Tribute

the sketching?”
    “You’ve got to have a story. Graphics is only half of a graphic novel. But you need to . . . Bring your wine. Come on upstairs.”
    He retrieved his brush. “I was inking the last panel on Payback when you knocked,” he told her as he led her out of the kitchen and to the stairs.
    “Are these stairs original?”
    “I don’t know.” His forehead creased as he looked down at them. “Maybe. Why?”
    “It’s beautiful work. The pickets, the banister, the finish. Someone took care of this place. It’s a major contrast with mine.”
    “Well, you’re taking care now. And you hired Matt—pal of mine—to do some of the carpentry. I know he worked on this place before I bought it. And did some stuff for me after.” He turned into his studio.
    Cilla saw the gorgeous wide-planked chestnut floor, the beautiful tall windows and the wide, glossy trim. “What a wonderful room.”
    “Big. It was designed as the master bedroom, but I don’t need this much space to sleep.”
    Cilla tuned into him again, and into the various workstations set up in the room. Five large, and very ugly, filing cabinets lined one wall. Shelves lined another with what seemed to be a ruthless organization of art supplies and tools. He’d devoted another section to action figures and accessories. She recognized a handful of the collection, and wondered why Darth Vader and Superman appeared so chummy.
    A huge drawing board stood in the center of the room, currently holding what she assumed to be the panels he’d talked about. Spreading out from it on either side, counters and cubbies held a variety of tools, pencils, brushes, reams of paper. Photographs, sketches, pictures torn or cut out of magazines of people, places, buildings. Still another leg of the counter held a computer, printer, scanner—a Buffy the Vampire Slayer action figure.
    Opposite that, to form a wide U, stood a full-length mirror.
    “That’s a lot of stuff.”
    “It takes a lot of stuff. But for the art, which is what you want to know, I’ll do a few million sketches, casting my people, costuming them, playing with background, foreground, settings—and somewhere in there I’ll write the script, breaking that into panels. Then I’ll do thumbnails— small, quick sketches to help me decide how I’m going to divide my space, how I want to compose them. Then I pencil the panels. Then I ink the art, which is exactly what it sounds like.”
    She stepped over to the drawing board. “Black and white, light and shadow. But the book you gave me was done in color.”
    “So will this be. I used to do the coloring and the lettering by hand. It’s fun,” he told her, leaning a hip on one leg of the U, “and really time-consuming. And if you go foreign, and I did, it’s problematic to change hand-drawn balloons to fit the translations. So I digitized there. I scan the inked panels into the computer and work with Photoshop for coloring.”
    “The art’s awfully good,” Cilla stated. “It almost tells the story without the captions. That’s strong imaging.”
    Ford waited a beat, then another. “I’m waiting for it.”
    She glanced over her shoulder at him. “For what?”
    “For you to ask why I’m wasting my talent with comic books instead of pursuing a legitimate career in art.”
    “You’ll be waiting a long time. I don’t see waste when someone’s doing what they want to do, and something they excel at.”
    “I knew I was going to like you.”
    “Plus, you’re talking to someone who starred for eight seasons on a half-hour sitcom. It wasn’t Ibsen, but it sure as hell was legitimate. People will recognize me from your art. I’m not on the radar so much anymore, but I look enough like my grandmother, and she is. She always will be. People will make the connection.”
    “Is that a problem for you?”
    “I wish I knew.”
    "You’ve got a couple days to think about it. Or ...” He shifted, opened a drawer, drew out papers.
    “You wrote up a release,” Cilla said after a glance at the papers.
    “I figured you’d either come around or you wouldn’t. If you did, we’d get this out of the way.”
    She stepped away, walked to the windows. The lights sparkled again, she thought. Little diamond glints in the dark. She watched them, and the dog currently chasing shadows in Ford’s backyard. She sipped her wine. Then she turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. “I’m not posing in a breastplate.”
    Humor hit his eyes