Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  “The Fairy Godfather?”

  As it happens, Chabon’s first published comix story did not appear in Dark Horse’s Escapist anthology. Instead, “The Strange Case of Mr. Terrific and Doctor Nil,” illustrated by Michael Lark, appeared in issue #7 of the DC Comics miniseries JSA: All Stars, cover-dated January 2004 but published in November of 2003. Here, Chabon occupies a position analogous to the writers and illustrators who work on the Escapist comix after Kavalier and Clay, namely, doing work for hire on a character he did not create, Mr. Terrific, a DC character mentioned once in Chabon’s novel in a list of golden age heroes (589). Chabon’s name assumes a prominent role on this issue’s cover, which declares, “Featuring an All-New Story by Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Chabon,” all in capitals, with Chabon’s name in an extralarge font. Chabon’s name thereby provides this “poster advertising a dream-movie” with the cultural legitimacy that so eludes Kavalier and Clay, even as the cover suggests the commercial appeal of Chabon’s artistic credentials.

  Chabon’s story features in its conclusion several panels in which the two title characters embrace one another, while Mr. Terrific is wearing a costume that leaves him half-naked. In response to this image, one reader posted the following message to the Usenet newsgroup on DC Comics: “I glanced at Michael Chabon’s story in the latest issue of ‘JSA All Stars’; and, I have a question. There is a scene where one guy is kissing another at a party. Mr. Chabon, in his book ‘The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,’ wrote about one comic book creator finding out he was gay. Is Mr. Chabon a gay activist? Has he talked about this in any interviews?” (Lee). This comment echoes Senator Hendrickson’s accusation that Clay uses his comix to advance a homosexual agenda, and, like the senator’s line of questioning, the comment depends on reading overdetermined meanings in comix images. Like this reader, we may well consider the image to be ambiguous: are the men actually kissing, and just what is their relationship? Indeed, the reader’s closing question, “Has he talked about this in any interviews?” testifies to the perceived need for words to guide our interpretations of images. In the end, words do lock these images into their normative meaning: as the words of the story explain, Mr. Terrific and Doctor Nil are brothers, and their embrace is one of fraternal reconciliation, not romantic love.

  These varied contexts, subtexts, and tensions come into play in Chabon’s longest comix story to date, “Arms and the Man I Sing.” This story, illustrated by Eduardo Barreto, features the Kavalier and Clay character Mr. Machine Gun, and takes up the entirety of issue #7 of Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. The Escapist and Luna Moth, the two other Kavalier and Clay superheroes whose stories appear in the anthology, receive extended attention in the novel, but Mr. Machine Gun is mentioned in the novel only in passing (171, 219, 260, 368, 589; interestingly, the last of these references to Mr. Machine Gun is the appearance of his name immediately after Mr. Terrific’s in the novel’s list of golden age comix heroes who are no longer published in the 1950s). John Joseph Hess therefore reads this story as Chabon’s attempt “to develop an entirely new character for the comics medium” (33). Nonetheless, examination of “Arms and the Man I Sing” shows that it, too, remixes the novel in a way that further illuminates the limits and blind spots of the novel’s politics, particularly its sexual politics.

  The second chapter of “Arms and the Man I Sing,” presented as a flashback reprinting Kavalier and Clay’s origin story for Mr. Machine Gun, introduces him as Ben Vanderslice, heir to a family fortune built on gun manufacturing, who travels to Nazi Germany in 1941, ostensibly to cement business ties with a German gun manufacturer. Business concerns are quickly exposed as a cover story, though, as Vanderslice is secretly an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, sent to gather information on one Dr. Speckler’s work on “neurotomics” (40). In short order, Vanderslice is captured, then has his right hand amputated and replaced with a neurotomic hand of Speckler’s design that can transform into a machine gun. Bernard Schwartz, a reporter who becomes Vanderslice’s confidant, describes it as “a kind of living machine. Responsive to his nerve-impulses. A part of his body. Or maybe his body was just an appendage of it” (44). Vanderslice soon learns to control the hand/gun and makes his escape, in the process ordering Speckler to cut the wire that would prevent Vanderslice from turning the hand/gun on himself. Speckler refuses, explaining, “You have no right. You are a monster now, Vanderslice. You are no longer a man. Only a man may die on his own terms” (52), before shooting himself. Donning a top hat and tuxedo, soon supplemented by a domino mask, Vanderslice adopts the identity of Mr. Machine Gun, and explains to Schwartz his decision to maintain a secret identity as follows: “Why keep it a secret, Schwartzie? Because—that’s what monsters do. Besides, there may be some practical use in having a secret identity” (54). Notably, in the panel in which Vanderslice offers this explanation, a beautiful woman smiles at him from the background, suggesting through a visual cue what one of the “practical uses” of keeping his monstrous identity a secret might be. Mr. Machine Gun goes on to fight Nazis in Europe, Communist spies in America in the postwar years, and Communist forces in the Korean War, until, as Schwartz explains, “he went berserk at Chosen and wiped out seven hundred raw NKA troops in under 30 seconds” (56). Horrified by his actions, Vanderslice abandons his Mr. Machine Gun identity, marries a “peacenik” (56), and becomes a United States senator dedicated to gun control.

