Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  As Kavalier and Tommy leave Spiegelman’s, Kavalier buys Tommy a copy of Escapist Adventures #54. By this point, however, Kavalier and Clay have not worked on the Escapist comix for years, nor are they in any position to determine who does work on those comix. Instead, like so many other creators from the golden age of comix, Kavalier and Clay give up their rights to the Escapist and their other creations before they are even published, selling them to the company that becomes Empire Comics, a company built on their creative labor. The creators Empire hires to continue the Escapist comix after Kavalier and Clay, however, give no evidence of attempting to aim higher than the clichéd conventions of the genre. Instead, the cover of Escapist Adventures #54 displays an image in which, we read:

  The Escapist, blindfolded and bound to a thick post with his hands behind his back, faced a grim-visaged firing squad. The signal to fire was about to be given by, of all people, Tom Mayflower, leaning on his crutch, one arm raised high, his face diabolical and crazed. “HOW CAN THIS BE?” the Escapist was crying out in an agonized, jagged word balloon. “I’M ABOUT TO BE EXECUTED BY MY OWN ALTER EGO!!!” (507–8)

  The Escapist’s plight is typical of 1950s comix covers, which often presented purposefully lurid scenarios that the stories within would resort to trickery to get out of, thereby rendering the cover a false advertisement. As the narration notes, Tommy “knew perfectly well that, in the end, when you read the story the situation on the cover would turn out to be a dream, a misunderstanding, an exaggeration, or even an outright lie” (508). As such, this episode refigures in more explicitly jaded terms the comment, at the beginning of Kavalier and Clay’s partnership, that “the comic book cover, in those early days, was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up” (74). This description of the cover as “a dream-movie” reminds us that movies, like comix, are not only a co-mixture of word and image but also the products of that “strange, illicit union of art and commerce.” The Escapist’s pending execution by his own alter ego, in this light, suggests the dichotomy between the competing elements that go into comix, with one-half of the form rising up to kill the other, as commercial concerns squash artistic integrity. Another example of this tension comes when Kavalier and Clay attend a rehearsal for the Escapist radio program spun off from their comix, titled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist (297): “On the whole, Sammy found it a depressing couple of hours. It was his first experience, though by no means his last, with having one of his creations appropriated and made to serve the purposes of another writer, and it upset him to such a degree that he was ashamed” (301). Kavalier and Clay’s fate as creators sidelined by the commercial demands of the comix industry thereby parallels that of their hero Orson Welles, similarly shunned by Hollywood, that land of dreams and movies that lies at the end of the American frontier, the end of the American Dream.

  Clearly, Chabon’s novel appreciates the dilemma faced by comix creators who sign the rights to their work over to a publisher and see their creations fall into the hands of other creators. In that context, while it may be unsurprising that Chabon’s love of comix would lead him to work in the medium, the particular mode of Chabon’s most prominent comix work stands as at least a little ironic. After the success of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon struck up a partnership with Dark Horse Comics to publish Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, a comix series that, tellingly, shares its title with the radio program that upsets Clay so much. This quarterly anthology, which debuted in 2004, ultimately comprised eight issues of stories from the world of Kavalier and Clay’s comix, stories featuring the Escapist and related characters done in pastiches of different comix genres and periods spanning comix history from the golden age to the present. Of the comix stories and text-only essays that fill the anthology’s eight issues, Chabon apparently wrote only five: a text-only introduction to the first issue; that issue’s first story, “The Passing of the Key,” illustrated by Eric Wight, which presents the Escapist’s origin story in terms drawn more or less straight from the novel’s presentation of that story (Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 123–34); a two-part text-only essay titled “Escapism 101” that appeared in the first and second issues under the anagrammatic pseudonym Malachi B. Cohen; and the story “Arms and the Man I Sing,” illustrated by Eduardo Barreto and featuring the character Mr. Machine Gun, which takes up the whole of issue #7.

  In this anthology, we see Chabon in an analogous situation to Kavalier and Clay, insofar as he turns his creations over to other creators. That parallel notwithstanding, Chabon did not sign the rights to the Escapist and his other characters over to Dark Horse, so he presumably retained the final word over how the various creators who worked on the anthology portrayed those characters. Moreover, the creators enlisted to work on the anthology are hardly the hacks Empire Comics appears to have hired to continue the Escapist comix in Chabon’s novel. The anthology’s contributors include nominees and winners of any number of comix industry awards. Indeed, the anthology won the 2005 Harvey Award for Best New Series, shared the 2005 Harvey for Best Anthology, and won the 2005 Eisner Award for Best Anthology. Will Eisner himself, for whom the Eisner Awards are named, wrote and illustrated a story for issue #6 of the anthology in which the Escapist meets Eisner’s iconic character the Spirit, a story that proved to be Eisner’s last work. The anthology was even successful enough to spin off a six-issue miniseries, The Escapists, which debuted in 2006. This series, set in the world of Chabon’s novel—but, like the vast majority of the anthology’s stories, not written by Chabon—tells the story of a group of contemporary independent comix creators who publish their own version of the Escapist after purchasing the rights to the character from the corporation that most recently owned those rights. As such, The Escapists reflexively dramatizes the premise of the anthology that gave birth to it: other creators working on characters created by Chabon . . . or Kavalier and Clay, as the case may be.

