My Pal Splendid Man

It was 1982 and we had just sold our first book. After years of separately writing serious novels that no one wanted anything to do with, we had decided to try writing something together just for fun, and we surprised ourselves by conceiving, writing, and actually selling a humor book, The Beaver Papers. It would be over a year before the book actually hit the bookstores, and during that time, fired with enthusiasm to work together, we dreamed up one humor idea after another. Some of those ideas later saw print in the National Lampoon, one of them eventually became the comic book The Trouble with Girls, but the one we loved best and did the most work on is the one that has just now, finally, arrived in print.
  We both lived in San Francisco, but not in the artistically edgy North Beach or Mission District that you read about in literary histories. We lived in the Richmond District, the foggy north-west corner of the city, a neighborhood of small apartment buildings with an almost suburban quality compared to the city that lay a bus ride away. We did most of the work at Will’s place, a second-floor apartment at the corner of 42nd Avenue and Balboa Street, and so it came to serve as the actual setting for much of the book. The second-hand furniture, the less-than-stellar housekeeping, and the general air of shabbiness all left their imprint on the stories.
      We didn’t have much money then, and in our memories we seem to have subsisted almost entirely on rice and chili—the rice we cooked at home, the chili we bought at a take-out Mexican joint down the street. When we felt like splurging we’d drive down to Mr. Hot Dog’s Cowboy BBQ, a Korean-owned diner on Geary Boulevard where a man could get full for less than four dollars. Our external lives weren’t much, but our internal lives were rich—if a bit peculiar. Besides surfeiting ourselves on William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary heavyweights, we also indulged in a shared obsession with the comic books of the 1960s. In our novels we tried to emulate the former, but we could never shake the temptation to do something creative with the latter.

      And so were born the stories that would become My Pal Splendid Man. It started with a quickly scribbled scene in which a superhero drops in on his young writer friend Will Jones—not as a prelude to exotic adventures but to talk about life, books, and highballs. That scene grew into a story, and suddenly we were seized. For a few months our favorite thing to do was to get together, eat our chili, and spin out a new Splendid Man story. We did wind up sending our heroes off on exotic adventures, but they were adventures of the sort that grew out of the peculiar chemistry of their friendship.
  Finally The Beaver Papers came out and made a modest splash. It earned us an invitation to write for the National Lampoon and the acceptance of our second book, a serious indulgence in our obsession called The Comic Book Heroes. By then we had begun to conceive My Pal Splendid Man as a book, but as life swept us along, we never found the time to finish it. After a while it became one of those projects in our drawers, remembered with great fondness but never returned to.
  Thirty years later we opened that drawer. We read the stories again, first with nostalgia but then with the joy of rediscovery. Not only were they still alive to us but they reignited the fire that had filled us decades before. We found ourselves writing five new Splendid Man stories to round out the narrative and weaving new threads through all the episodes to hold them together as a book.
  We were momentarily tempted to update the book’s milieu, but then we thought better of it. Not only was Will’s life built around the realities of being a would-be writer in the pre-internet age, not only were there some story elements that could really only work in the social context of the early ‘80s, but the essence of Splendid Man himself was clearly inspired by things we were observing in comics at the time. The wholesome superheroes of the “Silver Age” were then being supplanted by a newer, darker sort of superhero; the tension of that moment was much of what went into defining our hero’s character. So, despite the great temptation to fill Splendid Man and Will’s world with iPads, hybrid cars, and kale, we’ve set the stories in the time they were originally conceived.
       Fly with us, then, back through the time barrier to 1982. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. A dark grittiness is creeping into popular culture. The poor can still afford rent in parts of San Francisco. A writer needs Wite-Out to correct a mistake. Will Jones strikes up a beautiful friendship with a fellow known as Splendid Man. And up and away we go.

(The preceding is excerpted from the introduction to My Pal Splendid Man, on sale now from Atomic Drop Press!)