The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (53 page)

More significant by far than anything else that happened to the cousins on that first day of May 1941 was the movie they had come to see.

In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs. Tastes changed, and writers grew bored, and all the straight plots had
been pretty well exhausted. Later writers and artists, with the connivance of George Deasey, turned the strip into a peculiar kind of inverted parody of the whole genre of the costumed hero. The Escapist’s chin grew larger and more emphatically dimpled, and his muscles hypertrophied until he bulged, as his postwar arch-foe Dr. Magma memorably expressed it, “like a sack full of cats.” Miss Plum Blossom’s ever-ready needle was pressed into providing the Escapist with a Liberacean array of specialized crime-fighting togs, and Omar and Big Al began to grumble openly about the bills their boss piled up by his extravagant expenditures on supervehicles, superplanes, and even a “hand-carved ivory crutch” for Tom Mayflower to use on big date nights. The Escapist was quite vain; readers sometimes caught him stopping, on his way to fight evil, to check his reflection and comb his hair in a window or the mirror of a drugstore scale. In between acts of saving the earth from the evil Omnivores, in one of the late issues, #130 (March 1953), the Escapist works himself into quite a little lather as he attempts, with the help of a lisping decorator, to renovate the Keyhole, the secret sanctum under the boards of the Empire Palace. While he continued to defend the weak and champion the helpless as reliably as ever, the Escapist never seemed to take his adventures very seriously. He took vacations in Cuba, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, where he shared a stage at the Sands Hotel with none other than Wladziu Liberace himself. Sometimes, if he was in no particular hurry to get anywhere, he let Big Al take over the controls of the Keyjet and picked up a movie magazine that had his picture on its cover. The so-called Rube Goldberg plots—in which the Escapist, as bored as anyone by the dull routine of crime-busting, deliberately introduced obstacles and handicaps into his own efforts to thwart the large but finite variety of megalomaniacs, fiends, and rank hoodlums he fought in the years after the war, in order to make things more interesting for himself—became a trademark of the character: he would agree with himself beforehand, say, to dispatch some particular gang of criminals “barehanded,” and to use his by now vastly augmented physical strength only if one of them uttered some random phrase like “ice water,” and then, just after he was almost licked and the weather too cold for anyone ever to ask for a glass of ice
water, the Escapist would hit on a way to arrange things so that inexorably the gang ended up in the back of a truck full of onions. He was a superpowerful, muscle-bound clown.

The Escapist who reigned among the giants of the earth in 1941 was a different kind of man. He was serious, sometimes to a fault. His face was lean, his mouth set, and his eyes, through the holes in his headscarf, were like cold iron rivets. Though he was strong, he was far from invulnerable. He could be knocked cold, bludgeoned, drowned, burned, beaten, shot. And his missions were just that—his business, fundamentally, was one of salvation. The early stories, for all their anti-fascist fisticuffs and screaming Stukas, are stories of orphans threatened, peasants abused, poor factory workers turned into slavering zombies by their arms-producer bosses. Even after the Escapist went to war, he spent as much time sticking up for the innocent victims of Europe as he did taking divots out of battleships with his fists. He shielded refugees and kept bombs from landing on babies. Whenever he busted a Nazi spy ring at work right here in the U.S.A. (the Saboteur’s, for example), he would deliver the speeches by which Sam Clay tried to help fight his cousin’s war, saying, for example, as he broke open yet another screw-nosed “armored mole” full of lunkish Germans who had been trying to dig under Fort Knox, “I wonder what that head-in-the-sand crowd of war ostriches would say if they could see this!” In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1941, as America went about the rumbling, laborious process of backing itself into a horrible war.

