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Company Men

The working stiffs and horrible bosses of Glen Cook’s Black Company saga

by Sean T. Collins


I worked for a wizard once. 

Alright, technically I worked for Wizard once: Wizard magazine, the old combination price guide, Entertainment Weekly, and FHM for fans of (mostly) superhero comics, which employed me from 2004 to 2007. There’s a lot we did back then that I’m not proud of (a publication for superhero nerds run by an editorial staff of almost all dudes in the ‘00s is gonna run some, uh, regrettable takes) and a lot we did that I am (getting some of the most challenging alternative and art comics on the market into a publication carried by every Barnes & Noble and Android’s Dungeon in America). 

But what we did matters less than who we did it with. There were two groups of people at Wizard and its associated spinoff magazines, which in addition to Wizard proper’s superhero and, later, overall nerd-culture remit included publications dedicated to anime and manga, toys and action figures, and tabletop and video gaming. The group that I belonged to, the group I loved and continue to love to this day, operated on the ground level of Wizard’s bland building in a Rockland County, New York, office park. 

We came from all over the country—a bunch of tri-staters, a ton of Midwesterners, plus folks as far afield as Oklahoma and Puerto Rico—but, to a person, we all really loved comics. Even when our tastes differed, even if someone you worked with loved a book or writer or artist or publisher or genre you thought was brain-dead dogshit or vice versa, that love of this weird American art form united us. 

More than that, though, it blossomed into love for each other. Wizard was like College II: The Quickening for me, a time and place where I forged lasting relationships that felt more like brotherhood than friendship. Even now that almost twenty years have passed and all of us have moved on, some to great success in comics and fiction and others to great success in fields that have nothing to do with either, those bonds stay strong. I still talk to those downstairs guys almost every day. (I refer to them as “my Wizard friends,” which always confuses people unfamiliar with the capital W.)

Upstairs was a different story. Upstairs—and do be sure to mentally capitalize it every time you hear it: Upstairs—was where the business shit got done. The ad sales people, the bean counters, the ones who ran Wizard’s shambolic convention wing and online store (though after a certain point, every aspect of Wizard’s business was shambolic; it collapsed within a year of shitcanning me, though it’s possible some fly-by-night comic con with the Wizard name still persists to this day, like a lingering infection), the founder on the vanishingly rare days he showed up, the publisher who called the shots: these people, to whom we referred collectively as “Upstairs,” ran the place. And we dreaded them.

Don’t get me wrong: we made fun of them plenty too, and there was much to make fun of. The founder, with a permanent beatific grin on his Kermit the Frog-like face and his total lack of discernible skills except glad-handing and accepting payola. His idiot brother, an Ed Hardy tryhard whose sole credential was his last name. (The whole thing was a nepo operation. The brothers got their seed money from their parents’ comic book store, and were lucky enough to find a terrific editorial mind when they hired one of the guys who worked the counter to run the magazines.) 

The list goes on. The giant with the booming voice. The cueball with the Mario mustache who excitedly said “Yo yo yo yo!” every time he entered a room with people in it, and possibly without people in it. The disbarred lawyer who served as legal counsel and bagman. The guy who clearly spent every workday running his own rinky-dink vanity press, for which he would sell ad space to himself. The toy-industry specialist whose excited videos about the latest baby doll came across like something out of Batman’s rogues gallery. The one female exec, beautiful and terrible as the dawn—and apparently a nice enough person once you got to know her, which all of us were afraid to do. The head honcho, who didn’t so much say as excrete the greeting “hello” to you, as if it was a veiled threat, and who once compared allowing coverage of Wizard friend-turned-enemy Todd McFarlane to “giving guns to the Palestinians.” (It was at his insistence that the company’s “special products” division produced a magazine dedicated to mercenaries and gun nuts.)

Everything good about the place, everything that involved caring about art or each other, came from downstairs. Everything bad about the place, every unethical and/or disastrous business decision and callous round of layoffs and attempt to exploit the art form we downstairs folks loved, came from Upstairs.

We knew it was a snake pit up there, that they were no more safe from each other as we were from them. But they were united about what counted: making comics, and our little part of it, a worse place to be.

Upstairs was a different story. Upstairs was where the business shit got done.

Croaker, the primary narrator and protagonist of Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company, works for a wizard. Many wizards, in fact. The moment he and his mercenary outfit, the titular Black Company, sleazily ditch their old commission in a city-state on the verge of falling to revolution in order to work for the great northern empire run by an ancient sorceress known only as the Lady, they begin taking marching orders from a whole court of wizards resurrected from the same curse-ensorcelled barrow as their monarch. Called the Ten Who Were Taken, they were once great independent wielders of magic, until the Lady and her hated husband the Dominator used their superior spellcraft to (semi-)permanently bind them to their will. 

But before you can say Nazgûl, it becomes apparent that the Taken aren’t your standard Dark Lord lieutenants in two important respects. First, unlike the Ringwraiths or the Balrogs, they each have distinct looks, personalities, and powers, which you can generally guess at from their names: Soulcatcher. Shapeshifter. Stormbringer. Bonegnasher. Nightcrawler. Moonbiter. The Faceless Man. The Hanged Man. The Howler. The Limper. Some of these you get to know better than others, Soulcatcher and the Limper foremost among them; none of these do Croaker and his brothers-in-arms want to touch with a ten-foot halberd, not even the minor wizards in the company, since in addition to being the most dangerous beings on the continent, they’re all more or less insane.

