The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist
(2004)
Michael Chabon won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a story about, of all things, comic books. Functioning as both a history of the Golden Age of the superhero and an exploration of the social, sexual and political repression of the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, Kavalier and Clay managed to blend the pulp and cheerful hyperbole of comic books with poignant human drama. The praise for the novel is well deserved: it is immensely re-readable, wonderfully structured with amazing set-pieces (a midnight rendezvous on the top floor of the Empire State Building during a 1944 blackout, an escape from Nazi Poland in the coffin of a Jewish relic, a deserted Arctic military base stalked by death) and culiminates as one of the most moving novels I have ever read.
My affection for the novel aside, I particularly enjoyed the sections in which Chabon diverged from his plot about the life and loves of comic book creators Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier to dive into the heady, surreal and allegorical stories about their brainchild, The Escapist. An orphaned boy raised by his illusionist uncle Mysterioso, Tom Mayflower suddenly inherits great power (and great responsibility, natch) when his uncle is murdered by an agent of the Iron Chain, a repressive group aimed at stealing the world's freedom.
Receiving both the story behind his uncle's amazing abilities to escape from any lock, safe or dangerous situation and aided by a golden key, Mayflower inherits his uncle's costumed identity and becomes The Escapist. He is now sworn to protect the freedom and dignity of the world. To aid him in his quest are the lovely Miss Plum Blossom, the gentle giant Big Al and the mystic Omar, all of whom were freed from their various states of bondage by Tom's uncle.
The story's saving grace is the metatextuality of Chabon's introduction and Malachi B. Cohen's Escapism 101 article, both of which insist that The Escapist was a real Golden Age character, lost and found over the years (much like the original 'detective' of Detective Comics, Siegel and Shuster creation Slam Bradley). The character's survival is presented as nothing short of miraculous, as "bad luck and good lawyers" have prevented Kavalier and Clay's creation from reaching comic book audiences for the better part of 60 years. With a wink and a nod to the fans of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon and his fellow writers do a good job of integrating events from the 2000 novel (legal battles for the character, the personal split between Joe and Sammy, Joe's breakdown and desertion) with the lost "history" of the Escapist. Like the newspaper and biography extracts in Alan Moore's The Watchmen, it is the metatextual references that keeps this collection going, enriching the adventures of the costumed heroes and the reading experience of the knowledgeable fan.
"Are You Now or Have You Ever Been", by Howard Chaykin and "Prison Break", by Kevin McCarthy and Steve Lieber, deals with the social issues of the 1950s and 1970s, among them McCarthyism and the state of America's prisons. Each story is a passable yarn totally lacking in subtly and filled with melodrama, just as stories printed in those times would have been. I can't quite blame Chabon and the other writers for their attempt to recapture all of the trends and themes unique to each decade of comic publishing: they certainly do a good job of making you feel as though you're reading an old issue of a forgotten comic. I suppose my complaint is that they just didn't push the envelope far enough. Is The Escapist a parody of these decades in comics? Is it a presentation of a new character to a contemporary audience? Or is it simply a collection of stories that tried to do too many things at once and failed?
I was really looking forward to this book, and while I was disappointed by Chabon's lack of grace and subtlety, I will probably buy the next Escapist collection in the hopes that Chabon will have discovered that the joke didn't work. Hopefully, the second trade will be dedicated to telling good, strong character stories and developing Tom Mayflower and his supporting cast into realistic people. As Batman could tell him, you're nothing in comics without a complete, believable world and good characters backing you up. Had Chabon transferred one tenth of his wonderful blend of the surreal, the silly and the sublime from Kavalier and Clay into The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, he might have had something special. As it is, this collection deserves to be forgotten in a water-stained box down in someone's basement. Maybe in another 60 years the character and his stories will seem interesting.
Writers: Michael Chabon, Jim Starlin, Kevin McCarthy and Howard Chaykin
Illustrators: Eric Wight, Kyle Baker, Steve Lieber
Colorists: Michelle Madsen, Christie Scheele, Dan Jackson, Jeff Parker
The origin story of The Escapist, "The Passing of the Golden Key" was adapted to comic form by Michael Chabon and illustrated by Eric Wright. It is the best of the six stories in the collection. Chabon pens a rather standard origin story, and as in the other tales there is a constant sense that Chabon's fingers are in too many pies. Trying to reproduce an iconic Golden Age story which echoes Superman's 1937 debut (even the cover is designed to recall Golden Age Superman), the tale is flat and the characters rather matter-of-fact in their dialogue and responses to the situation. As a Golden Age story written by the fictional team of Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, as the introduction to the comic claims, the Escapist's debut would have read as a fresh and original during the great rush in the late '30s to present as many Superman-like characters as possible. The Escapist, for one, is human and, like Batman, is vulnerable to bullets. The concept of putting an ordinary human in costume was unique in 1939, when Kavalier and Clay's character first appeared, but it reads like old hat to contemporary audiences. 
The second story in the collection, "Reckonings", features another Kavalier and Clay creation, Luna Moth. I found Luna Moth's origin story in the novel to be much more interesting than that of The Escapist: whereas Tom Mayflower and his alter-ego dealt exclusively with human bondage, Luna Moth crystallized gender roles in mid-20th century America and the role of female comic book heroes in general. Based on Rosa Saks, wife to Sam Clay and the great love of Joe Kavalier's life, Luna Moth was a dreamy, dark and elusive presence in Kavalier and Clay, flitting in and out of the novel as love and happiness eluded the central characters. The Luna Moth in the comic book version bears little to no resemblance to the novel's strange heroine. The nearly-wordless story, in which Luna makes a deal with Death to give a little girl a chance to say goodbye to her mother, lacks both emotional impact and fails to give any sense of the character. In addition, the character's design looks nothing like my mental images of the Luna Moth from the novel: she wears a blue skin-tight leotard and a belt, resembling more a lost version of Catwoman from the pre-Crisis days than the ethereal "Mistress of the Night" I'd pictured from Chabon's lyrical descriptions. 
The other stories, each representing a period from the Escapist's checkered publishing career (the self-lampooning, self-important caricature from the 1950s, the hard-boiled Neal Adams influenced detective of the 1970s, even the juvenile Power Puff Girls-styled Escapegoat) enjoy middling success, working more as parodies of similar points in the careers of other superheroes (most notably Batman) than as stories in and of themselves. "Sequestered", a loose satire of the American Justice System, reminds one of Sergio Aragones's superhero spoofs in MAD. Illustrated by Kyle Baker, the story is a cartoony romp through the trials of jury duty, in which the buffoonish, blustering escapist attempts to get himself out of performing his civic duty.
