Superman of Letters

When Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of superhero history and immigrant assimilation, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, was published in 2000, critics couldn’t help but note that it would make a great comic book. Apparently, the author was paying attention to his reviews. This month, Dark Horse Comics publishes the first issue of Michael Chabon Presents...The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, which brings to life Chabon’s fascist-bashing costumed champion in the medium for which he was made.

 

"I wanted to see if the Escapist could be a viable character outside of the protection of the novel," says Chabon, 40. "It's kind of a dare to make this work." Though the earliest issues of his series will feature the "handiwork" of his fictitious comics creators Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay (the true, human heroes of his book), it will also include new stories that pay tribute to the visual styles and dramatic tones of comics' bygone decades, from the earnestness of the 1940s to the nihilism of the 1970s. It's Chabon's homage to the 80-Page Giants published by DC Comics during his adolescence, which featured original material alongside Golden Age?era reprints in volumes that sold for 25 cents. "Those were such a bargain," Chabon says. "It was like having the entire history of comics at your fingertips." (The first issue of The Escapist, however, will set you back $8.95.)

While working simultaneously on a screenplay for Kavalier & Clay and a new book, Hatzeplatz (which explores a plan to turn Alaska into a Jewish homeland during World War II), Chabon is hoping to tap his novelist friends, including Glen David Gold, Jonathan Lethem, and Dave Eggers, to write the Escapist's future exploits. "When you absorb vast quantities of comics over a long period of time, it just becomes part of the structure of your imagination," says Chabon. "There was such a stigma attached to comics that you had to deal with them ironically if you invoked them at all. But these days, the stigma has lessened quite a bit. We're encouraged to come out of the closet."