The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “I bet,” Sammy said. He put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Joe, I bet you do.”

  They were at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, in a boisterous cloud of light and people, and Sammy said to hold on a minute. Joe stood there, hands in his pockets, helplessly ordering his thoughts with shameful felicity into the rows and columns of little boxes with which he planned to round out the first adventure of the Escapist: Tom Mayflower donning his late master’s midnight-blue mask and costume, his chest hastily emblazoned by the skilled needle of Miss Plum Blossom with a snappy gold-key emblem. Tom tracking the Nazi spy back to his lair. A full page of rousing fisticuffs, then, after bullet-dodging, head-knocking, and collapsing beams, an explosion: the nest of Iron Chain vipers wiped out. And the last panel: the company gathered at the grave of Misterioso, Tom leaning again on the crutch that will provide him with his disguise. And the ghostly face of the old man beaming down at them from the heavens.

  “I got cigarettes.” Sammy pulled several handfuls of cigarette packages from a brown paper bag. “I got gum.” He held up several packs of Black Jack. “Do you like gum?”

  Joe smiled. “I feel I must learn to.”

  “Yeah, you’re in America now. We chew a lot of gum here.”

  “What are those?” Joe pointed to the newspaper he saw tucked under Sammy’s arm.

  Sammy looked serious.

  “I just want to say something,” he said. “And that is, we are going to kill with this. I mean, that’s a good thing, kill. I can’t explain how I know. It’s just—it’s like a feeling I’ve had all my life, but I don’t know, when you showed up … I just knew.…” He shrugged and looked away. “Never mind. All I’m trying to say is, we are going to sell a million copies of this thing and make a pile of money, and you are going to be able to take that pile of money and pay what you need to pay to get your mother and father and brother and grandfather out of there and over here, where they will be safe. I—that’s a promise. I’m sure of it, Joe.”

  Joe felt his heart swell with the longing to believe his cousin. He wiped at his eyes with the scratchy sleeve of the tweed jacket his mother had bought for him at the English Shop on the Graben.

  “All right,” he said.

  “And in that sense, see, he really will be real. The Escapist. He will be doing what we’re saying he can do.”

  “All right,” Joe said. “Ja ja, I believe you.” It made him impatient to be consoled, as if words of comfort lent greater credence to his fears. “We will kill.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “What are those papers?”

  Sammy winked and handed over a copy each of the issues for Friday, October 27, 1939, of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold and of a Czech-language daily called New Yorske Listy.

  “I thought maybe you’d find something in these,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Joe said, moved, regretting the way he had snapped at Sam. “And, well, thank you for what you just said.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Sammy. “Wait till you hear my idea for the cover.”

  THE ACTUAL CURRENT OCCUPANTS of Palooka Studios, Jerry Glovsky, Marty Gold, and Davy O’Dowd, came home around ten, with half a roast chicken, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of seltzer, a carton of Pall Malls, and Frank Pantaleone. They walked in the front door boisterously quibbling, one of them imitating a muted trumpet; then they fell silent. They fell so quickly and completely silent, in fact, that one would have said they had been expecting intruders. Still, they were surprised to find, when they came upstairs, that Palooka Studios had been transformed, in a matter of hours, into the creative nerve center of Empire Comics. Jerry smacked Julie on the ear three times.

  “What are you doing? Who said you could come in here? What is this shit?” He pushed Julie’s head to one side and picked up the piece of board on which Julie had been penciling page two of the adventure he and Sammy had cooked up for Julie’s own proud creation, a chilling tale of that Stalker of the Dark Places, that Foe of Evilness himself,

  “The Black Hat,” said Jerry.

  “I don’t remember saying you could use my table. Or my ink.” Marty Gold came over and snatched away the bottle of India ink into which Joe was about to dip his brush, then dragged his entire spattered taboret out of their reach, scattering a number of pens and pencils onto the rug, and completely discomposing himself. Marty was easily discomposed. He was dark, pudgy, sweated a lot, and was, Sammy had always thought, kind of a priss. But he could fake Caniff better than anyone, especially the way he handled blacks, throwing in slashes, patches, entire continents of black, far more freely than Sammy would ever have dared, and always signing his work with an extra-big letter O in Gold. “Or my brushes, for that matter.”

