Book review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

digresssmlOriginally published December 1, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1411

Toward the end of the 1930s, two young men teamed up to produce a comic book hero. They then sold all the rights to the character to a publisher for what seemed, to the young men, like a huge sum. The character then went on to make the publishers millions and millions of dollars, of which the character’s creators saw precious little. Meantime the character himself spent some time fighting Nazis, branched out to star in radio and in movie serials, and then, post war, had his adventures degenerate into silliness, while his original creators struggled to find themselves.

I am of course referring to Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sam Clay (born Clayman), contemporaries of such luminaries as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, and Stan Lee. Kavalier and Clay, creators of the famed hero of the Golden Age, the Escapist. What’s that, you say? Never heard of the Escapist? Perhaps Luna Moth, then, a.k.a. the kinky “Mistress of the Night” whose collected adventures (The Weird Worlds of Luna Moth) became a head-shop bestseller when published by Nostalgia Press in 1970?

Don’t be too distressed if this famed creative duo, these titans of the industry, somehow managed to slip past you. Because, sadly enough, they exist only between the covers of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a recently published novel by Michael Chabon (Random House, $26.95.) For any reader, it is a richly textured slice of history. For a comic fan, it has depths and parallels that any long-time reader or follower of the industry will appreciate. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that any adult fancier of comics who does not have this book on his shelf is doing himself a great disservice.

Although the characters share billing, it is Joe Kavalier (no relation, so far as I know, to DC editor Joey Cavalieri… although I suppose you can never be too sure of such things) who is the mover and shaker of the novel. The catalyst, the one who drives the plot, setting things into motion when he manages to smuggle himself out of an increasingly Nazi-controlled Poland by hiding within—get this—a coffin-like box containing the Golem, the mythic constructed creature created to be the defender of the ghetto. The existence of the Golem is the one true flight of fancy in the book, and at first its presence is something of an oddity in a novel grounded not only in reality, but in real people and places.

Joe is a trained escape artist, you see, and manages to hie himself all the way to the United States, where he seeks to find a way (i.e., earn enough money) to bring the rest of his family over from an environment that is becoming more and more anti-Jew. Hooking up with his cousin, Sammy Clayman (who has shortened his name to Clay) Kavalier displays a talent for art that suggests possibilities to Sammy: He and his cousin Joe will cash in on the superhero comic craze that was sparked by the advent of Superman.

Just as the omnipotent (for that time, at any rate) Superman was a wish-fulfillment for any teenage boy who ever, at any time in his life, felt powerless (which would, of course, be all of them), the Escapist becomes the incarnation of what Kavalier and Clay both desire the most. For Kavalier, he is a symbol of why he’s doing comics in the first place: To help his family escape from Hitler’s clutches. But Clay likewise desires to escape: From the oppressive home life inhabited by his endlessly nagging mother and increasingly senile grandmother, from the dead end job he inhabits, and from the crushing loneliness that pervades his life.

When the lovely and enticing artist and aspiring Bohemian, Rosa Saks, enters their life, she winds up being pulled inexorably into their world—first figuratively, as she becomes the basis for the ultra sexy Luna Moth, and then literally as the two men war for her affections, but in very different ways and for very different purposes.

Kavalier not only occupies the majority of the story’s action, but it is also in him that author Chabon invests much of the research that he did in preparing the book. Kavalier is literally a one-man band of comic book artists. He is trained as a magician and escape artist… a nod not only to the superhero roots of pulps (in which it is said that magician Walter Gibson fictionalized his good friend Harry Houdini as the Shadow) but to escape aficionado Jim Steranko who purportedly served as the basis for Jack Kirby’s creation, Mister Miracle. And it is indeed Kirby who serves as the spiritual godfather for Kavalier (Chabon in his author’s note acknowledges “the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I’ve written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics.”) Kavalier’s art style starts out as “a little static and overly pretty,” but in short order develops a reputation for fight scenes, in particular, that are “wild, frenetic, violent, extreme.” In short, pure Kirby. Yet Kavalier then goes on to encompass the good girl (or, if you will, bad girl) art of the period when he designs Luna Moth, who is ostensibly described by Jules Feiffer as “the first sex object created expressly for consumption by little boys.”

