WEEKLY CRISIS UPDATE 48

The Amazing Comic Chapters of Kavalier and Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a loving story about comics and their creation as written by Michael Chabon. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel deals with Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier as they create the greatest comic character of all time, The Escapist. The book is marvelously written as it shows us the two creators over many years of their lives and their many loves and achievements as well as challenges. We follow one man to war, in Antarctica, and another through a grueling test to hide his true sexuality. There is love and loss and a child is born, but in the background always looms the creation that they introduced to the comic world. I reviewed the book yesterday, so go have a look, and then check out this more detailed look

I advise everyone out there to read this book as it is stunningly amazing, but today I’ll only be discussing two chapters of true comic importance. There are two very Golden Age chapters within the book that detail the origins of the Escapist and his female companion, Luna Moth. These chapters are of interest because they are written as if we are being told about the comic, or even being read it by someone as verbose and engaging as Stan Lee. It's an experiment in style that melds the comic writing style with a pure prose work and one that I feel works exceptionally well. Look after the jump to see examples of why this bold attempt at something new is worth your attention, and don't worry, it's not really that spoilery to the book.

I discussed this book just the other day in a broader sense than I'll detail it today, but as a wizened comic editor once told me, 'You gotta write each one like it's someone's first,' so I'll try to go easy on you here.

The Escapist is a Golden Age hero, as fictionally created for us within this book. While the book deals with his creation, Chabon also gives us a brief insight into the comic itself. We are afforded two chapters that showcase the writing style of an old school comic book. This might seem strange, to have a novel ape comics, but due to the wordy nature of comics gone by this experiment works brilliantly. The first chapter to show you is the origin of The Escapist.

A Couple of Boy Geniuses – Chapter Eight

Upon first reading, and without prior warning, this chapter does stand out. Chabon is a verbose man anyway, often-times described as flowery, and he knows how to set a scene but as the curtain lifts on this chapter you feel a different mood in the air. The words hold themselves in a different manner; the image in your head becomes that much more concrete. You’re reading the novelization of a comic, and it’s damn good. Chabon uses the usual hammed up narrative text that lived in so many caption boxes of the nascent comic books but he also describes the scene, what would be the art, in a similar way.

We first get an introduction to the city in which our hero resides, here’s an example:

Call it Empire City, home of the needle-tipped Excelsior Building, tallest ever built; home of the Statue of Liberation, on her island in the middle of Empire Bay, her sword raised in defiance to the tyrants of the world; and home also of the Empire Palace Theater, whose fabled Black Curtain trembles now as, at stage right, the narrowest of fissures opens in the rich dark impasto of its velour.

I can already picture the establishing shots being drawn by a master like Jack Kirby or Joe Shuster. Chabon works hard to alter his style and put the reader into a different mindset. It’s a bold experiment, and a successful one in my eyes.

The chapter continues to show us Tom Mayflower, our fresh eyes into the scene and the boy who will become the man inside the Escapist's suit, and his large friend, commonly referred to as Big Al who is a hulk of a man but one who harkens back to a pulpy era of hero’s servants who could do it all. Alois Berg is intensely strong and can also play the violin and calculate celestial numbers. He’s the perfect fix-it man who can also serve as best friend.

Tom limps across the room, as he suffers from a similar ailment as his creator, Sam Clay, and discusses the world with Big Al and another helper, a man with a turban and brown skin. Omar is another aid, a man who can be any profession that is needed on the day, can converse in any manner of tongues, and can plant information anywhere, and with anyone, so as to greater serve their master, Mysterioso the Great. Omar’s history is unknown and his skills probably still not completely tapped.

We meet Miss Plum Blossom, the ageless Chinese seamstress, as Tom goes to his uncle’s dressing room. Everyone on the team seems tight lipped and nervous but the show must go on. Mysterioso the Great performs but due to a drastic incident during the Oriental Water Torture Trick cannot continue to go on, and as he recedes quickly to his dressing room, blood spreading from his torso, Tom is told to go on in his stead. Tom knows he cannot perform the last trick, The Coffin, with his leg so badly damaged and so Max gives Tom a key, nothing special, or so it would seem, and urges him on in costume.

Tom’s show is a success yet upon exiting the stage, without his limp, he slumps by his dying uncle’s side and is made privy to the origin tale of Mysterioso the Great. It seems that the key imbues strange powers to its owner and Tom is to now become the latest holder of the key. He is to use it for good and to help free those who cannot find liberation themselves. Big Al, Omar, and Miss Blossom will help him in this cause, and so we are handed our new hero, born in pain, released from agony, prepared to fight:

He calls Big Al, Omar, and Miss Blossom to gather around him, then raises the key high in the air and swears a sacred oath to devote himself to secretly fighting the evil forces of the Iron Chain, in Germany or wherever they raise their ugly heads, and to working for the liberation of all who toil in chains – as the Escapist.