  He snatched at the brush in Joe’s hand. A pea of ink fell onto the page Joe was inking, spoiling ten minutes’ work on the fearsome devices arrayed backstage at the Empire Palace Theatre. Joe looked at Marty. He smiled. He drew the brush back out of Marty’s reach, then presented it to him with a flourish. At the same time, he passed his other hand slowly across the hand that was holding the brush. The brush disappeared. Joe brandished his empty palms, looking surprised.

  “How did you get in here?” Jerry said.

  “Your girlfriend let us in,” Sammy said. “Rosa.”

  “Rosa? Aw, she’s not my girlfriend.” It was stated not defensively but as a matter of fact. Jerry had been sixteen when Sammy first met him, and had already been dating three girls at a time. Such bounty was then still something of a novelty for him, and he had talked about them incessantly. Rosalyn, Dorothy, and Yetta: Sammy could still remember their names. The novelty had long since worn off; three was a dry spell now for Jerry. He was tall, with vulpine good looks, and wore his kinky, brilliantined hair combed into romantic swirls. He cultivated a reputation, without a great deal of encouragement from his friends, for having a fine sense of humor, to which he attributed, unconvincingly in Sammy’s view, his incontestable success with women. He had a “bigfoot” comedy drawing style swiped, in about equal portions, from Segar and McManus, and Sammy wasn’t entirely sure how well he’d do with straight adventure.

  “If she’s not your girlfriend,” said Julie, “then why was she in your bed naked?”

  “Shut up, Julie,” Sammy said.

  “You saw her in my bed naked?”

  “Alas, no,” said Sammy.

  “I was just kidding,” said Julie.

  Joe said, “Do I smell chicken?”

  “These are not bad,” said Davy O’Dowd. He had close-cropped red hair and tiny green eyes, and was built like a jockey. He was from Hell’s Kitchen, and had lost part of an ear in a fight when he was twelve; that was about all Sammy knew about him. The sight of the pink nubbin of his left ear always made Sammy a little sick, but Davy was proud of it. Lifting the sheet of tracing paper that covered each page, he stood perusing the five pages of “The Legend of the Golden Key” that Sammy and Joe had already completed. As he looked each page over, he passed it to Frank Pantaleone, who grunted. Davy said, “It’s like a Superman-type thing.”

  “It’s better than Superman.” Sammy got down off his stool and went over to help them admire his work.

  “Who inked this?” said Frank, tall, stooped, from Bensonhurst, sad-jowled, and already, though not yet twenty-two, losing his hair. In spite of, or perhaps in concert with, his hangdog appearance, he was a gifted draftsman who had won a citywide art prize in his senior year at Music and Art and had taken classes at Pratt. There were good teachers at Pratt, professional painters and illustrators, serious craftsmen; Frank thought about art, and of himself as an artist, the way Joe did. From time to time he got a job as a set painter on Broadway; his father was a big man in the stagehands’ union. He had worked up an adventure strip of his own, The Travels of Marco Polo, a Sunday-only panel on which he lavished rich, Fosterian detail, and King Features was said to be interested. “Was it you?” he asked Joe. “This is good work.
You did the pencils, too, didn’t you? Klayman couldn’t do this.”

  “I laid it out,” Sammy said. “Joe didn’t even know what a comic book was until this morning.” Sammy pretended to be insulted, but he was so proud of Joe that, at this word of praise from Frank Pantaleone, he felt a little giddy.

  “Joe Kavalier,” said Joe, offering Frank his hand.

  “My cousin. He just got in from Japan.”

  “Yeah? Well what did he do with my brush? That’s a one-dollar red sable Windsor and Newton,” said Marty. “Milton Caniff gave me that brush.”