  Hillary Chute reads the comix that spin out of Chabon’s novel as evidence that “Kavalier & Clay has become a far-reaching commercial enterprise” (281). The fact that low sales of the anthology apparently led to its premature cancellation, as editor Diana Schutz implies in comments published in the letter columns of the second and third issues of The Escapists, would tend to argue against reading the series too strongly in terms of the commercial side of comix, however. Focusing instead on the artistic side of the “strange, illicit union” raises the question of what Chabon’s ideas gain by their translation into comix. Does the Escapist flourish when he emigrates from the text-only world of Chabon’s novel to the four-color world of comix, or does being put into images trap the Escapist more fully than any of the snares of his enemies in the supervillainous organization the Iron Chain? The answer is not so clear cut, as the comix spun off from Chabon’s novel revisit and thereby serve to remix, as it were, the novel’s concerns, shedding new light on the implications of the interconnectedness of word and image and of art and commerce, even as they similarly remix the novel’s broadly liberal political orientation.

  “Saw You on the TV”

  Of the stories in the anthology not written by Chabon, writer-illustrator Howard Chaykin’s “‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . . ,’” from the anthology’s first issue, pointedly illustrates the ways the comix remix the novel. As its title indicates, this story centers on a Red-baiting witch hunt being conducted by one Senator McCraven, who has targeted the Escapist’s associate Miss Plum Blossom. From its start, the story emphasizes the power of images. The first panel of the story presents a television screen showing the senator’s hearings, reflexively including within the screen one of the television cameras broadcasting the hearings (45). Fittingly enough, references to images and to the visual fill the story. Early on, the Escapist declares, “It’s time I took a de
eper look at Senator McCraven . . . to find a way to stop him before these outrageous Senate hearings become an inquisition” (46; ellipses and emphasis in the original in this and subsequent quotations). The narration goes on to note that the Escapist occupies himself by “keeping an eye on Senator McCraven as he makes his circuitous way about town” (47), until ultimately, the narration tells us, “But a greater shock awaits the Escapist . . . a man who believes, up until this moment, that if he hasn’t seen everything, at the very least he’s heard about it . . .” (47). On the next page, the readers see what the Escapist does: Senator McCraven, crying and dressed as a baby, being spanked by a dominatrix. “It’s official,” the Escapist thinks, “now I have seen everything” (48). Even though the senator’s sexual escapades offer an easy way for the Escapist to stop the hearings, by virtue of the opportunity they offer to expose and ruin Senator McCraven, the hero refuses, explaining, “I won’t use McCraven’s tactics against him” (49).

  Later, the proprietor of the studio the senator frequents for his sexual escapades offers to sell the senator what he describes as “a photographic record of your experiences here” (50). Outraged by what he takes to be a blackmail attempt, the senator knocks out the studio manager, ties up the dominatrix, and leaves both to die in a fire he sets. A man who relies so heavily on the power of televised images, however, should know better than to think he can so easily escape the photographic images of his sexual escapades. The Escapist, while rescuing the dominatrix, learns that the negatives of the photographs of the senator are in a safe, the lock of which the Escapist picks while reflecting, “I’m afraid higher principles don’t apply to attempted murder,” and then promising, “I’ll see that these get to the proper authorities” (53). In this story, the threat of words, summed up in the directive to name names, is first aided and abetted by the televised images of the hearings but then undone by the photographic images that, by capturing an embarrassing escapade, trap the senator, ending his public career through the exposure of his private life. The images in this story are dangerously ambiguous in their power, liberating Miss Plum Blossom from the threat the televised Senate hearings pose, but also imprisoning the senator both in his own hypocrisies and in the sexual mores of 1950s America.

  Chaykin’s story cannot help calling to mind an episode from the last part of Chabon’s novel. Clay, a closeted homosexual, marries illustrator Rosa Saks and raises Tommy, the child she conceived with Kavalier, as his own son, out of the need to provide himself with a cover identity as a heterosexual. That cover does Clay no good, however, when he receives a subpoena to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency on 22 April 1954, in a set of televised hearings that also includes the testimony of Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of the anticomix polemic Seduction of the Innocent (613). In Clay’s appearance before the subcommittee, Senator Robert Hendrickson grills him over the pedophilic and homosexual undertones Wertham identifies in comix. After asking Clay, “Isn’t it true that you actually have a reputation in the comic book field for being particularly partial to boy sidekicks?” (615), Hendrickson follows up with two more pointed questions. First, he asks, “Mr. Clay, are you familiar with Dr. Fredric Wertham’s theory, which he testified to yesterday, and to which, I must say, I am inclined to give a certain amount of credit, having paged through some of the Batman comic books in question last night, that the relationship between Batman and his ward is actually a thinly veiled allegory of pedophilic inversion?” (615). After Clay indicates his unfamiliarity with that testimony, Hendrickson continues, “So you have never been aware, personally, therefore, that in outfitting these muscular, strapping young fellows in tight trousers and sending them flitting around the skies together, you were in any way expressing or attempting to disseminate your own . . . psychological proclivities” (616), a question whose premise Clay can make only a stumbling effort to refute.