Can’t you just see the revelatory splash page now? It’s an excellent sidenote chapter to a great novel that gives us an understanding of how the creators put pieces of themselves into the story.

The Funny Book War – Chapter Thirteen

This chapter details the origin of the sexual foil of the Escapist, Luna Moth. It comes after Kavalier meets Rosa Saks at a party and they retire to her room. Luna Moth is openly credited as being inspired by Saks and from the introduction in the previous chapter it is amusing to watch the similarities of what Kavalier noticed about her on first meeting and then infused into the character.

We begin this origin with a description of Empire City as we see her dazzling glory and then delve far below her to the scene of the action. It’s another successful showcase of establishing panels as we pass high heels, legendary alligators, bones of Algonquins, to a small cubicle titled Office 99 which is on the third subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here we meet Miss Judy Dark, a meek and mild-mannered Under-Assistant Cataloger of Decommissioned Volumes. She is a lady to whom life is clearly passing by, as witnessed from above.

Miss Dark’s existence is sad, lonely, a tale of a lost soul who drudges through each day as if it were the same, and to her they all are. Work, rain, books, and dreams. The latest exhibit at the library, The Book of Lo, is in town but she couldn’t see it through the crowd and gave up. The book details the worship of the moth goddess, Lo, by the great and ancient Cimmerian people. The library police guard smoothly offers to show it to her but she lies and says she has seen it already, an instinctual lie to shield herself from others but one she instantly regrets and stews over.

Upon returning to take up the grand offer, Miss Dark finds thieves about to steal the book, an apelike trio in stevedore sweaters and newsdealer caps, and distracts them so as to make off with the book for protection. The thieves take chase, curses streaming from their lips in mad torrents of printer’s marks and random punctuation. They catch Miss Dark and a ricocheting bullet loosens a power line from above which lands in a puddle at her feet, electricity courses through her system as she holds The Book of Lo. We see how a flash turns everything white but the black roentgen skeleton of Miss Judy Dark and thus our heroine is born in a possibly Ditko or Steranko inspired splash page:

The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix. No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of shallowtailed moth’s wings. They are a pale greenish-white and have a translucent quality; they might even, like Wonder Woman’s airplane, be visibly invisible, at once ghostly and solid. All around her, outside the column spiraling infinitely upward, reality dissolves into dream-landscapes and wild geometric prodigies. Chessboards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls, and pinwheels. Mysterious hieroglyphs stream past like sparks from a roman candle. Miss Dark, her great phantom wings steadily flapping, takes it all strangely in stride – for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.

Our new Mistress of the Dark earns her powers from an ancient Cimmerian queen and she begins her escapades as a cowled crusader for justice. The first wrong to right, rescuing the book back which gave her these magnificent powers. She foils the thieves easily as she can now imagine something to make it so. Once she’s imagined herself an intricate and revealing costume, her glasses and tied up hair a look of the past, she turns one thief into a mouse and bursts the other one into flames. With a kiss on the felled officer’s cheek she flaps off into the night, living in dark, always seeking light, the Luna Moth.

Graphic Adaptation

It’s an impressive feat to try and recreate a visual style with only words but Chabon makes it completely work. These chapters read as something entirely different from the rest of the book, though they are indicative of his power of description and love of using many commas within the one sentence to include many muttered asides. The novel is one of nostalgia and these excerpts make me feel like I’m suddenly holding an old and tattered comic in my hand, and I’m also a single digit age once more.

There are some corny elements to the origins of Tom Mayflower and Miss Judy Dark but that’s half of the allure. Chabon hasn’t been lazy and bashed something out and then used the excuse of style to warrant plot holes, he still makes everything add up, but he uses the standard tropes to his advantage. The usual twists are employed but they’re such a joy purely for the way that Chabon delivers them to us.

Conclusion

In a world that has seen hundreds of mutants created over the years, innumerable revenge tales of capes and cowls, and more old school heroes forgotten than need to be re-imagined, Chabon does a masterful job of actually creating two interesting characters for that era. Both the Escapist and Luna Moth have a resounding quality to them that you can’t help but wonder why they weren’t done before. It’s an imaginative wonder that Chabon found depths still to plumb in our mired four colour world of continuity where everything has been tried, usually.

To say that the rest of the book is as impressive is an understatement. I easily rate The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay as my favourite book of all time and am sure that many comic fans will appreciate the love and history that is folded into the 639 pages. I would discuss it more here but it really is something that you need to immerse yourself in, and hopefully these two chapter discussions will push you in that direction. It’s bold, personal, superbly written, and possibly the perfect comic novel to have ever been committed to paper.