  “So you have always claimed,” said Frank. He studied the remaining pages, chewing on his puffy lower lip, his eyes cold and lively with more than mere professional interest. You could see he was thinking that, given a chance, he could do better. Sammy couldn’t believe his luck. Yesterday his dream of publishing comic books had been merely that: a dream even less credible than the usual run of his imaginings. Today he had a pair of costumed heroes and a staff that might soon include a talent like Frank Pantaleone. “This is really not bad at all, Klayman.”

  “The Black … Hat,” Jerry said again. He shook his head. “What is he, crime-fighter by night, haberdasher by day?”

  “He’s a wealthy playboy,” said Joe gravely.

  “Go draw your bunny,” Julie said. “I’m getting paid seven-fifty a page. Isn’t that right, Sam?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Seven-fifty!” Marty said. With mock servility, he scooted the taboret back toward Sammy and Joe and replaced the bottle of ink at Joe’s elbow. “Please, Joe-san, use my ink.”

  “Who’s paying that kind of money?” Jerry wanted to know. “Not Donenfeld. He wouldn’t hire you.”

  “Donenfeld is going to be begging me to work for him,” said Sammy, uncertain who Donenfeld was. He went on to explain the marvelous opportunity that awaited them all if only they chose to seize it. “Now, let’s see.” Sammy adopted his most serious expression, licked the point of a pencil, and scratched some quick calculations on a scrap of paper. “Plus the Black Hat and the Escapist, I need—thirty-six, forty-eight—three more twelve-page stories. That’ll make sixty pages, plus the inside covers, plus the way I understand it we have to have two pages of just plain words.” So that their products might qualify as magazines, and therefore be mailed second-class, comic book publishers made sure to toss in the minimum two pages of pure text required by postal law—usually in the form of a featherweight short story, written in sawdust prose. “Sixty-four. But, okay, here’s the thing. Every character has to wear a mask. That’s the gimmick. This comic book is going to be called Masked Man. That means no Chinamen, no private eyes, no two-fisted old sea dogs.”

  “All masks,” said Marty. “Good gimmick.”

  “Empire, huh?” said Frank. “Frankly—”

  “Frankly—frankly—frankly—frankly—frankly,” they all chimed in. Frank said “frankly” a lot. They liked to call his attention to it.

  “—I’m a little surprised,” he continued, unruffled. “I’m surprised Jack Ashkenazy is paying seven-fifty a page. Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. Plus, oh, yeah, how could I forget. We’re putting Adolf Hitler on the cover. That’s the other gimmick. And Joe here,” he said, nodding at his cousin but looking at Frank, “is going to draw that one all by himself.”

  “I?” said Joe. “You want me to draw Hitler on the cover of the magazine?”

  “Getting punched in the jaw, Joe.” Sammy threw a big, slow punch at Marty Gold, stopping an inch shy of his chin. “Wham!”

  “Let me see this,” said Jerry. He took a page from Frank and lifted the tracing-paper flap. “He looks just like Superman.”

  “He does not.”

  “Hitler. Your villain is going to be Adolf Hitler.” Jerry looked at Sammy, eyebrows lifted high, his amazement not entirely respectful.

  “Just on the cover.”

  “No way are they going to go for that.”

  “Not Jack Ashkenazy,” Frank agreed.

  “What’s so bad about Hitler?” said Davy. “Just kidding.”

  “Maybe you ought to call it Racy Dictator,” said Marty.

  “They’ll go for it! Get out of here,” Sammy cried, kicking them out of their own studio. “Give me those.” Sammy grabbed the pages away from Jerry, clutched them to his chest, and climbed back onto his stool. “Fine, listen, all of you, do me a favor, all right? You don’t want to be in on this, good, then stay out of it. It’s all the same to me.” He made a disdainful survey of the Rathole: John Garfield, living high in a big silk suit, taking a look around the cold-water flat where his goody-goody boyhood friend has ended up. “You probably already have more work than you can handle.”

  Jerry turned to Marty. “He’s employing sarcasm.”

  “I noticed that.”

  “I’m not sure I could take being bossed around by this wiseass. I’ve been having problems with this wiseass for years.”

