On Wednesdays the shop smelled like ink and plastic sleeves and the faint sugar of the bakery next door. New shipments meant a current to the air; the clerk moved through it with a box cutter, slicing open cartons while the bell over the door kept chiming. Posters peeled at the corners, Watchmen’s blood-smeared smiley next to Into the Spider-Verse’s spray-painted logo, and in the reflection of the front glass you could read the neon from the vape store flickering backwards.

Alex and Jamie always ended up at the glass counter near the register, leaning their elbows on the pane scratched by a thousand variant covers slid across it. They’d been doing that since they were fifteen and the shop was on the other end of town by the laundromat, arguing top ten lists while pretending the girls from the record store could hear them. They were thirty-two now and still argued with the same mixture of tenderness and impatience that only long friendships allow.

“Look,” Alex said, tapping the edge of a bagged copy of All-Star Superman. “I’m not saying he’s the single worst director alive. But within this genre? Over the last twenty-five years? He’s one of the worst. He might be the worst.”

Jamie blew hair out of his face and pretended to study the back cover copy like it held a rebuttal. He always wore the same battered hoodie with the Nightwing logo, the blue turning gray along the creases. “You can’t say that in here,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the cathedral of four-color around them. “You’ll hex the bags and boards.”

Alex laughed without smiling. He had new lines at the corners of his eyes he pretended not to notice when he shaved in the mornings. Back in high school he used to graffiti tiny bat symbols on the margins of his notebooks. “Ritual won’t change the facts,” he said. “The man keeps misreading the most basic thing about the characters he’s working with. That’s not just taste. It’s malpractice.”

Jamie reached under the counter and pulled out a dog-eared copy of Watchmen. The shop kept reading copies for debates like this, the way a bar kept extra napkins for wiping away the evidence. He flipped to the chapter with the nine-panel grid of Dr. Manhattan on Mars, blue skin against red dust, the gears and glass clockwork life of intrinsic fields turning in the background. “He understood these,” Jamie said, tapping the panels. “Maybe too much, like a kid copying the homework neatly enough to get caught. But tell me that shot of the Comedian’s badge isn’t the badge. Tell me he didn’t nail the way this feels.”

“You mean the way it looks,” Alex said. “Which is the point. He can replicate a panel. He can slow-mo the hell out of a bullet casing like it’s Shakespeare. But where’s the heart? Where’s the critique? He turned Rorschach into a martyr.”

Jamie looked away, towards the long boxes where a kid in a Miles Morales hoodie was carefully squatting, flipping the back issue dividers like they were spices in a cupboard. “We saw Watchmen together opening weekend,” he said softly. “Do you remember? My dad was only a month gone. I remember that blue light on my hands in the theater, thinking about time all at once and none of it, and I, look, I know it wasn’t subtle. It still meant something.”

The bell over the door chimed and the clerk thumped another stack of new releases onto the counter, two covers of Detective Comics, a reprint of Hush, a second printing of something indie and moody with a girl holding a sword. Alex traced the logo of Hush with his finger. He remembered midnight releases, the way he and Jamie drank gas station energy drinks and argued Henchmen tiers in the parking lot. He remembered sneaking in to see The Dark Knight twice in one weekend. He remembered sitting in the Imax for Man of Steel, heart beating too fast because Clark was hovering in the sky, that alien, that human. He remembered the silence of his father’s living room the week after because his father had packed up and left, and his mother made spaghetti every night as if routine could staunch a wound.

“I wanted to like Man of Steel,” he said. “You know I did. You were there. But he turns the first public Superman moment into a horror movie for half of Smallville and then shrugs it off like a growing pain. He can’t tell the difference between awe and trauma.”

Jamie gave him a look that said you always cut to the bone without warning. He deflected it the way he always had, with a snort. “Smallville’s levelled in the comics all the time,” he said. “We lived through Doomsday when we were twelve and you cried into my mom’s throw pillow, don’t pretend you didn’t. What Zack was doing there was scale. Gods among us.”

“He makes them gods,” Alex said, “and forgets to make them people.”

The clerk, who had learned to move like an NPC through all arguments, slid a sealed pack of cardstock variants onto the counter and drifted away. Through the floor vents they could feel the heat come on, a dragonish breath underfoot.

“You always do this,” Jamie said. “You conflate ‘I didn’t feel it’ with ‘It’s bad for everyone.’”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Alex picked up All-Star Superman and held it like a catechism. The cover of Superman holding the sun in his hand, or maybe the sun holding him. “I’m saying there are ways to know when a take is wrong for a character, because you’ve got a hundred versions to triangulate from, and a century of readers whose responses reveal patterns that aren’t just individual noise. Look, Morrison and Quitely, bright suit, soft jaw, empathy like gravity. Reeves’ Superman, clumsy charm, a wink that isn’t snide. Even the Fleischer cartoons, angles and momentum but the eyes are kind. Zack looks at all that and says ‘What if he’s a religious crisis?’

“Sometimes a religious crisis works,” Jamie said. “It worked for me back then. It still does.”

They fell quiet long enough for an old woman to pay for her grandson’s trade paperback with a careful handful of bills, re-counting twice. The clerk bagged it with reverence and a sticker that said #1 for New Readers! The boy clutched it with both hands like a Bible.