But that’s not enough. After seeing Citizen Kane, Kavalier is inspired to reinvent himself as an artist, “chopping up the elements of narrative, mixing and isolating odd points of view,” and crafting visuals with “the integration of narrative and picture by means of artfully disarranged dislocated panels that stretched, shrank, opened into circles, spread across two full pages, marched diagonally toward one corner of a page, unreeled themselves like the frames of a film.” He incorporates the name of his lead character, a la the Spirit, into the splash page of the story, transforming the letters variously “into a row of houses, now into a stairway, into… marionettes, …spidery bloodstains… the long shadows of haunted and devastating women.” Basically, Kavalier becomes Will Eisner.

Kavalier helps us bridge the entirety of the Golden Age of comics, taking us through to the germination of the notions which will result in Marvel Comics (and Stan Lee himself, among others, has a cameo.) Every major beat of the Golden Age is there, from National Periodicals threatening legal action against the Escapist for alleged copyright infringement, to the even greater threat of Frederic Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent.

As for Clay, he’s the idea man, the driving creative force in terms of stories, concepts, characterizations. Again aptly named, Clay molds and shapes the stories, not only for himself, but for other creators in the book as well. There is a nice, deft commentary on the cluelessness of executives at one point, as Clay presents an assortment of heroes to his publishers as potential characters in their stable… and the suits select as their favorite the one hero whom Clay did not have an opportunity to work on: Radio Wave, who transmits himself through air waves and emerges from the grill of a Philco to nail the bad guys (and whom Clay correctly realizes would be thwarted by the simple expedient of the bad guys shutting off their radios.)

Adventures reminds us of what superheroes were at the beginning: Four-color icons who wanted to fight for the public good, to make the world a better place and rid it of evil (usually incarnated as Hitler). This as opposed to nowadays, when costumed adventurers are all too often self-centered, self-obsessed, and too darkly cynical to be thought of as “heroes” of any kind, much less super ones.

But Adventures goes beyond that. For Kavalier’s association with the Golem is no more coincidental than is his partner bearing the last name of “Clay.” Adventures, set against the backdrop of comics, serves also as a metaphor for Jews struggling to maintain their own identity in a society that disdains them, and for which many Jews feel that they must either hide their own true nature(behind disguises and fake names) or reform themselves, like clay, taking the risk that they will change beyond recognition. Over the course of the book, Clay literally remolds himself, tries to make himself something that he’s not, in every way possible. Kavalier likewise loses himself, loses his focus, as his passion and pure fury for the plight of the Jews slowly dissipates while a comfortable American lifestyle threatens to strip him of his identity. Even superheroes themselves are held up as metaphors for Judaism, as Clay contends, “…they’re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.” Jewishness as Secret Identity. What a concept.

As a further amusement to comic book fans, the book is filled with footnotes, providing “information” ranging from how much one of Kavalier and Clay’s comics fetched at a Sotheby’s auction to an anecdote about Roy Lichtenstein. It’s done just straight-facedly enough to add an air of reality to the aptly named “amazing” proceedings.

Ultimately Chabon’s work is a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit, and of the lengths to which people will go in order to act on behalf of others. It’s a marvelous novel.

And it left me wishing I could read the adventures of the Escapist. Or even better, Luna Moth.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

4 comments on “Book review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

  1. “And it left me wishing I could read the adventures of the Escapist. Or even better, Luna Moth.”

    Or even better than that, a movie version.

    Stoopid Hollywood execs can never make anything easy.

    1. Just to add; those stories are written by sum of comics top writers like Brian K. Vaughan, Will Eisner, Marv Wolfman, Howard Chaykin to name a few and are in fact eggcellent.

      And yes Luna Moth has quite a few stories as well.

  2. There’s a quiz going around Facebook about matching novels with their authors… I beat a friend on it yesterday because the very last one? Was “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”

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