Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"A lot of guys are also calling them Germans, sir," Joe said. "The Spy Smasher. The Human Torch. You are going to look like the idiot who does not."

"Oh, am I, now?" Anapol said, twisting up a corner of his mouth.

Joe nodded. In his first three appearances, the Escapist along with his eccentric company had toured a thinly fictionalized Europe, in which he wowed the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain, while secretly going about his real business of arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Haxoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war. But Joe had soon seen that this was not going to be anywhere near enough-for the Allies or for him. On the cover of the fourth issue, readers were startled to see the Escapist lift an entire panzer over his head, upside down, and tumble a pile of Gothsylvanian soldiers from its hatch like a kid shaking pennies out of a pig.

Within the covers of Radio Comics #4, it was revealed that the League of the Golden Key, depicted for the first time in its "secret mountain sanctum at the roof of the world," had called, in this time of great urgency, for a rare convention of the scattered masters of the globe. There was a Chinese master, a Dutch master, a Polish master, a master in a fur hood who might perhaps have been a Lapp. The assembled masters seemed mostly to be elderly, even gnomelike men. All agreed that our guy, Tom Mayflower, though he was new at the game and still young, was fighting the hardest and accomplishing the most of any of them. It was therefore voted to declare him "an emergency CHAMPION OF FREEDOM." The power of Tom Mayflower's key was increased twentyfold. He found that he now could peel the skin from an airplane, lasso a submarine with a steel cable borrowed from a nearby bridge, or tie the obligatory superheroic love knot in a battery of antiaircraft guns. He also developed an improvement on the old Ching Ling Soo trick of catching bullets-the Escapist could catch artillery shells. It hurt, and he would be knocked flat, but he could do it, staggering to his feet afterward and saying something like "I'd like to see Gabby Hartnett do that!" From that point on, it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense. It soon become clear to Sammy, however, that if Joe's monthly allotment of pages was not increased-if he was not kept fighting, round the clock-his cousin might be overcome by the imprisoning futility of his rage. Around this time, fortunately, the first complete circulation figures for Radio Comics #2 had come in at well in excess of half a million. Sammy immediately made the natural proposal of adding a second title to the line; Anapol and Ashkenazy, after the briefest of conferences, authorized the addition of two, to be called Triumph Comics and The Monitor. Sammy and Joe went for a series of long strolls, in and out of the streets of Manhattan and Empire City, talking and dreaming and walking in circles in the prescribed manner of golem makers. When they returned from the last of these arcane strolls, they had brought forth the Monitor, Mr. Machine Gun, and Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, filling out both books with characters drawn by the now regular Empire stable: Gold, the Glovskys, Pantaleone. Both titles had, as Sammy had once predicted, killed; and Joe had soon found himself responsible every month for more than two hundred pages of art and wholesale imaginary slaughter on a scale that, many years later, could still horrify the good Dr. Fredric Wertham when he set about to probe at the violent foundations of the comics.

"Jesus Christ," Anapol said, wincing. He had reached the point, toward the end of the story, in which the Escapist went to work on the massed panzer divisions and storm troopers of the Wehrmacht. "Ouch."

"Yes."

Anapol pointed with a thick finger. "Is that a bone sticking out of the guy's arm?"

"It is meant to suggest this."

"Can we show a bone sticking out of a human arm?"

Joe shrugged. "I could erase it."

"Don't erase it, just… Jesus."

Anapol looked, as he generally did when he inspected Joe's work, as if he was going to be sick. Sammy had reassured Joe, however, that it was not disgust at the violence portrayed but at the awareness, always for some reason painful to Anapol, of how big the latest Escapist donnybrook was going to go over with the remarkably bloodthirsty children of America.

It was Joe's battle scenes-the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest-that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chickens and eggs go flying. Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.

"One of these days you're going to go too far," Anapol said, shaking his head. He put the stack of Bristol board back together and started toward his office. "Somebody is going to get hurt."

"Somebody is getting hurt already," Joe reminded him.

"Well, not around here." Anapol unlocked his door and went in. Joe followed uninvited. He wanted Anapol to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe's existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.

Anapol looked around at the meager furnishings of his office, the sagging shelves, the desk lamp with its cracked shade, as if he had never seen them before.

"This place is a dump," he said, nodding, as if agreeing with some inaudible critic, possibly, Joe thought, his wife. "I'm glad we're getting out of here."

"Did you hear about Vichy?" Joe said. "The laws they passed?"

Anapol set a paper bag down on his desk and opened it. He took out a net sack filled with oranges.

"No, I did not," he said. " Florida orange?"

"They are planning to restrict the Jews there."

"That's terrible," Anapol said, handing him an orange. Joe put it into the hip pocket of his trousers. "I still can't believe I'm going to be in the Empire Slate Building ." His eyes developed a faraway glaze. "Empire Comics, Empire State Building, you see the connection?"

"As also they have such laws as these in Czechoslovakia."

"I know. They're animals. You're right. Tell me, what do you hear from your family?"

"The usual," Joe said. Envelopes bearing the strange Dlouha Street address arrived at a rate of about two a month, his mother's scratchy, baroque hand tattooed over with swastikas and eagles. There was often nothing at all in these letters in the way of news; they had been emptied of information by the censor. Joe was obliged to type his replies, because although on the comics page he had one of the steadiest lines in the business, when he sat down to write his brother-most of his letters were addressed to Thomas-his hand shook too violently to hold a pen. His missives were terse, as if to forestall the incoherence of emotion. In each one, he begged Thomas not to despair, assured him that he had not forgotten his promise, and that he was doing everything he could to get them all to New York. "Not anything is different."