My latest piece has gone up at https://www.tcj.com/a-fig-in-winter/
It begins:

On September 6, 1956, the newspaper strip cartoonist Alex (“Rip Kirby”) Raymond was killed when the Corvette he was driving crashed into a tree. The car’s owner, Stan (“The Heart of Juliet Jones”) Drake, who had been riding shotgun, had an ear nearly torn off and a shoulder dislocated. The two had been speeding uphill when Raymond attempted to brake for a crossroad, hit the accelerator instead, and launched them airborne. Or so Dave Sim writes early in “The Strange Death of Alex Raymond,” Leonard (“On Stage”) Starr said in an interview in the October 2012 issue of Alter Ego magazine, Drake, who’d died in 1997, told him. This double hearsay explanation set Sim speculating about what “strange metaphysical undercurrents” may have been at play.