For an ordinary person the job carried a fair bit of risk, the San Fernando Valley being a semi-legitimate, semi-shady place, but Elektra wasn't worried. With her skills, dealing with a pack of hired muscle and bodyguards was child's play.
Elektra had her own room in the villa. She ditched the maid's work then and there, retreated to that room, and settled in to watch the films and screen her sales targets. Daisy had complete faith in her. The woman had cut her way through the Hand seven times in and seven times out; a handful of small smut studios were hardly going to stump her.
After all, this was a round-the-clock global advertisement, an opportunity that came once and never again. A few rounds of pitching ought to bring in at least a hundred million dollars. And that figure already accounted for how little cash these outfits kept on hand: if this dragged on too long, the intelligence services of various nations would start sniffing around.
Elektra would handle the particulars, shoulder some of the danger, and pocket thirty percent. Daisy planned to peel off twenty percent for Baldy when the time came and graciously keep the rest for herself.
Money like this was just a byproduct of saving the world. She wasn't all that fussed about it.
But Elektra did flag one thing for her: making the lineup suitable for all ages was simply impossible. Some children were too young, some of the elderly too old, and for them these films would strike no chord at all.
Daisy had to admit she had a point. The way she saw it, the World Serpent's awakening was a matter of a day or two; there was no time to go hunting down wholesome, all-ages variety shows. So, fine. Cartoons it would be.
She rang up Lorna and asked about a few of the best-selling cartoons on the market. A pang of reluctance went through her. Shouldering the risk and the infamy to advertise on someone else's behalf: what kind of saintly nonsense was that? Should she squeeze them for a fee too?
She shook her head almost at once. Shaking people down was a measure of last resort.
Her own film company could produce its own animation. Adult films carried a reputation too foul to touch; animation was another matter. Riding a tidal wave of publicity like this, she could absolutely engineer a sensation, and if she played it right, it might even grow into a real brand.
On the day she'd dubbed "Fear Day," when she held the global network in her grip, her cartoon would air slipped in among a whole heap of others. That would accomplish the promotion and, at the same time, let her drape herself in the mantle of a victim.
She didn't need anything elaborate. One animation lodged in her memory, a perennial favorite that fit the present situation perfectly.
Tom and Jerry.
A great deal of it ran on the techniques of the 1940s and '50s, simple enough to reproduce today, and the stories were genuinely funny. Daisy recalled several side-splitting episodes and quickly sketched out the plots. The original character art, though, stopped her cold.
She couldn't draw it. The handful of artists at Skye Pictures took a few passes at it on her instructions, and none of them quite matched what she had in mind.
"Uh, I was just passing through to take a look. Anything I can help with?" Handsome and easy on the eyes in a leather jacket and jeans, Captain America was very plainly not passing through. He'd come specifically looking for Daisy. Only, catching her in the thick of her flurry, he offered the explanation a touch awkwardly.
"Steven? Uh, I remember you're a decent hand at drawing? Come here, come here..." Desperate enough to clutch at any straw, Daisy didn't bother asking what Cap had come for. She simply hauled him into the company studio, thrust a few of the artists' attempts at him, and started explaining.
Cap was thoroughly lost. He'd been holed up two days in his temporary lodgings before discovering he had no money, which was what had finally driven him out to ask Daisy whether she might find him a job. On the strength of that handsome face he'd hitchhiked all the way to New York, then tracked her down using the business card she'd left behind.
He hadn't expected Daisy to stand on no ceremony whatsoever, putting him to work drawing the moment he walked in.
Back when his body had been frail, he'd loved to draw. But the battles of his later years had been brutal, and it had been a long while since he'd picked up a pencil. Still, a skill like drawing was the sort you never lost, and Cap wasn't a man who backed away from things. He pinned down exactly what Daisy wanted, studied the earlier efforts of the Skye Pictures crew, and without another word began to draw.
Sketching a cartoon cat and mouse was no great feat. But unlike the studio's artists, Steven threw himself entirely into everything he did, pouring his own feeling into it, an attitude that wasn't exactly common among today's salaried Americans, the ones forever clamoring about freedom.
The Skye Pictures artists liked to show off their technique. Steven was different. He drew with such care, such focus, thinking it through, putting real strength behind every line, the way he might face every battle of his life. Watching his profile, the artists who'd started out faintly scornful, faintly put out, fell quiet one by one.
After fifteen minutes he set down the pencil, studied it for himself, then turned and smiled at Daisy. "I don't know if it suits modern taste, but I think it came out rather fun." He handed her the sheet.
The instant Daisy saw the Tom and Jerry Captain America had drawn, she finally understood why the artists' work had never sat right with her.
It was the sense of an era. The Tom and Jerry of her memory had weathered sixty years, and yet its art style had barely shifted. Today's artists, even with ten times Captain America's drawing chops, simply could not capture that flavor: the texture of the war years and the decades that followed.
"Steven, you're a genius. Come to my office, let's talk properly."
Inside her office she finally got around to asking why he'd come, and on learning that he only wanted work, she agreed without hesitation.
"How about being a comic artist? I think your style is wonderful, and Skye Pictures could really use your talent." She said it with sincerity. Cap was a good man, and an old one besides. Did the world of today truly need him charging onto the battlefield? Probably not. Let Captain America enjoy life for a change. Let him enjoy living.
Cap hadn't looked nearly so far ahead. He simply wanted a job, to stand on his own two feet, and to sort out everything else from there. Drawing had been an accident. Maybe some people loved war, but that man was most certainly not Captain America. He loathed it. And now it seemed he might leave something behind for the world in a different way. That didn't sound half bad, did it?
He accepted on the spot. Then he proceeded to argue with Daisy the entire morning over Tom and Jerry's core values.
This was the part of Cap that made him hard to like. He was too stubborn, too rigidly principled.
From the few stories Daisy had described off the cuff, Captain America had spontaneously extracted a whole bundle of convictions: irony, antiwar sentiment, the defense of world peace.
Daisy walked out the door utterly mystified. Was there really that much depth buried in this cartoon? She'd gone a dozen meters (about forty feet) before it dawned on her that this was her own office, so why on earth was she the one leaving?
Producing animation turned out to be far easier than film. With Steven handling the original art and Daisy supplying a few plots that Cap deemed especially patriotic and high-minded, the rest of the work was parceled out in no time.
In under half an hour, Daisy watched Captain America whip her once-listless employees into a spinning frenzy. Under the sheer force of his charisma, not one of them grumbled; if anything, they seemed flattered to be ordered around.
Seeing her staff scrambling about, Daisy said nothing. They all worked for her anyway, and a man of Cap's character would never covet her ideas. As for the employees? Let one of them dare leak company secrets, and Daisy would send a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent over for a nice heart-to-heart.