Reading Sandra Cisneros's recent novel Caramelo, set in Mexico City during the late 1950s, I wondered about the fotonovelas that are mentioned again and again over the course of the book: "The Awful Grandmother" locks the bedroom door when she dips into the stack of fotonovelas she keeps beside her bed. Lala, the narrator of the novel, delights in fotonovela titles such as Virgen Santísima, You Killed Her, I Killed the Love of My Life, Don't Make Me Commit a Craziness, The Unhappiest Woman of All, and The Glories of His Love. A family of Mexican men in Chicago use fotonovelas as their bathroom reading. And when Lala's father gets caught misbehaving, Lala explains that the history of her family could itself be a fotonovela. Later, when it's revealed that Soledad and Narciso (a young couple who will eventually marry) are cousins -- which they don't suspect, despite the fact that they are both named Reyes -- the spirit of the Awful Grandmother remarks, "Just like a good fotonovela." I put down the book and thought, So what are these fotonovelas about?

Since I grew up in San Diego and often set my stories here, I frequently use Mexican or Mexican-American characters. Having spent a lot of time in Mexico in the 1960s, I came to admire the Mexican people and their culture. But somehow I hadn't heard of fotonovelas before. I thought of the popular soap operas called telenovelas that you sometimes come across on Mexican television stations, and I assumed that what Cisneros was describing were short, printed melodramas that use photographs to advance the story.

Over time, the article related, the fotonovela also became an efficient way to promote political and social agendas to those with little access to television and movies, and they appealed to many who were only semiliterate. The fotonovela form is now commonly used in the United States to promote political issues and candidates and to sell products to the Hispanic population. Fotonovelas have been produced to spread warnings and provide practical advice about pesticides, rape, AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.

Most of the examples I found online, however, were either pornographic or full of low-grade, adolescent humor. Moreover, most were illustrated, not photographic. One article made the following distinction: "Technically, the fotonovela is illustrated with photos while the historieta employs drawings, but the two terms are often used interchangeably." I dubbed the novelas with drawings fauxtonovelas.

I discovered that Michigan State University has a collection of fotonovelas, and I imagined that SDSU might have one as well. But the librarians I reached on the phone didn't know much about them. A trip to the SDSU library turned up only a few academic articles. Cecilia Puerto, bibliographer for Latin-American studies and Mexican-American studies at SDSU, told me that the Santa Barbara Public Library has a fotonovela collection.

My curiosity was piqued, and I would have welcomed an excuse to take a drive up to Santa Barbara, where I've passed serene days on the beach, but between here and there lies Los Angeles. I would rather drive east to Miami in August through the desert and steamy South than suffer the 405 or the I-5 and 101 route between Irvine and Thousand Oaks. Besides, if the Santa Barbara library had fotonovelas, I reasoned, so must the San Ysidro library. And if I couldn't find any in San Ysidro, I'd be a teaspoon full of gas from Mexico.

The San Ysidro library is small, quiet, and orderly, with lots of computers. The librarian, Lorena Rodriguez, didn't seem to mind a gringo pestering her about fotonovelas.

"We used to have a subscription to fotonovelas when I first came to this branch 16 years ago." They were usually no more than 30 pages, she told me. "They had actors and actresses with the dialogue to the side of them or above their heads. They were like reading a novel only with pictures of the people. They mostly were the romance type, sometimes with a little bit of mystery. Not usually murder mysteries, though. More to do with romance. They were very popular, but we stopped getting them at least 10 years ago. The company we used to get them from ceased publication. Then we used to get vaqueros, which were colorized, like cartoons. They were called vaqueros because they were westerns."

Lorena supposed that the fauxtonovelas came into vogue once actors and actresses decided they were better off trying to make movies or novelas on TV. She tilted her head contemplatively. "I don't think any branches in San Diego City have fotonovelas anymore. Maybe the Logan branch does. They used to carry them, but I'm not sure they do now."

A few minutes later, moping on the library lawn, I told myself that the odds of my finding anything but fauxtonovelas at the Logan branch were about the same as the odds of my being drafted by the Republican Party to run for president. And like most men, I have a mild phobia against backtracking. Besides, from San Ysidro I either smelled Tijuana or imagined I did. Over the border, at one of those corner magazine stands, I was sure to find some real fotonovelas. Onward, I commanded myself, and don't come back to el norte without fotonovelas in hand.