“Our first San Diego,” Jamie said suddenly, leaning back against the counter to look at the ceiling. “We camped on the sidewalk, slept on the concrete, your ankles went numb. We saw the BvS teaser in Hall H and you grabbed my shoulder so hard you left a bruise.”

“I thought it meant something,” Alex said. “I thought it meant someone was going to eat Frank Miller and spit out the human bits without choking. He ate it and choked.”

Jamie chuckled despite himself. “Okay, the ‘Martha’ thing was indefensible.”

“There it is,” Alex said, pouncing. “Internal coherence. If you’re going to do myth you have to be even more precise about your human pivots, not less. Batman’s awakening can’t be ‘our moms share a name.’ That’s not lore, that’s Mad Libs.”

Jamie reached for the reading copy again, flipped to a panel of Ozymandias watching the monitors, arms folded in architect’s grief. “You like to pretend you’re cold about this, but you’re not. You’ve never been.”

Alex felt the familiar flush climb his neck, the way embarrassment and anger fit together like Legos. He glanced down the aisle where the kid in the Miles hoodie had found an old issue of Ultimate Spider-Man and was cradling it as if it were fragile bone. “Alright,” he said. “I’m not cold. My metric’s not numbers, it’s life spent with these stories. My mother used to read me Kingdom Come when I was sick. She’d do the Wonder Woman voice and it was terrible. Supes says ‘I’m tired of the blood,’ and you can feel tired in the panels. Zack makes him tired of people.”

Jamie let the book lie open between them. He thought of his dad, the hospice weeks, the blue light in the theater after, how there had been a clarity in the geometry of Snyder’s compositions that made his grief make sense for two hours. He thought of the forum days, the fight threads, typing with shaking hands at two in the morning because someone had posted a bootleg cam rip of a scene and he needed to defend it to strangers.

“So he means something to me too,” he said up into the ceiling. “There’s your objectivity problem. Not because opinions are equal by default, but because the parts that are measurable, the shot composition, the pre-viz, the way the speed ramp lands, those parts don’t always capture what the thing is for. If the aim is to make a myth you can stand under when your bones hurt, he did that for me.”

“And for me he built a monument with a ‘do not touch’ sign,” Alex said. “Classical proportions and a cage around it. He can paint the Sistine Chapel with perfect musculature. I still want someone to hold my hand while we look up.”

“Maybe that’s why we always end up back here,” Jamie said, letting the book close with a thud softer than he meant. “We want the books to hold our hands and the films to, too. And when they don’t, when they lecture instead of touch, you call that failure and I call it a kind of comfort anyway. It’s like praying in an empty church. Some people hear the echo and leave. Some stay for the echo.”

Alex snorted. “Now who’s mythologizing?”

They smiled at each other then, brief and rueful, two men whose fights had always been a way to keep talking. In high school they had argued in whispers about whether Hush was overrated in the back row of the bus. In college, dimly lit dorm rooms, whether the Nolan films forgot to have fun. On dates, there had briefly been a period where they double-dated, they had excused themselves from tables to squabble over a trailer that had dropped mid-meal. Jamie had held Alex’s phone while Alex’s hands shook the night the first Man of Steel footage appeared, snow and prayer and a boy with a towel around his shoulders. Alex had sat with Jamie in a hospital cafeteria drinking coffee that tasted like cardboard after a screening of Watchmen, both of them staring at their blue-lit palms like they’d been given something holy and didn’t know where to put it.

The clerk cleared his throat. “Are you two gonna buy those or argue them to death?”

Jamie held up the reading copy with faux innocence. “We’re respecting the text.”

“Respect it at the register,” the clerk said, but his mouth twitched.

They paid for the new Detective and a facsimile edition of All-Star Superman because the spine on Alex’s at home had cracked from re-reading. The register beeped. The bell over the door chimed as a couple came in hand-in-hand, arguing over whether to start Saga now or wait for the next omnibus. Outside, the light had gone flat and wintery, rain beginning to patter against the awning.

At the door, Jamie hesitated. “You coming to the watch party Saturday?” he asked. “We’re doing a double feature. Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and, ” he made a face, “the long Justice League.”

Alex groaned. “Four hours is a war crime.”

“Bring snacks,” Jamie said. “I need you there so I have someone to roll my eyes at during the Icelandic singing.”

“You’re making my case for me.”

“Maybe,” Jamie said, shoving the door open with his shoulder. The smell of wet pavement came in, the sound of tires sloshing by. “Or maybe I just want to argue with you about it again. You make me sharpen my takes.”

Alex looked down at the bag in his hand, All-Star’s smiling, serene Superman visible through the plastic like stained glass. He felt the familiar pull in his chest, the stupid loyalty to a red cape and a fictional man’s decency that had survived divorce and debt and the move across town to a smaller apartment. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m bringing the scene where Cyborg says ‘I’m not broken.’ Because I’ll admit it, that lands.”

Jamie bumped his shoulder. “Objectively.”

Alex rolled his eyes. They stepped out into the rain. The bell chimed once, and the door swung shut, and inside the clerk put the reading copy back on the shelf where it lived between debates, ready for the next pair of vows said over panels, the next two friends who needed a reason to talk about what they loved, and why.