The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  The boy blinked as if doubting his own reply or the wisdom of making it. His breathing came wheezy through congested nostrils.

  “I’m an escape artist,” the boy said at last, making it sound dull, offhand, disappointing, the way he might have said “I have a shellfish allergy.”

  “That so?” Sam felt his heart squeeze at the sound of the words “escape artist,” the deviated-septum rasp, the eyes that sought to slip free of the enforced deadpan manner of a ten-year-old boy. “Good with locks?”

  The kid shrugged. “Yours was easy.” He refolded the pick blade into his knife and returned it to the pocket of his jeans. “I’m actually not really all that good.”

  In his semi-blindness, it took a moment for Sam to realize that the boy was crying softly and had been crying possibly for a long time before he took it upon himself to rescue the old guy in the closet.

  “Hmm,” Sam said. “So what are you doing wandering around the hotel, freeing strange geezers from broom closets? Where are your mother and father?”

  The kid shrugged. “I’m supposed to be downstairs. At the league award lunch.”

  “You like baseball?”

  Another shrug.

  “I take it they aren’t handing you any awards.”

  The boy reached into his pocket again and took out a crumpled wad of paper. He handed it wordlessly to Sammy with an expression of utter disdain for the paper and its contents.

  Sammy unfolded and smoothed it out and then pressed it right up to his right eye, the stronger, to read it. “ ‘Nice Try Citation.’ ”

  The boy leaned back against the far wall of the corridor and sank slowly to the ground until his forehead touched his knees.

  “Long season?” Sammy said after a moment.

  “Ninth place,” the boy said, his voice muffled and small. “Out of nine. Also I have personal problems I don’t care to discuss.”

  Sam considered pressing but decided that when you were ten, all your problems were more or less personal. “Look at me,” he said. “I just peed into a bucket.”

  This seemed to make the boy feel better about himself.

  “Listen. I don’t know what the trouble is. I’m going to, uh, respect your privacy there. But I appreciate your helping me. I’d like to pay you back.” He reached into the hip pocket of his suit pants and then remembered that his wallet was in the breast pocket of his jacket, hanging over the back of the chair in Artist’s Alley. “Only I’m, uh, busted.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “So I guess I need to find somebody else who’s stuck in a jam and do the same for them like you did for me. Creed of the League of the Golden Key.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget about it. What’s your name?”

  “Hey, dickhead!” A gang of boys wearing red Lions jerseys and red caps tumbled into the hallway from the elevator and stood. “Vaughan!” The voice, cracking with mockery or pubescence, seemed to be issuing from the largest among them. “What the hell are you doing up here? Coach is looking everywhere for you! He called your mommy, dickhead!”

  “You best get your ass downstairs!”

  “Hey, Vaughan, who’s the old guy?”

  Sammy took a step toward the boy, Vaughan, and lowered his voice. “They want to give you another certificate?”

  “A trophy. But I saw mine. The head was missing. I guess maybe somebody, well. Broke it off. When I saw that, that’s when I left.”

  “Come on, Vaughan!”

  “Hey,” Sam told the boys, flexing his Popeye arms and putting as much Brooklyn into his voice as he could muster. It was still a decent amount. “Whyn’t you punks get the hell out of here and leave the kid alone?”

  The red mass hung a moment in the hallway, wavering like the afterimage of a bright flash on his damaged retinas. A moment later it was gone.

  “You ever read comic books?” Sam asked the boy.

  “Not really. Like Archies?”

  “Archies. No, well, Archie has his place. But—”

  Sam reached a hand down and offered to help the boy to his feet. “Look, they got a big show going on downstairs. Cuyahoga Ballroom. A comics show. You might like it. Take Doctor Strange. He’s a magician. You’d like that one, I bet.”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “You ought to check it out.” He pulled the boy up and stepped away from him.

  “I’d better get back to the banquet,” the boy said.

  “Suit yourself,” Sam said. “ ‘Suit yourself,’ that’s good advice. I wish somebody’d given it to me when I was your age.”