I don't go to Mexico often these days, though I still enjoy it when I do go, and most people I meet there are kind and gracious. But I'm not as adventurous as I once was, and last month my brother-in-law was out surfing below Playa Rosarito when his friend's car got snatched. The two of them had to stagger home in wet suits, lugging their surfboards onto Mexican busses and the San Diego trolley. And not long ago, after taking a walk on an Ensenada beach, my son Cody and his girlfriend returned to her truck to find two policemen rummaging around inside of it. They excused themselves by claiming someone had broken in and they were investigating.

But more dangerous than any crooked cop or car thief is Tijuana traffic. Driving in Mexico was a welcome thrill in my wilder days, but I have become a defensive driver in my afternoon years. A drive through Tijuana sounds to me almost as deadly as the I-5 and 101 route from Irvine to Thousand Oaks.

I tried to blend into the flow of traffic, but after horns and shouts reduced me to a wimp, I drove in fits and starts the way my mother used to at the age of 80. I infuriated scores of motorists by rounding a traffic circle a dozen or so times before I determined which way to branch off. Downtown was a maze of one-way streets and construction detours. My brain whirled from the tornado of delivery trucks and cabs whizzing past. At last I found a parking lot off Avenida Revolución, near the Jai Alai Palace.

After a fruitless search of the magazine rack in a Sanborn's department store, I hiked past the police station to Constitución, a busy mercantile street a couple of blocks outside the tourist zone. At a magazine stand on the corner of Constitución and Calle Ocho, Sergio Nieto, a small man with a gray beard, was preparing to close for siesta. In my best high school Spanish, I asked him about fotonovelas. He had many, he said, and started to show me vaqueros, sentimentales, historietas. Not a true fotonovela among them.

"No fotonovelas con fotos actuales?" I groaned.

He used to have them, he said. They used to come out every week, but they don't make those anymore -- not for a year at least, he explained.

I bought a few fauxtonovelas to show my appreciation and then plodded east until I spotted another magazine stand. There a young vendor named Atanacio Ramírez told me he also hadn't seen any fotonovelas con fotos in several years. But Atanacio pointed the way to the treasure.

At Lucero Librería, a used book and magazine store, the proprietor, Oscar Ruiz, showed me a pile of true fotonovelas, all of them frayed, fragile, and at least a dozen years old.

Tonight, I told myself, armed with cerveza, a dicionário, and the phone numbers of friends who are real Spanish speakers, I would read them.

I can read Spanish menus with ease, but for any other kind of literature I need a dictionary and ample time to concentrate. So while I waited in the quarter-mile-long Port of Entry line, I browsed a few of the articles I had picked up at SDSU. I learned that some social-activist critics claim that fotonovelas foster gender ambiguity and other social ills. One critic lamented the simplistic plots of commercial fotonovelas that target the widest, least discriminating audience and criticized the way they stereotyped social classes and blamed moral defects on bad genes.

At the border gate I felt sure the guard who stood there gazing at me would conclude that my face must belong to a terrorist -- I hadn't yet recovered from the harrowing drive, and I was hungry. He asked what I was bringing from Mexico. "A bunch of magazines," I explained, cringing as I wondered if the fotonovelas I'd bought at Lucero Librería might get me jailed as a pornography smuggler. To my surprise, he simply waved me through.

A few minutes later I was soothing my frayed nerves at a Popeyes chicken just off the 805 when inspiration struck. Ever since another writer and I walked into a Tucson Popeyes for lunch and discovered that the only other patrons were the novelists Larry McMurtry and Leslie Silko, I've considered it a literary hangout. And Tucson, I remembered, was the location of a distributor of fotonovelas an Internet site recommended. A distributor, I thought, would carry contemporary fotonovelas.

Risking indigestion for the sake of art, I gobbled the rest of my chicken and dirty rice. Then, risking death for the sake of art, I sped home along Highway 94 at rush hour, arriving just in time to call Latin American Periodicals before they closed.

A fellow with a congenial voice answered.

"Does your outfit handle fotonovelas?" I asked. "And I mean real ones, with the photographs in them."

"We sure do."

"Could I come there and look at some of them and interview somebody?"

"You can," he said. "We're closed over the weekend, though."

Sure, I could've waited and driven over at dawn on Monday and returned Monday evening, but I have more to do in Tucson than play detective. I've got a daughter, a son-in-law, and a baby grandson there. Plus they live just blocks from two excellent golf courses, and because I helped them buy their home, I possess a Tucson resident discount card.