  Once Clay’s testimony concludes, the novel’s narration records that Kavalier and Rosa whisk him away from “the television cameramen and newspaper photographers” and bring him to a bar, “all as if according to some long-established set of protocols, known to any civilized person, to be followed in the event of a family member’s being publicly identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate” (617). The emphasis on the fact that Clay’s humiliation is captured on camera underscores the ambiguous power of images: the images Kavalier draws constitute the true genius of the Escapist comix, they provide an outlet for the rage he feels over the plight of his family in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Kavalier and Clay’s comix work is prodded to artistic greatness by the example the movies give of “the total blending of narration and image” (362). In this instance, though, Clay is captured by another “blending of narration and image,” in the form of the stagecraft of the televised hearing that exposes his private life. Rather than serving as a method of escape, the co-mixture of words and images, in the form of television, becomes something to be escaped from. Even in escape, however, Clay cannot elude the power of the image, as the bartender harasses him by mockingly commenting, “Saw you on the TV this afternoon” (620).

  This episode brings back into sharp focus that previously excluded middle term from Clay’s description of himself as someone “who believes there’s life on Alpha Centauri and got the shit kicked out of him in school and can smell a dollar” (94), as the televised outing of Clay stands as one of the most prominent instances in the novel in which he comes under assault because of his homosexuality. Indeed, insofar as the hearing precipitates the end of Clay’s marriage to Rosa, it bookends the other scene in which he most obviously comes under fire for being a homosexual, the police raid on James Love’s house in 1941, which drives him to marry Rosa in the first place, as a way of hiding his homosexuality. As Clay later explains to Kavalier, “I was as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn’t want to, well, to be a fairy” (580). Clay, it may be remembered, is “the only guest at Pawtaw that evening for whom there is no existing arrest record” (409), but only because of the presence in the raiding party of an FBI agent who lets Clay go after raping him: “The bitter taste of Agent Wyche’s semen was in Sammy’s mouth, along with the putrid sweet flavor of his own rectum, and he would always remember the feeling of doom in his heart, a sense that he had turned some irrevocable corner and would shortly come face-to-face with a dark and certain fate” (413). Taken together, these two episodes underscore the repressive atmosphere Clay endures for more or less the entirety of the novel.

  As it happens, however, the novel tries to recuperate even the senators’ outing of Clay for its narrative of America as a land of liberation. Following his Senate testimony, Clay talks with George Deasey, his former editor, and reflects that, instead of feeling ashamed at his exposure, he feels “relieved” (623). Adopting the language of the Escapist comix, Deasey tells Clay, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out in the end that Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals just handed you your own golden key” (623). Clay, realizing that he “could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie” (623), begins to reevaluate his life and realizes that his televised outing as a homosexual, even as it apparently ends his career in comix, frees him to move to Los Angeles to begin a second career in television, another medium built on a co-mixture of word and image.

  Given the backdrop of this part of the novel, Chaykin’s inclusion in his story of both televised Senate hearings and the revelation of sexual “proclivities” functions as a remixing of the novel’s treatment of Clay. In turning the power of images against a senator whose own power depends on the televised images of his hearings, Chaykin’s story seems to offer justice for Clay. At the same time, it is difficult to reconcile the novel’s sympathetic treatment of Clay’s plight as a closeted homosexual in 1950s America with a story like Chaykin’s, in which Senator McCraven’s sexual “deviance” appears to funct
ion as a sign of his evil, part and parcel of his murderous impulses. Of course, that conflation of sexual “deviance” with criminality fits perfectly with the 1950s setting of Chaykin’s story. As Neil Miller observes, “Homosexual acts were against the law in every state in the union” in the 1950s (108), and, beyond the criminalization of homosexuality itself, sexual “deviance” of any sort was easily conflated with sexual violence, such that, as Miller puts it, “The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between nonviolent and violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless ‘sexual deviates’ and dangerous sex criminals” (81–82). Ironically, given Senator McCraven’s Red-baiting, Miller also notes that homosexuals were conflated with Communists as subversives infiltrating every aspect of American life (105–7). Given these historical realities and the echoes between Clay’s testimony and the hearings conducted during the Red Scare by Senator Joseph McCarthy and by the House Un-American Activities Committee, it is notable that Chabon’s novel does not reveal what happens to Clay when he moves to Los Angeles. Readers might well wonder whether Clay will find himself blacklisted because of his testimony and its exposure of his homosexuality, like those who were persecuted for their alleged connections to Communism. Here, too, the example of Clay’s hero Orson Welles is illustrative, in light of Joseph McBride’s argument that Welles was forced to leave the United States because of the blacklist, though Welles himself denied this (101, 105). Will Clay find himself marginalized once again for his failure to conform to the mainstream? The novel does not address this possibility, but Chaykin’s comix remix of the novel underscores that elision and thereby suggests the limits of the novel’s liberal politics. Moreover, similar ambiguities and tensions crop up in Chabon’s own comix stories.