  They went to the elevator, and the boy pressed the button. They said nothing when it arrived and the doors opened, and nothing until they were halfway down.

  “ ‘Suit yourself,’ ” the boy repeated. “I let you out of a dark, stinky closet where you could of died, you give me some cheap advice.”

  Sam looked at the boy and saw that sly light in the boy’s eyes again. “Ten-year-olds,” he said as he got out of the elevator at the mezzanine. “God help me.” The doors started to close on the boy and Sam’s chance to redeem himself and repay his debt of freedom. He stuck his arm in and stopped them from closing. “Check out the show,” he said. “That’s my advice to you. Cheap as it may be.”

  “I can’t,” the boy said. “I really don’t think I can. But, uh, thanks.”

  “Vaughan. What’s the rest of it?”

  “Brian K. Vaughan.” It came out in a rush, a single word, almost a single syllable.

  “Uh-huh. What’s the K for?”

  “Kellar.”

  “Like the magician. Self-decapitation, right? Harry Kellar. That the guy?”

  Brian K. Vaughan looked shocked, almost put out, as if his middle initial represented a grave and powerful mystery of which he had hitherto believed himself the sole initiate. “Yeah,” he said wonderingly.

  Sam stepped back from the doors and drew back his hand with a Harry Kellar flourish, and the door slid shut on Brian K. Vaughan, who, having called home from a pay phone in the lobby, received permission to stay after the league banquet and attend the remainder of the Saturday session of ErieCon ’86, where he purchased a copy of Strange Tales number 146 (featuring Baron Mordo, Dormammu, and the Ancient One) in Very Good condition, thus altering the entire course of his future life, not to mention the lives of those of us who are fortunate enough to know and appreciate the comic book genius so wildly and thoroughly on display (along with the estimable talents of Steve Rolston, Jason Alexander, Philip Bond, and Eduardo Barreto) in the pages that follow.

  He and Sam Clay never saw or spoke to each other again.

  FIFTY DOLLARS TAKES IT HOME

  What follows is an unsigned item originally published in

  “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 17, 1988.

  A FRIEND IN PITTSBURGH WRITES:

  Last week, at IronCon, a convention of comic book dealers and fans held annually at the Hotel Duquesne, I screwed up my courage and went over to the Kavalier & Clay booth. At comics shows in the past, I had admired the elegant, comely Mrs. Kavalier from afar, and at panel discussions I had sat in large groups of fellow devotees worshipping her first husband, Mr. Sam Clay, from an even greater distance, while he discoursed, with evident relish and some heat, on his own pivotal role in the history of comic books, but this was the first time I could remember seeing them with their own booth. They sat not quite side by side on two folding chairs, with Mrs. Kavalier a little bit forward of Mr. Clay as if to screen him, and he sheltering, so to speak, in her lee. Mr. Clay had a large sheet of bristol board clamped in one hand, with the bottom edge balanced on the tops of his slender legs. He was sketching something with a large black Sharpie marker and frowning at it. He had looked his age, which is sixty-seven, for as long as I could remember, as he did this time, I thought, only more so. He still has most of his wavy dark hair, though it has thinned some at the back, and he favors enormous black spectacles of the Swifty Lazar variety. In fact, he, George Burns, and Mr. L
azar may be the only three men in America who wear glasses quite so big and round.

  My welcome was unexpectedly warm.

  “How are you, darling?” said Mrs. Rosa Kavalier, better known to aficionados of comic book romance (sadly few) as Rose Saxon. In the fifties and well into the early sixties, she had taken the conventions and verities of the romance genre and stretched them to the breaking point. At first her hallmark was a stylized realism, but toward the end, before the bottom fell out of love comics and her career was cut short by arthritis, things took a baroque turn. I had always cherished a story she did for Charlton Comics’ Love Diary, told entirely—and not without realism—from the point of view of a lovelorn she-gorilla in the Bronx Zoo, pining away for a dashing, chiseled keeper who will not give her the time of day.

