Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Finally, I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I've ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the Ring of Comics.

[1]The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death-of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats – is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.

[2]In 1998, the New York branch of Sotheby's offered a rare copy of Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1 in Very Good condition. The minimum bid was fixed at ten thousand dollars. Its staples were shiny, its corners sharp, its pages white as piano keys. The cover had a long transverse crease, but after more than half a century-three generations removed now from that jittery year in that brutal yet innocent city-the joy and rage incarnate in the knockout Kavalier punch still startled. It sold, after lively bidding, for $42,200.

[3]"Fighting Fascism in His Underwear," issue of August 17, 1940.

[4]Frege, a socialist, an alpine skier, and, like Love, a Rhodes scholar (they had met at Trinity College), was stripped of his title as German national downhill champion and sentenced to Dachau for "soliciting an act of depravity" in the Munich Bahnhof.

[5]This legendary library of self-mortification was lost, and widely considered apocryphal, until 1993, when one of its volumes, Racy Attorney #23, turned up at an IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was mutely serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model "Hjorp" wall unit. It is signed by the author and bears the probably spurious but fascinating inscription To my pal Dick Nixon.

[6]Two weeks after Kahn's piece appeared in The New Yorker, giving some particulars of Josef Kavalier and of his family's plight, Kahn forwarded to Joe a check for twelve dollars, one for ten, and a letter from a Mrs. F. Bernhard of East Ninety-sixth Street, offering to feed him a home-cooked meal of schnitzel and knodelen. It is probable that Joe never took her up on the offer. Records indicate, however, that the checks were cashed.

[7]It was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.

[8] Radio, All Doll, and Freedom.

[9]The Freedoms, whose sales, during the war years, came to rival those of the Escapist himself, were four teenage boys, Kid Einstein, Knuckleduster (known affectionately as "Knuck") O'Toole, Tommy Gunn, and Mumbles, a reformed gang of "Dead-End Hooligans" who had abandoned street fighting and pinked derbies in favor of the Axis menace and matching suits of tricolor long underwear.

[10]Thirty years later, when this work was first reprinted, The Weird Worlds of Luna Moth (Nostalgia Press, 1970; second edition, Pure Imagination, 1996) quickly became a head-shop bestseller.

[11]Lost.

[12] Gargantua and Pantagruel, and possibly Vathek.

[13]Sammy liked to tell a story about a hungry young artist named Roy Lichtenstein who had once wandered into his office at Pharaoh looking for a job. There is no evidence, however, that the story is true.

[14] The Paris Bridge-Leap of 1921: A Memoir of Hardeen, New York; privately printed, 1935. Now in the collection of Prof. Kenneth Silverman.

[15]Les Organes du Facteur moved to Fifty-seventh Street after the war, three doors down from Carnegie Hall, an inexorable journey uptown and into cultural irrelevance in the last moments before Surrealism was overwhelmed by the surging tribes of Action, Beat, and Pop.

[16]In his excellent The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History.

[17]Among some dozen she is believed to have employed over the years.

[18]"A person of unprecedented physical prowess dedicated to acts of derring-do in the public interest."

[19] The Escapist, starring a young Peter Graves in the title role, 1951-53.

[20]At this time in the history of comic books, it was a mark of only the most successful heroes that they had a secret lair. Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, Batman his Batcave, the Blackhawks their windswept Blackhawk Island, and the Escapist his posh digs under the boards of the Empire Palace. These redoubts would be depicted, from time to time, in panels mat showed detailed cutaway diagrams of the secret lair, each 3-D Televisor Screen, Retractable Helipad, Trophy Room, and Rogue's Gallery carefully labeled with arrows. Only one of these cross-section plans was ever published for the Keyhole, a special two-page drawing in the centerfold of Escapist Adventures #46.