If anybody knows Chuck Klosterman personally, I owe him a comic book or three. This month’s Fanboy couldn’t have been written without his excellent article “The Importance of Being Hated” from the April 2004 edition of Esquire. In it, Klosterman argues that the two most important qualities of any successful person are (a) one quality nemesis; and (b) one archenemy. “We measure ourselves against our nemeses,” Klosterman writes, “and we long to destroy our archenemies. Nemeses and archenemies are the catalysts for everything.”

Being a comic book fanboy, I took to Klosterman’s essay like today’s Marvel to six part story arcs, but I found it kind of confusing. After all, in comics, isn’t your nemesis also your arch-enemy? Klosterman lays out the difference like this: “You kind of like your nemesis, despite the fact that you despise him. If your nemesis invited you out for cocktails, you would accept the offer. If he died, you would attend his funeral and—privately—you might shed a tear over his passing. But you would never have drinks with your archenemy, unless you were attempting to spike his gin with hemlock. If you were to perish, your archenemy would dance on your grave, and then he’d burn down your house and molest your children. You hate your archenemy so much that you try to keep your hatred secret, because you don’t want your archenemy to have the satisfaction of being hated.”

Klosterman peppers his article with examples, only briefly touching on the world of comic books—a good thing because he gets as much wrong as he does right: “The Joker was Batman’s nemesis, but—ironically—his archenemy was Superman. Superman made Batman seem entirely mortal and generally nonessential. Nobody likes to admit this, but Batman hated Superman; Superman is the reason Batman became an alcoholic (this is speculative).” Considering one of the traits Klosterman uses to identify your nemesis is: “If your archenemy tried to kill you, [your nemesis] would attempt to stop him,” I’d think it’s a much better argument to suggest that, frothy Frank Miller stories aside, Superman is Batman’s nemesis. The uneasy tension and respect between the two, post-Dark Knight, is not that of two archenemies, but that of two people who can’t stop measuring themselves against each other, and who used to be close. “At some point in the past,” Klosterman writes, “[your nemesis] was (arguably) your best friend.”

So, for example, Grant Morrison is Mark Millar’s nemesis, but Paul Levitz is Millar’s archenemy. Lex Luthor was Superman’s nemesis before the Man of Steel miniseries; after, he was Superman’s archenemy. For a long time, Chris Claremont was John Byrne’s nemesis, and Jim Shooter the archenemy; now, I would bet Byrne would consider himself above having nemeses, but everyone who isn’t John Byrne is potentially his archenemy. Reed Richards started off as a nemesis of Doctor Doom, then zipped right to the top of the archenemy list (as for Reed, The Submariner is his nemesis, and probably vice-versa) (and when The Thing first appeared, part of what made him so scary was that The Torch was his nemesis and Reed was almost his archenemy, but once Stan and Jack softened up Ben Grimm, the faceless Yancy Street Gang took the place of both). I couldn’t say for certain who Mark Waid thinks is his nemesis (although he’s Alex Ross’s), but I would bet Mark Alessi is his archenemy. Bullseye is obviously Daredevil’s archenemy, while under Bendis, The Kingpin and Matt Murdock took the emotionally messy relationships you expect of nemeses to new heights; Harlan Ellison and Gary Groth should just be nemeses but because they’re both so vitriolic, they’re archenemies. I’m sure their archenemies are all muscleheaded louts from their past, but Chris Ware is Dan Clowes’ nemesis the same way Clowes is Crumb’s and Crumb’s was Art Spiegelman’s—if you think the emergence of each didn’t cause three drops of cartoon sweat to fly from the tri-lined brow of the other (and elicit a vow to do better work), you’re mistaken. And finally, among superhero fans who care about such things, I bet you could divide them quite neatly into the group that prefers Cyclops and Wolverine be nemeses (me, Morrison, Claremont) and the group who thinks they’re archenemies (Millar and Whedon most notable among others).