  Mrs. Kavalier reached out to take my hand and then held on to it, giving it an occasional shake to punctuate some point she was trying to make, for the rest of my visit. “You can’t talk to Sam,” she said. “He’s drawing. He can’t draw and talk at the same time.”

  “I can’t do anything and talk at the same time,” Mr. Clay said, though I noticed as he said this that he went on with his drawing.

  “How do you like it?” Mrs. Kavalier said when I asked her about the whole idea of a Kavalier & Clay booth. “What can I tell you, dear, he saw some of the other old farts like him starting to show up with booths at these things, and he wanted one, too.”

  “I saw them making a lot of money, is what I saw,” said Mr. Clay, giving his sketch a baleful look. “Guys who could never draw any better than me, and believe me, if you buy one of my pieces, young man, the quality of the drawing is not guaranteed.”

  “Far from it,” said his ex-wife, who last year married Mr. Joe Kavalier, one of the four or five greatest artists in the history of comic books, after having lived with him without benefit of clergy, as she put it, since 1954. At the time of the wedding, Mr. Kavalier was dying of cancer.

  “Far from it,” Mr. Clay agreed.

  In its day of glory Mr. Clay was the writing half, with Joe Kavalier, of the team of Kavalier & Clay. He and his late partner were the creators of the Escapist, a costumed crimefighter of the 1940s whose sales at one time rivaled those of such titans as Superman, Batman, and the great captains, America and Marvel. In the early forties, the combination of Mr. Kavalier’s stylish pyrotechnics with layout and composition and Mr. Clay’s sometimes didactic, sometimes touching, always clever scripts was the envy of their peers.

  A young man came up behind him, put a hand on his shoulder, and asked him how he was doing.

  “Fine, I’m fine,” Mr. Clay said. “Maybe you could bring me one of those kielbasas.”

  The young man went off to get lunch. I had noticed that there were always one or two young men nearby, would-be artists or writers or dedicated scholars of Kavalier & Clay, escorting Mr. Clay to conventions, helping him around his house in Florida, assisting in his business dealings, driving him where he needed to go. Mr. Clay is the sort of man who attracts disciples. He is well known in the business not only for having given a first break to artists and writers who later went on to become tops in the field, but also for having supplied them with money and material support, creating, first in Los Angeles and later, at his home in Coconut Creek, a kind of combination credit union, flophouse, and soup kitchen for the starving young funny-book men of tomorrow. One of these was the younger of Mrs. Kavalier’s two sons, Ethan, himself a comics illustrator who has had success working both for DC and for Marvel Comics. Her son by Mr. Clay, Thomas, is a professional stage magician who works under the name of Cavalieri and has performed frequently on Johnny Carson’s show.

  Finally I found the nerve to ask to see what Mr. Clay had been drawing all this time. He took another second to squint at the board, then turned it to me. It was a drawing of the Houdiniesque Escapist, executed in a competent if somewhat dated style, brandishing the magical golden key from which his powers derive. Mr. Clay had portrayed him as a smiling, big-muscled hero with a cartoonishly cleft chin.

  “Fifty dollars takes it home,” Mrs. Kavalier said. “And two for ninety.”

  Here the conversation turned to the subject of money. Mr. Clay has led a satisfying life, he says, but is rankled by the thought of the money other people have made over the years from the fruit of his fervid imagination. Empire Comics, the original publisher of the Escapist, made a considerable sum that Mr. Clay perhaps overestimates as “several hundred million” off the character, before an infringement lawsuit brought by Superman’s publishers forced the tights-clad super-escape-artist out of existence. After a tangled history in which Joe Kavalier was involved, the assets of Empire came eventually to none other than DC Comics itself, which revived the character of the Escapist during the “nostalgia craze” of the early seventies (“which turned out,” as Mrs. Kavalier points out, “to be more or less of a permanent thing”). The Escapist has since been revived and mothballed a number of times, and as of this writing appears in his own monthly title, featuring all-new, considerably more violent adventures. Though Mr. Clay has gone to court many times over the years, with and without his late partner, he has yet to profit from any of these uses of the character which he and Mr. Kavalier sold for “about a hundred bucks” to Sheldon Anapol, the publisher of Empire Comics, in 1939, when they were aged nineteen and twenty, respectively.