Besides, the Muse could be leading me to that certain fotonovela whose melodramatic plot would inspire my first bestselling novel.

I would have loved to take my wife Pam and our daughter Zoë along, but traveling with a two-year-old is a chore, and I was too intent on my pursuit of the fotonovela to put up with such distractions. And anyway, Pam had to work on Monday. "Darn it, Pam, I guess I have to go to Tucson, to interview a guy."

She's a clever one and probably could sense I wasn't feeling as put out as I let on. Before she could probe any further, I described my frustrating day on the trail of the elusive contemporary fotonovela. "But," I announced with grim assurance, "this distributor, who just happens to be in Tucson, holds all the answers."

"Can't he enlighten you over the phone?" she asked. My hopes for a sunny round or two of golf began to dim.

"Well, I need to see these fotonovelas in person," I said. "The only ones I found are ancient. And -- "

"Have fun," she said. "Zoë and I will be fine."

While she was occupied changing a diaper, I snuck my golf clubs from the garage to my car. But I made sure she saw me carrying the laptop computer. "In case some fotonovela inspires me," I said.

That night in the desert, the moon turned from silver to red and back to silver again. Ahead of me all the way was a blanket of stars, but in my mirrors all I could see were clouds like giant lumps of coal. Even when surrounded by thunder and lightning, even in blinding sandstorms, I feel safe in the desert, as though rocked in my mama's arms -- much safer than the way I feel driving north or south out of San Diego.

About 20 years ago I lived in Tucson for 3 years, and I still find it to be a more comfortable place than my hometown of San Diego. Even though Tucson's population has doubled since I lived there and the traffic has its snags and snarls, life is mellower. Maybe the heat slows people down, or the fact that they don't need three incomes to buy a home lessens the pressure. Or perhaps it's the $14 rounds of golf at public courses.

One city course, called Fred Enke, can be injurious to the ego. If you hit the ball ten degrees off line, you're in a forest of cholla cactus or a bottomless arroyo. But the fee included the use of an electric cart, so I cruised along, losing golf balls, smiling in the sunshine, sipping lemonade on the front nine and Heineken on the back nine. Relaxed as I was, I sank a few long putts and shot 91, counting the lost ball penalties.

Most of my adult life, I've harbored the suspicion that my breaking 80 would foreshadow the phone message I've been waiting for, the one from my literary agent, the one when he says, "You can buy that writing retreat in the mountains, Ken. Hyperion, Knopf, Doubleday, and Farrar, Straus all want your book."

Maybe tomorrow I would break 80.

At my daughter Darcy's house, before dinner, while baby Nicolas napped, I read fotonovelas, juggling the little books and my Spanish-English dictionary. One of them, entitled El Enfermito (The Sick Little Boy), begins with a woman named Connie walking home, carrying a child, and shouting, "Help, help! My son is sick." A neighbor approaches and carries the boy back to Connie's house. With a shower of tears, Connie tells the man that Ismael has a horrible blood disease and the doctors can do nothing but help relieve some of his pain. After she injects the boy with painkillers, she thanks the man and he leaves.

When Horacio, Connie's husband, gets home from work, Connie explains that Ismael needs more pain medicine but that they don't have enough money. Horacio vows he'll do anything for the sake of his son, even rob a bank. But none of his friends will lend him what he needs; he has no savings account, no insurance. Horacio decides that his only option is to buy a fake gun and rob someone. He attempts to rob an old woman, but she gets away. Then he successfully robs a young woman. He goes home disheveled, holding the woman's purse. Connie assumes he's cheating on her. When he explains what he's done, Connie is appalled. With a look that could shame even an innocent, she tells him their neighbor can lend them all they need.

After some crying and arguing, Connie and Horacio go to check on Ismael. The boy has taken a turn for the worse. Horacio rushes out to buy the medicine, and when he returns, Connie is on her knees, moaning that she believes God is punishing her for her sins. She clutches her husband's knees and confesses that Ismael is actually her cousin's son, not Horacio's. Horacio smacks her around. He had loved Ismael like a son, but his name has now been disgraced.

Ismael calls for his father: he can't breathe. Connie runs to Ismael's side and yells for Horacio to come too. When Horacio finally does, he gives Ismael an injection...but Ismael dies. Horacio had injected him with a water placebo. After murdering Ismael, Horacio leaves Connie. End of story.

