Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Crandall is the top, no doubt."

"And the stuff they are doing, grown-ups are reading it. Adults. It's dark. It's also mean, I think, but look around you, this is a mean age we're living in. Have you seen the Heap?"

"I love the Heap."

"The Heap, I mean, come on, that's a comic book character? He's basically, what, a sentient pile of mud and weeds and, I don't know, sediment. With that tiny little beak. He breaks things. But he's supposed to be a hero."

"I see what you're saying."

"This is what I'm saying. It's 1954. You got a pile of dirt walking around, the kids think that's admirable. Imagine what they'll think of the Golem."

"You want to publish this."

"Maybe not quite like it is here."

"Ah."

"It is awfully Jewish."

"True."

"Who knew you knew all that stuff? Kabbalah, is that what it's called? All those angels and… and, is that what they are, angels?"

"Mostly."

"This is what I'm thinking. There's something to all this. Not just the Golem character. Your angels-do they have names?"

"There's Metatron. Uriel. Michael. Raphael. Samael. He's the bad one."

"With the tusks?"

Joe nodded.

"I like that one. You know, your angels look a little like superheroes."

"Well, it's a comic book."

"This is what I'm thinking."

"Jewish superheroes?"

"What, they're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Rent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself."

Joe pointed to the stack of bulging portfolios on the ground between them. "But half the characters in there are rabbis, Sammy."

"All right, so we tone it down."

"You want us to work together again?"

"Well… actually… I don't know, I'm just talking off the top of my head. This is just so good. It makes me want to… make something again. Something I can be just a little bit proud of."

"You can be proud, Sammy. You have done great work. I have always been telling you this all along."

"What do you mean, all along, you've been gone since Pearl Harbor."

"In my mind."

"No wonder I didn't get the message."

Then, startling both of them, there was a flat, tentative knock. Someone was rapping on the frame of the open door to the corridor.

"Anyone here?" said an oboe voice, tentative and oddly familiar to Joe. "Hello?"

"Holy Amazing Midget Radio," Sammy said. "Look who it is."

"I heard I might find you boys up here," said Sheldon Anapol. He came into the room and shook hands with Sammy, then shambled over and stood in front of Joe. He had lost almost all of his hair, though none of his bulk, and his jaw, more mightily jowled than ever, was set in a defiant scowl. But his eyes, it seemed to Joe, were shining, full of tenderness and regret, as if he were seeing not Joe but the twelve years that had passed since their last encounter. "Mr. Kavalier."

"Mr. Anapol."

They shook hands, and then Joe felt himself being enveloped in the big man's fierce and sour embrace.

"You crazy son of a bitch," he said after he let Joe loose.

"Yes," Joe said.

"You look good, how are you?"

"I'm not bad."

"What was all that narrishkeit the other day, eh? You made me look very bad. I should be furious with you." He turned to Sammy. "I should be furious with him, don't you think?"

Sammy cleared his throat. "No comment," he said.

"How are you?" Joe asked him. "How is business?"

"A pointed question, as ever, from the mouths of you two. What can I tell you. Business is not good. In fact, it's very, very bad. As if television was not problem enough. Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on fire ! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it's over they're going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama? Then this Dr. Fredric Stick-Up-His-Ass Wertham, with that book of his. Now we have the Senate committee coming to town… you heard about that?"

"I heard."

"They served me," Sammy said.

"You got subpoenaed?" Anapol stuck out his lip. "I didn't get subpoenaed."

"An oversight," Joe suggested.

"Why would they subpoena you, you're just an editor at that fifth-rate house, pardon me for saying so?"

"I don't know," Sammy admitted.

"Who knows, maybe they've got something on you." He took out his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. "Jesus, what lunacy. I never should have let you two talk me out of the novelty business. Nobody ever made a big pile of whoopee cushions and lit them on fire, let me tell you." He went over to the lone chair. "Mind if I sit down?" He sat and let out a long sigh. It seemed to begin rather perfunctorily, for show, but by the end it carried a startling cargo of unhappiness. "Let me tell you something else," he said. "I'm afraid I didn't come up here just because I wanted to say hello to Kavalier. I thought I ought to-I thought you might want to know."

"Know what?" Sammy said.

"You remember we had that lawsuit?" Anapol said.

The next day-the twenty-first of April, 1954-the Court of Appeals of the State of New York would finally hand down a ruling in the matter of National Periodical Publications, Inc. v. Empire Comics, Inc. The suit had, in that time, made its way in and out of the courts, with settlements proposed and rejected, weaving a skein of reversals and legal maneuverings too complicated and tedious to tease out in these pages. National's case, in the business, was generally felt to be weak. Though both Superman and the Escapist shared skintight costumes, immense strength, and the odd impulse to conceal their true natures in the guise of far weaker and more fallible beings, the same qualities and features were shared by a host of other characters who had appeared in the comic books since 1958; or had been shared, at any rate, until those characters, one by one or in wholesale lots, had met their demise in the great superhero burn-off that followed the Second World War. Though it was true that National had also pursued Fawcett's Captain Marvel and Victor Fox's Wonder Man through the courts, a raft of other strong men who favored performing their feats, including flying, while wearing some form of undergarment-Amazing Man, Master Man, the Blue Beetle, the Black Condor, the Sub-Mariner-had been allowed to go about their business unmolested, without any apparent loss of income to National. Many would argue, in fact, that greater inroads into the hegemony of Superman in the marketplace had been made by his successors and imitators at National itself-Hourman, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Starman, the Green Lantern-many of whom were but distortions or pale reflections of the original. What was more, as Sammy had always argued, the character of Superman itself represented the amalgamation of "a bunch of ideas those guys stole from somebody else," in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Dann was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel Gladiator; from Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose orphaned hero, young Lord Greystoke, grew up to become Tarzan, noble protector of a world of inferior beings; and from Lee Falk's newspaper comic strip The Phantom, whose eponymous hero had pioneered the fashion for colorful union suits among implacable foes of crime. In so many of his particulars, the Master of Elusion-a human showman, vulnerable, dependent on his team of assistants- bore very little resemblance to the Son of Krypton. Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of the term "superhero" had even been arrived at. [18]In the end, in its wisdom, the full panel of the Court of Appeals, overturning the ruling of the state Supreme Court, would side against the prevailing opinion in the comics trade and find in favor of the plaintiffs, sealing the Escapist's doom.