Which leads to the second, even more important factor that distinguishes the Black Company series’ Taken from similar figures in fantasy lore: They hate each other’s guts. 

Obviously, bad guys not getting along is nothing new. Saruman plotted against Sauron, Arawn betrayed Achren, Destro staged a palace coup against Cobra Commander… you get the drift. What distinguishes Cook’s work is that for his bad guys, deceiving, undermining, backstabbing, and constantly forming and dissolving alliances of convenience—all while ostensibly working for the same evil side—is the rule rather than the exception. 

And from the moment the Black Company takes on its new commission—an act that involves the murder of their previous contracted employer via a ruse by their new ones, which claims the life of one of the Company’s own wizards before they’ve so much as left their fortress—the constant scheming of the Taken, the Upstairs of Cook’s unnamed fantasy world, make the lives of Croaker and his dogged-but-otherwise-unexceptional comrades a living hell. They’re drawn into a complex web of overt and covert alliances based on grudges that date back centuries. Soulcatcher and her closest ally Shapeshifter, for example, hate the Limper, the most grotesque of the Taken; in an especially vivid detail, Shifter uses the petrified corpse of a woman who cheated on him with the Limper as a walking stick. The Limper in turn hates the Black Company for being Catcher’s pets, even though he relies on their inarguable skill and fearsome reputation for his own campaigns, and even though they’re as terrified of Soulcatcher as they are of him. 

It spiders out from there. Croaker, who both keeps the Company’s annals and serves as their medic, eventually discovers that several of the Taken’s battlefield deaths are at least as attributable to one another as they are to the formidable wizards on the Rebel side—because, in addition to whatever personal grudges they bear against one another, several of them are in actuality working to resurrect the Dominator, whom the Lady is happy enough to leave in the ground. This resurrectionist tendency is also present in the Circle of Eighteen, the sorcerers who run the Rebel armies; in several cases these ostensibly heroic figures are as cruel and merciless as the Taken, for whom they make handy replacements when some of the original Ten go down. 

Some of these figures survive their apparent expirations and live to fight another day, either in service of—or serving as—Dark Lords half a world away. Some continue to hound the steps of the Black Company long after they’ve left the northern empire behind; one of them leaves a continent-long path of destruction in their wake in a final attempt to get even, but is stopped before the Company even become aware of their continued existence. And towering above them all is the Lady herself, a figure of such beauty and terror that the hard cases of the Company (Croaker excepted) fight amongst themselves to not have to deal with her, despite their place of favor in her grand plans. 

That she turns out to be the least of several evils the Company faces does not diminish the fact that she does shit to these dudes that they’d never put up with if they weren’t in mortal fear for their lives—and their paychecks. For them, as for us, these are synonymous concepts. That is the ultimate curse of the Company: They’re working stiffs, who will become stiffs if they don’t work to their masters’ satisfaction. It’s not the Rebel they fear most. It’s the Boss.

The men of Croaker’s company do not stab each other in the back; they simply can’t afford to. More than that, they refuse to.

I’d read, and loved, a lot of fantasy novels before I made my way to Cook, and I applied many of the life lessons learned therein to my own life. (Not to mention my body: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left arm and the war cry of the Golden Company on my right.) Cook’s revisionist tendencies are of course influential to and present in the work of George R.R Martin, while I see a lot of Robert E. Howard’s earthy affect in Cook in turn. (Superhuman martial and coital prowess notwithstanding, Conan is nothing if not the original just-some-guy fantasy protagonist.)

But until I encountered Croaker and Company, I had never imagined that my own experience working for wizards, or for any of my other shitty bosses, could be captured in fantasy fiction.

The Taken, with their outsized personalities, unforgettable idiosyncrasies, and total lack of scruples? They’re Upstairs: the people who run the show, oblivious to the lives of those beneath them when they aren’t busy trying to make those lives worse. They all work together when they have to and do a terrifyingly good job of it, too, as awful people in our own world so often do. But when that need passes, they’re at each other’s throats, as awful people in our own world so often are. And no matter what, we’re forced to go along with their lunacy to earn a living, if not stay alive.

One cannot say that the perfidy and callousness of the Taken awakens anything quite like political or class consciousness in Croaker and the Company; even when they eventually turn against the Lady and her empire, it’s out of fear they themselves are about to be turned against. But their shared terror of and contempt for the Taken, the thrill of achieving victories in their name and the resentment of being made to suffer and die to do so, is the perfect forge for solidarity, comradeship, love.

Unlike the Taken, the men of Croaker’s company do not stab each other in the back; they simply can’t afford to. More than that, they refuse to. They may work for bastards, they may do bastards’ work—but to each other, they’re not bastards, they’re brothers. 

In lives governed by the Taken Upstairs, that’s maybe not the best we can hope for. But it’s often the best we can do.


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