A Dos Equis helped me recover from that tragedy before I plunged into the next one, which features a narrator who explains that "Uriel and Luz had a very harmonious and passionate relationship. When a couple loves each other, sex is very gratifying and necessary for the body. We should nourish love so that it won't extinguish." Uriel and Luz have four kids. He works and she takes care of their home with the help of the maid, Juana. One day, Uriel loses his job and becomes distraught. He walks the streets like a drunken blind man. Meanwhile, Luz's sister Lilia runs into Luz's ex-boyfriend Ruben. When Lilia learns that Ruben is looking for a trustworthy administrator to run his law office, she tells him about the office experience Luz had before she married Uriel. Ruben tells Lilia that Luz should contact him.

Uriel spends day after day fruitlessly looking for work. He tells his wife that they have only enough money to last two more months. They make love out of obligation, thoughts of how to make life better running through their minds and into dialogue bubbles.

When Luz contacts Ruben, she gets the job instantly. Later that night she tells Uriel that she wants to give him a break, and she suggests that he stay home and take care of the kids for a while. He reluctantly consents. He will let her work. But shame, self-doubt, and jealousy torment him.

The next day, he rushes around rubbing his temples while he washes dirty diapers, cooks, and shops. At the market, Uriel runs into an old friend who questions his new status as "housewife" and warns him that any woman who works in an office is sure to cheat on her husband. Uriel can't dismiss this notion, and the more he dwells on it, the more he begins to doubt Luz's fidelity.

The next day, while Uriel is out running errands, he spots Luz in a car with Ruben. They are on their way to a meeting at another law firm, but he imagines Luz and Ruben together in bed. Later that afternoon, Luz tells her sister about Uriel's growing jealousy. Uriel is eavesdropping through the kitchen door when Lilia asks Luz if Uriel knows that Ruben was once her boyfriend. At that, Uriel grabs a butcher knife. He charges into the parlor, knocks Lilia to the ground, and slits Luz's throat. The cops take him away. In jail he finds out that Luz had actually always been faithful. End of story.

I couldn't remember enduring such vicarious misery since college, when I read King Lear and Oedipus back to back. But these fotonovelas had convinced me that powerful stories usually weave romance and tragedy. I phoned Pam.

"How's the trip?" she asked.

"Oh," I said wearily, "it was a long drive, and reading all these fotonovelas with my bonehead Spanish is a grind."

"Why are you bothering if it's so hard? I mean, what's so important about them anyway?"

When you're 18 and you tell somebody, even a girlfriend, that you're doing something for no obvious practical reason, she probably won't go sour on you. But when you're past 40, not to mention past 50, and have a small child and bills and have quit your day job in favor of writing, "I'm following my muse" can be fighting words.

"Didn't I tell you?" I said. "I'm going to write an article about them."

"Oh, good idea," she said.

I started pitching my own questions to avoid fielding any more of hers. And when I ran out of questions, I said, "Baby Nick's crying, and Darcy's making a shopping list. I'd better help out."

On Sunday I couldn't sit around reading all day because I needed to burn off the fried chicken and mashed potatoes my daughter had cooked for dinner the night before. I walked around Del Urich, one of two golf courses at Reid Park about a mile away from Darcy's house. And I might've broken 80 and soon gotten the message I'd been waiting for all these years except I couldn't putt and my drives hit too many trees.

After all the exertion, aching all over, I sat with a Dos Equis and my Spanish-English dictionary and read another fotonovela. This one featured rape, murder, adultery, bribery, prison, and doomed love and ended with a sudden death. Maybe, I thought, these domestic tragedies were the wrong kind of fotonovela to inspire a popular literary masterpiece. Maybe I needed to find some historietas with what publishers call a "high concept," such as the fate of nations at stake. Latin American Periodicals might be just the ticket.

First thing Monday, I drove up Speedway, which a national magazine once labeled "the ugliest boulevard in the country" but whose proletarian charm appeals to me: the thrift shops, used tire outlets, and taco stands; the drab, flat-roofed, single-floor buildings. From the junction of Speedway and I-10, Latin American Periodicals is a few miles north.

Bernardo Serrano, a soft-spoken man with wavy hair, welcomed me. Originally from Monterrey, Mexico, Serrano worked as a CPA before moving to the States 15 years ago. He found a job with a company called Hispanic Books Distributors that shipped books and magazines across the country. Six years ago he bought the magazine arm of the business. Now he distributes Latin American periodicals to public libraries, universities, and correctional facilities nationwide.