And yet, in spite of the fact that he sold in the millions, and for a time ascended or sank into the general popular consciousness of America, if Sammy had never written and Joe had never drawn another issue after the spring of 1941, the Escapist no doubt would have faded from the national memory and imagination, as have the Cat-Man and Kitten, the Hangman, and the Black Terror, all of whose magazines sold nearly as well as the Escapist’s at their peaks. The cultists—the collectors and fans—would not have shelled out appalling sums for, or written hundreds of thousands of donnish words devoted to, the early collaborations of Kavalier & Clay. If Sammy had never written another word after
Radio Comics
#18 (June 1941), he would have been remembered, if at
all, by only the most fanatic devotees of comic books as the creator of a number of minor stars of the early forties. If Ebling’s Exploding Trident had killed Joe Kavalier that evening at the Hotel Pierre, he would have been recalled, if at all, as a dazzling cover artist, the creator of energetic and painstaking battle scenes, and the inspired fantasist of
Luna Moth
, but not, as he is by some today, as one of the greatest innovators in the use of layout, of narrative strategies, in the history of comic book art. But in July 1941,
Radio
#19 hit the stands, and the nine million unsuspecting twelve-year-olds of America who wanted to grow up to be comic book men nearly fell over dead in amazement.

The reason was
Citizen Kane
. The cousins sat, with Rosa and Bacon between them, in the balcony of the dowdy Palace with its fancy-pants chandelier and a fresh poultice of velvet and gilding applied to its venerable old bones. The lights went down. Joe lit a cigarette. Sammy sat back and arranged his legs, which had a tendency to fall asleep at the movies. The picture came on. Joe noted that Orson Welles’s was the only name above the title. The camera hopped that spiky iron fence, soared like a crow up that sinister, broken hillside with its monkeys and its gondolas and its miniature golf course and, knowing just what it was looking for, burst in through the window and zoomed right in on a pair of monstrous lips as they rasped out that ultimate word.

“This is going to be good,” Joe said.

He was impressed—demolished—by it. When the lights came up, Sammy leaned forward and looked past Rosa at Joe, eager to see what he had thought of the film. Joe sat looking straight ahead, blinking, working it all out in his mind. All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of
Luna Moth
, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.

“I want us to do something like
that
,” he said.

This was precisely the thought that had occupied Sammy from the moment he caught on to the film’s structure, when the mock-newsreel
about Kane ended and the lights came up on the men who worked for the “March of Time” newsreel company in the film. But for Joe it had been the utterance of his sense of inspiration, of taking up a challenge, while for Sammy it had been more the expression of his envy of Welles, and of his despair at ever getting out of this lucrative swindle, with its cheap-novelty roots. After they got home from the Pennsylvania, the four of them sat up well into the night, drinking coffee, feeding records to the Panamuse, recollecting bits, shots, and lines of dialogue to one another. They could not get over the long upward tilt of the camera, through the machinery and shadows of the opera house, to the pair of stagehands holding their noses while Susan Alexander made her debut. They would never forget the way the camera had dived through the skylight of the seedy nightclub to pounce on poor Susie in her ruin. They discussed the interlocking pieces of the jigsaw portrait of Kane, and argued about how anyone knew his dying word when no one appeared to be in the room to hear him whisper it. Joe struggled to express, to formulate, the revolution in his ambitions for the ragged-edged and stapled little art form to which their inclinations and luck had brought them. It was not just a matter, he told Sammy, of somehow adapting the bag of cinematic tricks so boldly displayed in the movie—extreme close-ups, odd angles, quirky arrangements of foreground and background; Joe and a few others had been dabbling with this sort of thing for some time. It was that
Citizen Kane
represented, more than any other movie Joe had ever seen, the total blending of narration and image that was—didn’t Sammy see it?—the fundamental principle of comic book storytelling, and the irreducible nut of their partnership. Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and bold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was more, much more, than any movie really needed to be. In this one crucial regard—its inextricable braiding of image and narrative—
Citizen Kane
was like a comic book.

“I don’t know, Joe,” Sammy said. “I’d like to think we could do something like that. But come on. This is just, I mean, we’re talking about
comic books
.”

“Why do you look at it that way, Sammy?” Rosa said. “No medium is inherently better than any other.” Belief in this dictum was almost a requirement for residence in her father’s house. “It’s all in what you do with it.”

