check boxes. When I got home, I decided it was a good idea to inventory all the other random comics I stored in a stack on one of my bookshelves.

So, while I had collected comics in a kind of slip sure way over the years, it was Micronauts #13 that made me a completist. I’m not sure if I should be thankful or angry.  

Once again, Micronauts became scarce. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find a single copy of the book—and it might have fallen off my radar if not for my trusty want-list. When next I found the comic, more than twenty issues had passed (driving me wild, of course) and it introduced me to something I like to call the Hunt Squad.

To be continued...

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Cullen Bunn's fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. His comic series The Damned will be published by Oni Press in late 2006. You can find out more about his work here.