"We are contractors to the government," he said. "At all levels: federal, state, or even local. We have a variety of materials here. We have the most popular and well-known Spanish-language magazines for men, women, teenagers, children."

"How about fotonovelas?" I asked.

"The most popular fotonovelas that we have are like the westerns and the sentimentales. We buy these fotonovelas in Mexico City and ship them out to the border, to Nogales, which is 65 miles down. We pick them up every week, and from this small warehouse facility we ship them out nationwide."

He showed me a few of his offerings, all of them fauxtonovelas, illustrated with drawings. No photos. "Thanks," I mumbled. "But I know there used to be fotonovelas with actual photographs of actors playing the characters, instead of the drawings. Do you have any of those?"

"Okay, those you can rarely find. The old ones, most of them, are off the market."

"Are any still on the market?"

"No, years ago we used to sell those, but little by little they started disappearing."

I must've looked discouraged. He pulled a chair out for me. I felt lots older than yesterday, because I sensed that the story I had chased for 30 years, the one as dramatically rich as Les Miserables, Wuthering Heights, or The Da Vinci Code, was still out of my reach.

"Do you have any idea why they don't make the real fotonovelas anymore?" I asked.

"My best guess is the printing costs became prohibitive."

"Do photographs cost more to print than drawings?"

"They were very neat in the presentation, and they had to hire actors and professional photographers and the quality of the paper was higher.... Now you can find pornographic fotonovelas with the actors, but we don't handle those kind. They used to deal with sentimental topics, love, romances, tragic stories. The same stories we have now, but the ones we have now don't use the photographic format.

"But in the illustrated ones you can find the Joyas de Literatura, the jewels of literature. The classical stories from famous books and novels. You can find Hamlet, Don Quixote, a lot of those great books."

Bernardo agreed it was a shame the form has been left behind. "They were higher quality than what is available today," he said.

He conceded, however, that the modern pocket-sized illustrated books have their uses. "It's an interesting business we have here. Because in a way you know that you are trying to do something to better the people. The teenagers get the magazines for entertainment and all that, but we're trying also to sell National Geographic in Spanish [as well as] other interesting cultural publications. Once the people get the habit of reading, they can go to the higher-quality materials. Once the people get to the library, they can find not only reading for entertainment, but also for education."

I told Bernardo about the time I spent teaching reading at a school for boys on probation. Most of them read at about a second-grade level, and I couldn't find much to hold the interest of 15- or 16-year-old boys. The kind of material Bernardo distributed, only in English, would have helped plenty.

Bernardo agreed. "With the fotonovelas, all you have to have is a dictionary to help with the comprehension process, and almost anybody can start reading and learn the words. The pictures are there when you get stuck. We serve a lot of correctional facilities all over the nation, and I think they have more of the reading programs that use our publications than libraries or schools. And we try to serve them the most educational material that we can provide, magazines and books and all that."

As I left Bernardo and drove south on I-10, I tried to analyze my gloom, which seemed to go deeper than the common occurrence of chasing what I hoped might be a great discovery and learning it was a mirage.

I was on Speedway when the answer came. The classic fotonovelas were about common people reaching for their dreams and failing because somebody's heart went wrong. These, not high-concept blockbusters about princes and starlets, were the kind of stories I love. Like Speedway Boulevard intrigues me more than the Las Vegas Strip.

Back at Darcy's, I phoned Pam.

"You sound depressed," she said.

"Yep, and I'll tell you why. I became a fan of these fotonovelas only to learn that they don't exist anymore. People still use them to sell stuff, and as propaganda, and to con college students into writing stories for their classes. But as an art, as an expression of the human condition, they're gone.

"Okay, sure, the ones I've read are simplistic and more like plot outlines than fleshed-out stories, but the photographs give them a punch. Even when the actors make phony or gaudy expressions, when the tragedy strikes -- and it always does -- you find yourself grieving because you're looking at people, not drawings. And by doing that, you might learn to sympathize with people even if they act phony or stupid."

Pam said, "The Marxist analysis would say the populist fotonovela genre became extinct either because it wallowed in melodrama or because it failed to incite a revolution among readers steeped in a capitalist discourse. You're nostalgic because of a yearning for Freudian wish-fulfillment that is satisfied by fotonovelas as you watch characters who are driven by the unconscious and libido and are never cartoons -- we never dream animation -- but real figures on a flannel graph, suspended in real time, like a signifying participle deconstructing the stages of emotion leading to the climactic expression of Edvard Munch's screamer, always a relatable, cathartic cry of anguish -- or at other times, rapture -- using the universalist discourse of a medieval morality drama. Which is why I watch David Lynch movies. So, when are you coming home?"