  “I can see how you might.”

  “If Tokyo Joe, here, will ink me,” said Frank Pantaleone, “I’m in.” Joe nodded his assent. “Then I’m in. Fra— To tell you the truth, I’ve been having a few ideas in this direction, anyway.”

  “Will you lend one to me?” said Davy. Frank shrugged. “Then I’m in, too.”

  “All right, all right,” said Jerry at last, waving his hands in surrender. “You already took over the whole damned Pit anyway.” He started back down the stairs. “I’ll make us some coffee.” He turned back and pointed a finger at Joe. “But stay away from my food. That’s my chicken.”

  “And they can’t sleep here, either,” said Marty Gold.

  “And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.

  “We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”

  “Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.

  “Good point,” said Davy O’Dowd.

  FOR TWO DAYS, none of them slept. They drank Jerry’s coffee until it was gone, then brought up cardboard trays of sour black stuff from the all-night Greek on Eighth Avenue, in blue-and-white paper cups. As promised, Jerry was cruel in his administration of the chicken, but another half was fetched, along with bags of sandwiches, hot dogs, apples, and doughnuts; they cleared the hospital-pantry of three cans of sardines, a can of spinach, a box of Wheaties, four bouillon cubes, and some old prunes. Joe’s appetite was still stranded somewhere east of Kobe, but Sammy bought a loaf of bread that Joe spread with butter and devoured over the course of the weekend. They went through four cartons of cigarettes. They blared the radio, when the stations signed off they played records, and in the quiet moments between they drove one another mad with their humming. Those who had girlfriends broke dates.

  It became clear fairly quickly that Sammy, deprived of his bible of clipped panels and swiped poses, was the least talented artist in the group. Within twelve hours of commencing his career as a comic book artist, he retired. He told Joe to go ahead and lay out the rest of the artwork for the Escapist story by himself, guided, if he needed a guide, by some of the issues of Action and Detective and Wonder that littered the floor of the Pit. Joe picked up a copy of Detective and began to leaf through it.

  “So the idea for me is to draw very badly like these fellows.”

  “These guys aren’t trying to draw bad, Joe. Some of what they do is okay. There’s a guy, Craig Flessel, he’s really pretty good. Try to keep an open mind. Look at this.” Sammy grabbed a copy of Action and opened it to a page where Joe Shuster showed Superman freeing Lois Lane from the grasp of some big-shouldered crooks—war profiteers, as Sammy recalled. The backgrounds were reduced to their essence, hieroglyphs signifying laboratory, log cabin, craggy mountaintop. The chins were jutting, the musculature conventionalized, Lois’s eyes plumed slits. “It’s simple. It’s stripped down. If you sat there and filled every panel with all your little bats and puddles and st
ained-glass windows, and drew in every muscle and every little tooth and based it on Michelangelo and cut your own ear off over it, that would be bad. The main thing is, you use pictures to tell a good story.”

  “The stories are good?”

  “Sometimes the stories are good. Our story is really fucking good, if I do say so myself.”

  “Fucking,” Joe said, letting it out slowly like a satisfying drag.

  “Fucking what?”

  Joe shrugged. “I was just saying it.”

  Sammy’s real talents, it developed, lay elsewhere than in the pencil or brush. This became clear to everyone after Davy O’Dowd returned to the Pit from a brief conference with Frank over ideas for Davy’s character. Frank was already wrapped up in his own idea, or lack thereof, working at the kitchen table and, in spite of his promise to Davy, could not be bothered. Davy came in from the kitchen scratching his head.

  “My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd. “That I know.”

  Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.

  “Oy,” he said.

  “What?”

  “He flies, huh?”

  “Something wrong with that? Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”

  “Huh?”

  “Wishful figments. You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do. Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more. So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk.”

  “Huh.” Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner. He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.

  “I always wished I could fly,” Davy said. “I guess a lot of guys must have wished that.”

  “It’s a common fantasy, yeah.”

  “It seems to me that makes it something you can’t have too many of,” Jerry Glovsky put in.