‘Kavalier & Clay’ and the Great Escapism of Golden Age Comics
The novel proves that classic comics can inspire great literature.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a masterpiece. The 2000 novel by Michael Chabon dives into the early days of superhero comic books and emerges as a work of genuine literature. It even won the Pulitzer Prize.
The novel inserts its protagonists into comic book history. Joe Kavalier and Sammy Klayman, teenagers at the start, create a hit superhero on par with Superman and Batman—the Escapist.
The story tracks alongside real-world events and situations: the tremendous popularity of superheroes during World War II, their decline after the war, some of the silliness that infected their stories afterward, copyright battles, legal issues around the work-for-hire arrangements under which these popular characters were created, creators’ loss of control over their own characters, and of course Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the resulting Congressional hearings about the comic book industry. Even Citizen Kane works its way into the plot.
Throughout all of that, the characters remain the focus. Joe is a Jewish refugee from Europe and is determined to get his younger brother to America as well. He had previously received some training in stage magic, which factors into the creation of the Escapist, whose comic book adventures become an outlet for Joe to vent his righteous anger against Nazis. He even draws the Escapist punching out Hitler on a cover, stealing Captain America’s thunder in this alternate comic book history.
His cousin Sammy longs for a father figure and also struggles with being gay in the mid-20th century. The social mores of the era force Sammy to adopt his own sort of secret identity, much like the characters he creates. Later in his career, he develops a penchant for pairing adult superheroes with kid sidekicks, which—despite the insinuations from Wertham’s followers—is perfectly innocent and motivated by the emotional wounds of his own childhood.
The narrator tells us:
Dr. Frederic Wertham was an idiot; it was obvious that Batman was not intended, consciously or unconsciously, to play Robin’s corrupter: he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America.
Sammy was one of those boys who lost his father at an early age, a Robin searching for a Batman to teach him and free him from his mundane existence. He wanted to escape his lot in life.
Everything goes back to the theme of escapism—escaping traps as a stage magician, escaping Europe, escaping the Nazis, escaping poverty, escaping loneliness, escaping anger, escaping the restrictions of society, escaping death, even escaping the confines of the comic book format, which is where Citizen Kane comes in.
As Joe watches the film, the narrator says:
All the dissatisfactions [Joe] had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.
“I want us to do something like that,” he said.
Escapism fits Golden Age comics wonderfully. The books were escapist fare for kids at the end of the Great Depression and into World War II, and the characters themselves were often escaping in various ways—literally escaping from death traps as well as metaphorically escaping into secret identities. Just think of meek Clark Kent escaping into the role of powerful Superman, and then Superman escaping the public eye by concealing himself within the guise of the mild-mannered newspaper reporter.
The best Golden Age comics possess a simple elegance in their purity. Chabon captures the flavor of those earliest comics—the freewheeling imagination, the fast-paced environment, and even the preponderance of enthusiasm over craftmanship. Along the way, Chabon minds the fine details as he depicts both the creative and business sides of this fledgling industry, populating it with people who are neither saints nor devils, infusing the book with a solid reality. The way it’s described, Kavalier & Clay’s Radio Comics absolutely could have occupied newsstand space alongside Action Comics and Marvel Mystery Comics in the early 1940s.
Joe and Sammy, however, are ahead of the curve. Joe is a gifted artist whose compositions eclipse most of the competition, and Sammy simply gets superheroes in these formative years. Sammy understands what distinguishes characters like Batman from those who never caught on.
This passage offers an important lesson for anyone developing characters in any medium:
“How? is not the question. What? is not the question,” Sammy said.
“The question is why.”
“The question is why.”
“Why,” Joe repeated.
“Why is he doing it?”
“Doing what?”
“Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn.”
“To fight the crime, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that’s all any of these guys are doing. That’s as far as they ever go. They just … it’s the right thing to do, so they do it. How interesting is that?”
Sammy is correct. Colorful costumes, clever powers, and daring deeds aren’t enough. If that’s all superheroes were, we wouldn’t still be reading and watching stories about them all these decades later. We need a concrete person at the center of it all.
Sammy goes on to explain how Batman has a specific, established motivation for fighting crime, which makes him far more compelling.
The dialogue concludes:
“So, we need to figure out what is the why.”
“ ‘What is the why,’ ” Sammy agreed.
As they figure out the “why,” Kavalier & Clay pour much of themselves into the Escapist. In doing so, they craft a character who captures the imaginations of kids and even some adults.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a huge novel, too huge for any movie adaptation. Only a television or streaming miniseries could possibly do it justice. With its fully realized characters, fluid dialogue, and historical plausibility, it has the makings of an excellent show.
But there’s no need to wait for one. Read the book. Or reread if it’s been a while. This novel deserves some quality time.