's Cardboard Box

Artie Pender / Mr. Gone

Artemus Pender functions as a mysterious dark figure, simultaneously villain and savior, during issues 1-20, but during the ten years that separate issues 20 and 21 he undergoes a great deal of personal change and becomes more of a guide and guardian to Sara, his daughter.

As a child he was sexually and emotionally abused by his aunt repeatedly; she called it "punishment" but did this to him no matter what he had done. Naturally he tried to discover what he was doing wrong, but he was unable to find out, because it was never really his fault. This experience forever colored his relationships with women, although he did not specifically remember the abuse until much later in life.

His first wife, Celia, who he met and married while in Bora Bora, was an addict who swore she'd stop prostituting herself to buy heroin, but she kept right on doing it. They had a child named Phred who Artie loved a great deal, but his wife sold Phred's eyes on the organ transplant black market to pay for drugs while Artie was away on business. Phred died soon after, and Celia's drug habit killed her not long after that.

Back in the US, he met and married a second wife, Judy, but he had urges to exact revenge on her for the way his first wife had treated him and their child (and unconsciously for the way his aunt had treated him as a child). He humiliated her in exactly the way his aunt had humiliated him, though he didn't realize that this was what he was doing. She drank to escape and gradually got angrier and angrier. One night he said something in his sleep, and when Judy repeated this to him he blacked out. Tensions increased, and finally she used this weakness against him; he blacked out and awoke in the hospital, seriously injured. When he returned home, Judy had moved out.

As a child he developed an interest in philosophy and metaphysics, trying to discover what he was doing wrong to make his aunt "punish" him so often, or at least trying to escape. After his second marriage, when he was in his forties, he moved to Australia (probably sent there by the US government), where he met a band of aboriginals and learned some of their magic. Their children were all blind; their eyes had been removed for organ experiments. After his first Dreamtime experience, he awoke to find the aboriginals gone; everyone he asked told him that they didn't exist. (This leaves open the possibility that that particular band of aboriginals existed only in his own Outback, which he somehow got to on his own. Since they are blind like Julie's Isz, and since they are drawn to look remarkably similar to Isz, it is possible that the blind children are Artie's Outback's equivalent of Isz, possibly engendered by his first child's maiming.) He returned to America and continued his research, using Julie's Outback, and later Sara's, as testing grounds.

When Julie was young, Artie told her tales of the Outback, and she incorporated some of the ideas into her own make-believe world, which she was already forming for herself. Later, when Julie went to college, he offered to store her belongings in a storage bin he had rented which happened to be a power spot. He traveled through Julie's Outback then, finally able to journey through the dreamtime of someone he knew. He seems to have made some modifications of his own, probably damaging Julie in some way, but it is difficult to say how badly. He also seems to have promised Julie's parents that he would look after her, but exactly when this happened is unclear. (It is also unclear why Artie did not experiment with his own Outback -- if he did, it is not mentioned, except in the possibility I state in the previous paragraph.)

His relationships were all tainted with the negative experiences he had had at the hands of women. He tried to suppress it all with his third wife, Sara's mother Tilly, but after Sara was born he had nightmares of hurting her. He left to avoid doing so, but still kept an eye on her to make sure she was all right. Still, he raped women because of the anger inside him, the source of which he only remembered after his aunt died. Tilly told Sara that Artie had taken a gun to work and killed his coworkers and himself, but there is evidence to suggest that Sara didn't believe the lie.

This is the situation when the comic starts. Calling himself Mr. Gone, Artie is raping and murdering women, using his power and his servants the dark Isz to help him overcome his victims. Then he calls Julie, whom he's been keeping an eye on all these years, and tells her that he's doing it all for her. It is difficult to see how he thinks Julie will benefit from all this violence, but perhaps it makes sense in his mind. But I digress. Mr. Gone knows a lot about the distress Julie's gone through and the elaborate fantasy world she's built around herself, and he wants her to know the truth so she can get along without the fantasy, but she doesn't want to know the truth, and his dark side keeps getting in the way of their relationship. And that lummox the Maxx is always gumming up the works.

This paragraph will spoil issues 1-20 for you if you haven't read them, but in the first story he manages to get Julie to remember the truth about what happened to her, so that her healing can begin. He seems unable to die, or at least decapitation is not sufficient to kill him. This is a result of his experiences in Pangaea.

In the ten-year interval between issues 20 and 21, Artie somehow recovers his head, meets an extraordinary woman named Gaynor, and actually begins to heal himself. He remembers his abuse and tries to deal with the trauma, then works at a rape crisis center in hopes of undoing some of the damage he has done. He even tries to find some of the women he'd raped and left alive, so as to apologize to them, although he is never truly forgiven.

After the interval Sara goes to see Artie, and he tells her a vastly different story that is contradicted by all later statements, so it must be a lie he deliberately tells Sara for some reason. He claims that he didn't do the raping and murdering and that it wasn't him wreaking havoc in Julie's and Sara's lives -- although he was trying to contact Sara through the dream planes. He seemed shocked when he learned that Sara perceived him as a marauding unkillable monster.

Artie is tall and has an odd cylindrical head. As Mr. Gone he usually wears a mustache and a rather unkempt goatee; before he became Mr. Gone he only had a handlebar mustache that curled up at the ends. After he stops being Mr. Gone, Artie grows no facial hair at all. Mr. Gone also usually wears a black cape, which seems to get longer and engulf everything near him whenever he exerts his powers. What precisely those powers are is hard to define. As described above, he can travel from the real world to the many dream-planes of Pangaea at will, and he can likewise transport other objects and creatures as well. He can summon and control Isz from Julie's Outback, which almost always turn dark when they travel to the real world. However, nearby mechanical devices seem to malfunction when he uses his power. He is amazingly hard to kill, and if he is killed in one world he lives on in other worlds and may actually be able to revive himself in the world where he was killed. In Pangaea he can take on many forms and possess creatures' bodies, and he can intrude upon people's waking consciousness to talk to them. In this world he can transform people into insects. I don't think we've seen the limits of his powers; they seem to be very fundamental and therefore have many applications.

Artie seems to me to be a message that we can overcome tremendous traumas and still become decent human beings, although he also seems to be a message that if we hurt people before that overcoming, we may still not be forgiven afterwards, no matter how much we've changed.