The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

This 636 page novel by Michael Chabon is an epic tale of two teenage boys, Samuel Klayman and Josef Kavalier, who create a comic book superhero, The Escapist. It is very clear from the beginning that Chabon has done his research. The story of The Escapist’s creation very closely resembles that of Superman’s (as told by Tom De Haven in Our Hero). Two Jewish boys with something to prove create a superhero in the hopes of making a fortune and naively sign away their rights to the character. Chabon takes the outline of Siegel and Schuster’s story and enhances it with a rich and compelling plot that gives the reader a better sense of the development of the comic book industry and the people in it than any collection of historical facts. This book explores the superhero genre by means of the real people behind it; their desires, anxieties and preoccupations become the fuel for this costumed crusader. The Escapist is wish fulfillment at its best.

Sammy Clay (he changed his name to something “less Jewish”) is the driving force behind The Escapist. When he discovers that his cousin Joe is an artist he sees his chance to impress his boss, Sheldon Anapol, and get a better job than writing advertisements for novelty items. Superman has just become a raging success, and Sammy thinks that he and Joe can create the next big superhero. Growing up in Brooklyn, Sammy was struck with polio which left him physically weak. He was also abandoned by his father; a circus strongman nicknamed The Mighty Molecule. For Sammy, The Escapist is a way of overcompensating for his physicality and of creating a father-figure whom he can idolize. Creating the comic provides an escape (pun intended) from the poverty and depression of his family life. He has the gift of an overactive imagination, which allows him to write tons of stories, issue after issue. Later in life he becomes disillusioned with the industry but no matter how hard he tries, he cannot make the transition to becoming “a real writer.”

Joe Kavalier, Sammy’s artist cousin, is perhaps the most complex and interesting character in the novel. He arrives in Brooklyn after a long and arduous journey in which he was snuck out of Prague in the coffin of a golem (a creature of Jewish folklore; generally made of clay and believed to come alive with the carving of a word on its forehead). The Escapist is based on his experiences as an apprentice to a renowned escape artist, Bernard Kornblum, from whom he learned the tricks of the trade. It is important to Joe that the character be involved in the struggle against Hitler and the Nazis, and as such The Escapist’s motivation is the need “to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic” (133). With his golden key, The Escapist (a.k.a. Tom Mayflower) frees people from the evil organization known as the Iron Chain. As a result, The Escapist is fighting Nazis before WWII has even started, which makes a lot of people nervous. For Joe, The Escapist is a way of venting his anger at the people who are oppressing his Jewish family back in Prague. When fighting fictional battles ceases to be enough, Joe takes to assaulting random Germans he encounters around New York, one of whom later tried to blow him up. After his brother, the last surviving member of his family, dies in a submarine attack on a refugee boat Joe enlists in the U.S. army in a misguided attempt to destroy the Nazi regime.

As I mentioned previously, the co-creators of The Escapist are cheated of their full pay-out by their naïve eagerness to have their comic books published. That’s not to say that they were poor, by the standards of the 1930s and 40s they did quite well for themselves. Once The Escapist became popular, the character was developed into a radio show, and eventually into a TV series (much like Superman). The hero was portrayed in both mediums by Tracy Bacon, an attractive, charismatic man who sparks a tentative relationship with Sammy. Chabon deals sensitively with Sammy’s exploration of his sexuality, which is a driving force in Sammy’s life. He rejects Bacon’s invitation to move with him to California after a horrific sexual experience leaves him ashamed and disgusted with himself. During the Senate hearings that follow the publication of Wertham’s book (Seduction of the Innocent) he is “outed” on national television after the portrayal of superhero/sidekick relationships in his comics is questioned. This experience leads him to accept the parts of himself which he had suppressed (in an act at self-denial he had married Joe’s sweetheart after his cousin joined the army and raised their kid as his own). Over the years The Escapist is written and drawn by a number of different people, and like Superman, the character is quite different in each person’s interpretation. Even under Sammy and Joe’s direction, the stories and art change based on influences from their lives; seeing Citizen Kane was a particularly profound experience for them in terms of aesthetics and storytelling. These are just a few examples of how Chabon weaves historical fact with the lives of his fictional characters.

The idea of the golem is an important one to the story, since that’s essentially what The Escapist is for Sammy and Joe. They pour all of their frustrations and longings into him and he fights their battles for them. In this way The Escapist is also their means of escape, of detaching from the uncomfortable reality of their powerlessness. As Joe discovers when he finally kills a German soldier, reality is not that simple. He thought that the act would be cathartic for him, but instead he is filled only with revulsion. For most of his adult life Sammy longs to escape from the comics industry and pursue his writing dreams, and yet it’s not until the end of the novel that he finally runs away to California, as he had planned many years prior. By the end of the novel, both Joe and Sammy have escaped the things that have tormented them throughout their lives (guilt and cowardice, respectively). That is the power of The Escapist.

Chabon’s writing is lush and his characters so well developed that they could walk right off the page. The chapters that provide the origin stories of Joe and Sammy’s leading characters, The Escapist and Luna Moth, are perhaps the best segments of the book. And then there are the tales with the tale, like the story of how Joe saved Salvador Dali from drowning inside an undersea diver’s suit in the middle of a living room in Greenwich Village. It’s elements like this that really make the novel. Although the novel is dense and sometimes the plot falters under the massive force of Chabon’s vision, I would definitely recommend this novel for anyone interested in learning about the Golden Age of comics without cracking open a history book.