  “We were dummies,” he told me. “Every jury I’ve ever met seems to agree on that.”

  And so, now that Kavalier has gone, Mr. Clay and his ex-wife travel around the country, following the calendar of comics shows and conventions, making personal appearances that are, in Mr. Clay’s words, “somewhat less lucrative than driving a bus.” And, lately, renting display booths in which they offer for sale not only the original drawings by Mr. Clay, whose first youthful ambition was to be a comics artist (“for the newspapers, mind you, comic books were nothing then”), but also his somewhat studied re-creations of classic Joe Kavalier covers, as well as a sad stream of original artwork, memorabilia, old scripts, and other items fed from the personal library and trove of comics-related objects that Mr. Clay and Mrs. Kavalier have each amassed over the years. The writer who was famous in his time for hammering out two hundred pages of scripts in a weekend says he has been offered five hundred dollars for one of his old typewriters, but “I burned out every damn typewriter I ever used.” Mr. Clay also does occasional work for his godson Ethan Kavalier, who is co-owner, with a group of five other artists, of his own independent company, Nuthouse Comics.

  “He’s no dummy,” said Mr. Clay.

  THE AMAZING ADVENTURES

  OF KAVALIER & CLAY

  Michael Chabon

  A Reader’s Guide

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. As he says goodbye to his family in Prague near the beginning of the book, Joe reminds himself to be “jaunty,” because “in my panache is their hope of salvation” (this page). How do Joe and Sammy use jauntiness, panache, and humor to create hope for themselves in a very dark time? How do things like comic books offer hope to them, in a time when Joe’s family is in grave danger, and offer hope to everyone, in a time when the world is spinning out of control?

  2. “Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation” (this page). When Joe and Sammy decide to start their own comic book, together they talk their hero, the Escapist, into existence, following in the footsteps of rabbis before them. (“Every golem in the history of the world … was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring.”) Why do you think the verbalizing and hashing-out of the Escapist’s story is so vital to its existence? Why does it need to be spoken out loud, as a communal activity, rather than just written by a solitary person?

  3. As Sammy is questioning and vocalizing a plot idea, the phrase “comic book catechism” is used (this page). How are these early verbal exchanges about the Escapist and other comic book characters a kind of religious exercise, a keeping of the faith, a s
piritual suspension of disbelief?

  4. Sammy and Joe remind each other of missing family members: Sammy’s gesticulations “reminded Joe almost painfully of Thomas” (this page), and as Sammy watches Joe jump up to the fire escape, his “stirring of passion” for Joe “was inevitably shadowed, or fed, or entwined by the memory of his father” (this page). In many ways, they fill in gaps in each other’s lives; they complement and complete each other. How does this symmetry between them manifest itself throughout the book? What missing ingredients do you think are supplied by the other person in their partnership? What are their checks and balances?

  5. When Joe draws his first comic book cover, featuring the Escapist punching Hitler, he realizes that the pleasure he got from creating this visual, brutal beating “was intense and durable and strangely redemptive” (this page). How does Joe manage to obtain such real satisfaction from a symbolic, imagined victory? Why does fighting the Nazis in the pages of his comic books become so important to his sanity?

  6. How do the style and language of comic books infect the language of the characters themselves in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay? Do you think any of the characters in this novel perceive themselves as comic book heroes of sorts, and if so, how does that self-perception affect their actions? What does it spur them to do? How do comic book stories affect the imaginations and beliefs of the people in this book?

  7. When he moves to New York City, Joe struggles with guilt over his newly found freedom and success while his family remains stuck in Prague. And so he feels “that he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind” (this page). Although Joe has physically escaped Nazi-dominated Europe, in what ways is he trapped, un-escaped, and still not free? How do his conflict and guilt illuminate the difficulty of true, complete “escape” in this novel, for him and for all of the characters?