"Later today," I said. "First, I need to go for a long walk in the desert." Maybe hit some golf balls along the way, I thought. Maybe break 80 and come home to find the momentous words from my agent.

"Good thing you brought your golf clubs," she said.

I didn't ask whether she had spied on me or checked in the garage to see if my clubs were missing. I just mumbled, "Yeah, well, I'll be home before bedtime."

I didn't break 80 that day. But on the way home, as I approached Gila Bend beneath a silver-flecked sky about 50 miles south of thunderheads and serious lightning, I decided that I wouldn't let the classic fotonovela die. Instead, I would make my article a plea for a popular revival, in Spanish, English, and in every human language.

The age of the fotonovela has arrived, I would argue, because anybody with an imagination can write one. They don't require a poetic gift or a novelist's grasp of craft, or a marathoner's perseverance. And because anybody can act in one. It's the perfect vehicle for would-be actors. Hold one pose, look at the photo and try again. And because anybody with a camera can shoot the photos, and anybody with a computer and printer can mass-produce them after adding the dialog. And anybody with a stapler can make the pages into a little pamphlet or chapbook. They don't require publishers or producers. Anyone can tell his or her story. And from these modest efforts a new trend might rise.

As I drove across the desert, I imagined a whole new industry of fotonovelas, with titles that would hook every level of reader. I imagined whole racks of them, in the Wal-Marts, Costcos, and Borders. I saw street vendors pushing carts laden with fotonovelas along the boardwalk at Mission Beach. I heard vendors shouting at Petco Park, "Get your Trevor Hoffman fotonovela to read while you're stuck in traffic."

Maybe, I dreamed, a whole generation will commence with fotonovelas that could curb the appetite for comics about superheroes and for reality-TV shows. Maybe people will start with fotonovelas and read their way up to Dickens, García Márquez, and Jane Austen. And I dreamed all this would begin with the San Diego Reader running a weekly fotonovela and encouraging submission from its readers.

Naturally, I decided to start with a fotonovela of my own. It would be called An Overnight Success.

Frame 1 establishes that ten years after Gene Riehl had retired early from the FBI to write novels, and five years after his wife left him because he paid more attention to his stories than to her, his first novel has finally been published.

Frame 2 is a photo of Gene talking to a bookstore clerk. Gene says, "So I drove a hundred miles to find that my books haven't arrived and you haven't advertised my signing?"

In frame 3, the clerk says to Gene, "Right. But if you brought books with you, you can sit at the table and I'll make a sign."

Frame 4 is a photo of Gene sitting at a table, pen in hand, gazing hopefully around the store. A stack of his books sits on the table next to a sign that reads, "Ex-FBI agent Gene Reel signs his new book from 1:00-3:00." A clock behind him reads 1:00.

Frame 5 introduces the love interest, a pretty Woman who stands nearby smiling seductively at Gene, who responds with a hungry look. The clock reads 1:30. The stack of books is no smaller.

By frame 6, Gene looks discouraged. The stack of books is no smaller. The clock reads 2:00.

In frame 7 the Woman passes Gene on her way to the cashier and flashes him another seductive smile. Gene points to the sign that says his appearance will end at three. The clock reads 2:20. The stack of books is no smaller.

Frame 8 shows Gene sneaking one of his books into the basket of a passing Customer.

In frame 9 the Customer is at the cash register, holding up Gene's book and saying, "I didn't buy this. That man must have thrown it into my basket."

In frame 10 the Clerk and Gene glare at each other, and in frame 11, the Clerk approaches Gene accompanied by an armed security Guard.

Frame 12 shows Gene being escorted out of the store by the Guard. "My books are in there," Gene says.

In frame 13 the Woman watches Gene while he gets interrogated by the Guard; frame 14 shows the Woman striding off with her nose in the air.

Gene snatches the Guard's pistol out of his holster in frame 15.

Frame 16 shows Gene striding into the bookstore toward the horrified Clerk.

Frame 17 is when Gene shoots the Clerk.

The last frame is a photo of a stack of Gene's books on the table in the bookstore beside a poster that says, "New York Times #1 Bestseller."