  This is the point, appropriately in medias res, at which the main story of “Arms and the Man I Sing” begins, apparently set at the time of its ostensible publication date of July 1974. Vanderslice’s wife, suffering from terminal cancer, kills herself with a gun Vanderslice owns, ironically enough. In doing so, she echoes not only Speckler’s suicide but also his last words to Vanderslice, namely, that he is a monster, not a man, who has no right to die on his own terms. Consequently, his wife’s death prompts him to reassume his “monstrous” identity as Mr. Machine Gun, though he does so only at night, in a somnambulant state, and he remembers his actions as Mr. Machine Gun only as dreams. Mr. Machine Gun’s first action is to stop a gay bashing, and when he announces his presence by ordering the bashers to “step back,” one of them, seemingly commenting on the hero’s dandified costume, asks, “Who’s this, the fairy godfather?” (12). During the ensuing fight, Mr. Machine Gun hears his hand/gun speaking to him, urging him to shoot to kill, not just the assailants but also the victims, declaring, “Face it, chump, you’re married to me. I’m not your gun. I’m your lover. Your wife. Not her. Me. I sleep with you. I make you strong. Come on. I need it, Ben, baby. I’m hungry” (14). Mr. Machine Gun refuses to kill, though, and the victims of the gay bashing respond by saying, “Uh, this ‘not killing innocent men’ thing? Kind of off the wall, but I say go with it,” and “It’s classy. Goes with the leather top hat.” As Mr. Machine Gun silently staggers off, the gay couple simply comment, “Gay,” “So gay” (15).

  As the reference to Mr. Machine Gun’s foppish costume suggests, one of the elements that codes him as “gay” is his outlandish appearance, thereby reminding readers again of the co-mixture of word and image that goes into creating the comix. In the case of Mr. Machine Gun, the fact that the “gay” subtext emerges through images resonates with Marc Singer’s argument:

  Some novelists have sought to avoid both metaphoric and metonymic methods of signification by transcending the symbolic divisions of signifier and signified altogether. Although this task is all but impossible for novels, which are entirely constituted of verbal signs, Chabon effects a partial escape from metaphor and metonymy in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by adapting another mode of figuration from the comics. Chabon invents a number of superheroes that literally embody their own subtexts, divining in this common comic-book storytelling device a trope of unmediated, undeferred meaning. (282)

  If Mr. Machine Gun is one of those “superheroes that literally embody their own subtexts,” however, he does so problematicall
y. By throwing together a senator, a gay bashing, and a hero with a “monstrous” secret life that makes a sham of his marriage, “Arms and the Man I Sing” remixes Clay’s humiliation at the end of the novel. Of course, homosexual subtext in a story published in 2005 does not carry nearly the shock value that it would have in the 1950s: in the decades since Seduction of the Innocent, parallels between superheroes and closeted homosexuals have entered the mainstream of comix scholarship, even as taboos on homosexuality in the United States have retreated. Still, as Nathan G. Tipton observes, “Wertham’s work remains a problematic touchstone for comics and graphic novel scholars” (322). Given the backdrop of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, that touchstone becomes particularly problematic, insofar as pointing out the homosexual subtext of “Arms and the Man I Sing” almost seems to put one in the position of those who would humiliate Clay by reading his comix work as a subversive expression of his homosexual “proclivities.” Indeed, it is not hard to imagine the epithet “fairy godfather” as a slur that could have been turned against Clay, perhaps by one of Tommy’s classmates after his teacher has his class view Clay’s Senate testimony on television, Tommy’s suspiciously pat statement to Kavalier that the only thing his classmates said about the hearing was that Clay “looked sweaty” notwithstanding (624).

  Other elements of “Arms and the Man I Sing” further underscore its problematic relationship to the novel’s treatment of Clay. As noted above, Vanderslice’s marriage is one of the things that temporarily halts his career as Mr. Machine Gun, while his wife’s death is the event that causes him to resume his costumed activities. Later, following a date with Schwartz’s daughter Sarah, Vanderslice again becomes Mr. Machine Gun. Sarah follows him to his hideout, where he surprises her by saying, “I don’t usually allow girls in my clubhouse” and invites her to go for a ride (64), during which she comments, “The thing that freaks me out the most is probably the leather tux” (65). Later that night, Sarah stops him from killing a criminal, but the hand/gun’s continuing unbearable demands that he kill lead him to attempt to kill himself by pointing his hand/gun at his head. As he struggles to fire, the narration comments, “He pushes, then, against the barrier. The one that was supposed to prove he was a monster. Pushes harder than he ever has before. And at that last instant, he feels that finally, after thirty years, he is a man again” (70). Waking up in a hospital room where he is recovering from the wounds the shot inflicted, Vanderslice learns that, while the hand portion of his hand/gun still works, “right now the gun part of it’s dead” (77). Once again, the subtext is hard to miss: being Mr. Machine Gun is incompatible with heterosexual romance, and if Vanderslice wants to have a relationship with Sarah, if he wants to be a “man,” he needs to give up his monstrous secret life, the life that is coded as “gay” throughout the story and incarnated in the hand/gun that claims to be his true lover.