I started this Fanboy with an idea toward spinning more and more absurd iterations of the above wackiness (Casper is Richie Rich’s archenemy, having both more friends and less melanin than Richie; Donkey Kong is Mario’s nemesis, but Pac-Man is the real archenemy; and Michael Moore is lobbying hard for the position of George W. Bush’s archenemy, not realizing that position is actually filled by the 41st President, Dubya’s father) and maybe dramatizing a similar riff for myself—thinking Stan Lee is my nemesis until Ben takes over my job as counterman by building himself an exoskeleton out of a wrist rattle, a carseat and three longboxes of Valiant comics.

But then, three nights ago, I had dinner next to my archenemy. I had come home from working at CE, and my girlfriend and I decided to eat at the little Italian place on the corner. The waiter seated us next to a table of two couples and, after we were seated, I sort of scoped them out. The age difference between the couples suggested a husband and wife, and a set of in-laws. And as I was scrutinizing the quartet, trying to figure out who were the parents of whom, I suddenly realized the husband, who was roughly my age, was none other than an old college roommate who I had spent approximately the last two decades loathing.

Struck with horror and dismay, I turned to Edi and grimaced like a man whose body was quickly putrefying from the inside out.

Edi looked at me. “What? What is it? Another Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose flashback?”

“Arch,” I whispered. “Archenemy.” I tried to discreetly nod my head in the direction of the table next to us. It came off like the twitching of a hanged man.

Bless her, Edi looked over at the next table, then back at me, and somehow understood. She reached over, took my hand, and muttered, “Do you want to move?”

And this is how I learned that my former college roommate had become my archenemy: I hated him so much, I didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he was hated. “No,” I said in a surprisingly calm voice. “No, this will be great.”

And so Edi and I went on to eat a regular meal at our favorite neighborhood restaurant—or we tried, anyway, in part because I still looked as if someone had struck me in the head with a railroad tie, and in part because we couldn’t stop discreetly peeking over at my archenemy: the guy who had fucked me over essentially the entire time we had lived together; the guy who treated me as a friend and then talked crap about me behind my back; the guy who would try to bond with my friends and then talk shit about me to them when I wasn’t around; the guy who would lie to me just to keep in practice, telling me friends had called when they hadn’t; the guy who went out and got a cat after everyone in the house voted against it; the guy who got the most emotionally needy cat from the shelter; the guy who then proceeded to leave the cat alone two to three nights a week while he slept over at his girlfriend’s, so that the cat nobody wanted would cry in the hallway and actually jam its paws under our doors, vainly batting for a latch so it could get in and not be alone even though it hated all of us (and, when one of us would inevitably take pity on it, would bite and scratch and gave the whole household fleas—no less than three times). And one of the strongest thoughts I had while eating that meal and trying to cautiously check him out was: Hey, he’s wearing fucking mandals. Right on.

It makes sense that the superhero, designed to appeal to kids, would have archenemies he would immediately begin to pummel. That, after all, is how it’s done on the schoolyard. And no matter how much Marvel Comics made superheroes more like actual people, you still didn’t have a situation where, for example, Reed Richards and Doctor Doom had to sit next to each other in a crowded movie theater because neither was going to give the other the satisfaction by walking out. And that’s kind of a shame because, perversely, it’s one of the sad truths of growing older, and how we handle such situations shows us who we are, whether we want to see or not. (“Psst! Sue! Doom’s wearing mandals! And I think that’s a Highlander t-shirt!”)

Edi and I did what adults do: we finished our meal, paid, and went home and ate cheesecake. We read comic books and surfed the Internet, and right before bed when Edi asked me, “That was kind of weird, wasn’t it?” I actually didn’t know what she meant for a moment because I was lying next to her happy, filled with cheesecake, and halfway through the latest issue of Eightball (which is disturbing and great and recommended). “Huh?” I replied. “Oh. Yeah. It was.”  And except for this column (which I admit is much later than it should be), that was that.

But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that since then, I’ve been stuck with an endless mental loop of The Legion of Doom and the Superfriends both waiting for tables at T.G.I. Fridays.

            HOSTESS:   Legion of Doom, party of fifteen?

            LEX LUTHOR:   Yes!!! In your face, Justice League!

And honestly, is that really any sillier than your average superhero punch-‘em-up?  Maybe that’s why the most convincing archenemy relationship in superhero comics is still Spider-Man and J. Jonah Jameson: childish, comical and reflecting poorly on all parties involved, the way these things sadly do.