“No, that’s not right. Comic books actually
are
inferior,” Sammy said. “I really do believe that. It’s—it’s just built in to the material. We’re talking about a bunch of guys—and a girl—who run around in their long johns punching people, all right? If the Parnassus people make this Escapist serial, believe me, it’s not going to be any
Citizen Kane
. Not even Orson Welles could manage that.”

“You’re just making excuses, Clay,” Bacon said, taking them all by surprise but no one more than Sammy, who had never heard his friend sound so serious. “It’s not comic books that you think are inferior, it’s
you
.”

Joe, sipping his coffee, looked politely away.

“Huh,” Rosa said after a moment.

“Huh,” Sammy agreed.

Sammy and Joe got in to the office at seven sharp, pink-cheeked, tingling from lack of sleep, coughing and sober and saying little. In a leather portfolio under his arm, Joe had the new pages he had laid out, along with Sammy’s notes not only for “Kane Street,” the first of the so-called modernist or prismatic Escapist stories, but also ideas for a dozen other stories that had come to Sammy, not just for the Escapist but for Luna Moth and the Monitor and the Four Freedoms, since last night. They went down the hall to find Anapol.

The publisher of Empire Comics had abandoned the vast chromium office that had so discomfited him and taken up residence in a large custodial closet, in which he’d had installed a desk, a chair, a portrait of the composer of
Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin
, and two telephones. Since the move, he claimed to be far more comfortable and reported that he slept much better at night. Sammy and Joe walked right up to the office-closet door. Once Anapol got in, there was really no room for
anyone else. Anapol was writing a letter. He held up a finger to signal that he was in the middle of an important thought.

Sammy saw that he was writing on the letterhead of the Szymanowski society.
Dear Brother
, the letter began. Anapol’s hand hovered while he read the line over, moving his fleshy purple lips. Then he looked up. He smiled grimly.

“Why do I suddenly want to hide my checkbook?” he said.

“Boss, we need to talk to you.”

“I can see that.”

“First of all.” Sammy cleared his throat. “Everything we’ve done around here up to now, as good as it’s been, and I don’t know if you ever look at what the competition’s doing but we’ve been better than most of them and as good as the best of them, all of that is nothing, okay, nothing, compared to what Joe and I have worked out for the Escapist from now on, though I’m not at liberty to divulge just what that will be. At the moment.”

“That’s first of all,” said Anapol.

“Right.”

Anapol nodded. “First of all, you should congratulate me.” He sat back, hands clasped smugly over his belly, and waited for them to catch on.

“They bought it,” Sammy said. “Parnassus.”

“I heard from their lawyer last night. Production is to commence by the end of this year, if not sooner. The money is certainly not enormous—we’re not talking M-G-M here—but it isn’t bad. Not bad at all.”

“Naturally we are obliged to ask you to give us half of it,” Joe said.

“Naturally,” Anapol agreed. He smiled. “Now tell me what it is that you two have worked out.”

“Well, basically it’s a whole new approach to this game. We saw—”

“What do we need with a whole new approach? The old approach has been working great.”

“This is better.”

“Better in this context can mean only one thing,” Anapol said. “And that is more money. Is this new approach of yours going to make more money for me and my partner?”

Sammy looked at Joe. He was, in fact, still not entirely persuaded of this. But he was still feeling the sting of Bacon’s accusation the night before. And what was more, he knew Shelly Anapol. Money was not—not always—the most important thing in the world to him. Once, years before, Anapol had cherished hopes of playing the violin in the New York Philharmonic, and there was a part of him, albeit deeply buried, that had never completely resigned itself to the life of a dealer in whoopee cushions. As Empire Comics’ sales figures had climbed, and the towering black cyclones of money came blowing in out of the heartland, Anapol, out of this residual ambition and a perverted sense of guilt over the brainless ease with which colossal success had been achieved, had grown extremely touchy about the poor reputation of comic books among the Phi Beta Kappas and literary pooh-bahs whose opinions meant so much to him. He had even imposed upon Deasey to write letters to
The New York Times
and
The American Scholar
, to which he then signed his own name, protesting the unfair treatment he considered those publications had given his humble product in their pages.