  This aspect of “Arms and the Man I Sing” remixes the very ending of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in which Clay, having no further use for the cover that his marriage provided him now that he has been publicly identified as a homosexual, leaves Rosa, allowing her to rebuild her life with Kavalier, and allowing Clay to build a new life in Los Angeles. Clay’s escape from domestic union is highlighted by his final act: he leaves behind the card that bears the name “THE CLAYS” and the address of the house he shares with Rosa and Tommy, which he got when he purchased the property in 1948 (474), but he first edits it as follows: “Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY” (636). In this case, “Kavalier & Clay” identifies not the artistic partnership between Joe and Sam, but rather the romantic coupling of Joe and Rosa. The novel’s final words thereby render its title ironically ambiguous, casting doubt on which “Kavalier & Clay” that title refers to, marginalizing Sam Clay, and giving an unsatisfyingly abrupt answer to Tommy’s question at the end of the novel’s penultimate chapter, “what about Dad?” (629). In Clay’s conversation with Deasey, this exile is figured as liberation, but if so, it is a liberation that exposes the limits of the novel’s liberality. If, as Richard Landon writes, “homosocial competition was common in the superhero comics of the Silver Age, where heroes like Superman and Batman would compete with each other for the attention of female characters, even though notions of marriage and domesticity were often more threatening than the villains” (214n12), then the ending of Chabon’s novel reverses that dynamic, privileging heterosexual union and domesticity over not just homosociality but also Clay’s homosexuality.

  Moreover, the unseemly quickness with which the novel dispatches Clay so that Kavalier and Rosa can be together suggests the limits of the liberality not just of the novel’s sexual politics but also of its understanding of American history in general. Lee Behlman argues that, “with superhero comic books, Chabon presents a form of fantasy that resolutely avoids the real, for it seeks to resolve history either by overcoming it through neat, miraculous reversals or by escaping its terms completely” (98), and that “with this comforting gesture may come the admittedly problematic, quintessentially American phenomenon of forgetting” (102). By contrast, Andrea Levine argues that “to read this novel as at heart a legitimation of the idea that ‘America is the place you escape to’—and as endorsing a reading of Americans as cheerfully ahistorical—seems to occlude its fraught rendering of Sammy’s experiences as Jewish, queer, disabled, and American” (40). Levine’s point is well taken, but it is the very ending of the novel itself that occludes Clay’s experiences by rendering them distinctly marginal to Kavalier and Rosa’s. This is not to argue that the novel ignores Clay, but that its championing of him is problematic, and that its ending leaves his experiences prone to the sort of forgetting that Behlman identifies. That threat of forgetting, whether the possibility that the newly established family of Kavalier & Clay will forget Sam’s genuine love for Rosa and Tommy, or that later generations of comix readers will forget the innovations of creators like Kavalier and Clay as they are distracted by the latest commercial tricks of the trade, or that the narrative of American history will forget those who have been marginalized by the mainstream and its attendant paranoia and distrust of those who do not fit in, or that any number of other “strange, illicit” elements will find themselves excluded from the “wide-open” spaces of America, is the danger that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay leaves unresolved in its deceptively tidy ending. Fortunately, we have Chabon’s comix to remix and bring to our attention those elements of the strange case of Mr. Chabon.

  Works Cited

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  Brod, Harry. Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. New York: Free P, 2012. Print.

  Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random, 2000. Print.

  ———, story. “Arms and the Man I Sing.” Art by Eduardo Barreto. Letters by Tom Orzechowski. Color by M. K. Perker and Paul Hornschemeier. Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist 7 (July 2005): 3–78. Print.

  ———, story. “The Strange Case of Mr. Terrific and Doctor Nil.” Art and letters by Michael Lark. Color by John Kalisz. JSA: All Stars 7 (Jan. 2004): n. pag. Print.

  Chaykin, Howard, story and art. “‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . .’” Color by Michelle Madsen. Letters by Chris Eliopoulos. Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist 1 (Feb. 2004): 45–54. Print.

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  Hess, John Joseph. “Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures with Dark Horse Comics.” Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Series and Genres. Ed. Jake Jakaitis and James F. Wurtz. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. 25–39. Print.

  Landon, Richard. “A Half-Naked Muscleman in Trunks: Charles Atlas, Superheroes, and Comic Book Masculinity.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18.2 (2007): 200–16. Print.

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  Levine, Andrea. “Embodying Jewishness at the Millennium.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 30.1 (2011): 31–52. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Feb. 2013.

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  Schutz, Diana. “Chain Mail.” The Escapists 2 (Aug. 2006): 26–27. Print.

  ———. “Chain Mail.” The Escapists 3 (Sept. 2006): 25. Print.

  Singer, Marc. “Embodiments of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel.” Critique 49.3 (2008): 273–89. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Feb. 2013.

  Spiegelman, Art. “Comix 101.” Elective Affinities: 7th International Conference on Word & Image Studies. International Association of Word and Image Studies. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 27 Sept. 2005. Address.