Michael Chabon Presents. . .The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, Volume… (2004)

The stories were pretty good, with nods to different styles of writing and artwork. I really enjoyed some of the guest work, especially the artwork by Gene Colan (Dracula, Dr. Strange, Daredevil and many others of the 70s). Good read. ( )

companion to Kavalier & Clay

The Escapist is a superhero...well, kind of. He wears spandex, and a mask, and he has a 'special ability,' so he's close enough. He's a hunky blue-eyed blonde-haired boy-faced man with ripping muscles and a strong chin, and he has a seemingly magical key that, errmm, sparkles? Definitely a superhero, right? His 'super power' is to, well...escape from things. From chains and locks, and...prison.

So maybe his superhero ability doesn't sound very useful, but that's where you're wrong my friend! You see, he's really good at getting captured so he can escape and beat up people and Win. At one point, he commits a crime and purposely gets caught and sent to prison, just so he can escape and capture the bad guy. ...oh yeah, talk about innovative!

The dialogue is cheesy-as-hell with a healthy serving of atrociously bad puns. The art is mostly terrible save for 1 or 2 comics ("Old Flame" has some great art, though! Oil-painting-esque and very colorful.) and the whole storyline is just...well, let's say, "not good."

Really, I can't imagine why anyone other than the most extreme of superhero comic extremist would want to read this. It's bad, really really bad, and it's books like this that cause most people to shy away from graphic novels. Avoid! ( )

Volume 1 has an introduction by Chabon, and opens with the Escapist’s origin, illustrated by Eric Wight, best known now for his comics work for the television show The O.C. It has an eye-catching cover and clever back-cover parody by award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware. I loved the Luna Moth story written and illustrated by Jim Starlin. My favorite piece, though, was the closing story “The Lady or the Tiger, illustrated by Gene Colan and written and with a preface by Glen David Gold (author of the Kavalier and Clay-esque Carter Beats the Devil). ( )

good for AoK&C fans, but not comics in general

Created as a visual addendum to the fantastic Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Escapist exists on the premise that the book was in fact a biographical documentation of its very history. This concept is re-enforced by textual insertions, period relative advertisements, and sections with the appearance of archival reprinting. I was thoroughly excited to read the Escapist but felt let down in the end because it could never truly live up to Chabon's detailed and artful descriptions in K & C. While I enjoyed the concept of actualizing an imaginary comic, I don't think I could really appreciate without perhaps having lived through those post-war early comic years, or perhaps if I were a fanatic collector. There is still quite a bit of talented art included in these anthologies, but I for one will be saving my money for collections with more depth. ( )