It was not that Joe felt at home in New York. That was something he never would have allowed himself to feel. But he was very grateful to his headquarters in exile. New York City had led him, after all, to his calling, to this great, mad new American art form. She had laid at his feet the printing presses and lithography cameras and delivery vans that allowed him to fight, if not a genuine war, then a tolerable substitute. And she paid him handsomely for doing so: he already had seven thousand dollars—his family’s ransom—in the bank.
Then the music program ended, and the newsreader for WEAF came on the radio to report the announcement, that morning, by the government of unoccupied France, that it had promulgated a series of statutes, modeled after the German Nuremberg Laws, that would enable it to “superintend,” in the newsreader’s odd formula, its population of Jews. This followed earlier reports, the newsreader reminded his listeners, that some French Jews—communists, mostly—were being transported to labor camps in Germany.
Joe fell back into the Empire offices, banging the crown of his head against the window frame. He went over to the radio, rubbing at the knot that began to swell on his head, and turned up the volume. But that was apparently all there was to say about the Jews of France. The rest of the war news concerned itself with air raids on Tobruk and on Kiel in Germany, and with the continued harassment by German U-boats of Allied and neutral shipping to Britain. Another three ships had been lost, among them an American tanker carrying a load of oil pressed from the seeds of Kansas sunflowers.
Joe was deflated. The surge of triumph he felt when he finished a story was always fleeting, and seemed to grow briefer with every job. This time it had lasted about a minute and a half before turning to shame and frustration. The Escapist was an impossible champion, ludicrous and above all imaginary, fighting a war that could never be won. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. He was wasting his time. “Idiot,” he said, wiping at his eyes with the back of an arm.
Joe heard the groan of the Kramler’s old elevator, the whistle and rattle of its cage door being rolled to one side. He saw that his shirtsleeve was stained not only by tears but with coffee and smudges of graphite. The cuff was frayed and inky. He became aware of the grit and the clammy residue of sleeplessness on his skin. He was not sure how long it had been since his last shower.
“Look at this.” It was Shelly Anapol. He had on a pale-gray sharkskin suit that Joe didn’t recognize, as giant and gleaming as the lens of a lighthouse. His face was sunburned bright red, and the skin of his ears was peeling. Pale phantom sunglasses framed his mournful eyes, which somehow, this autumn morning, looked incrementally less so than usual. “I’d say you’re here early if I didn’t know that you never left.”
“I just finished Radio,” Joe said glumly.
“So what’s the matter?”
“It stinks.”
“Don’t tell me it stinks. I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”
“I know.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Not really.”
“Does it stink?”
“It is all baloney.”
“Baloney is okay. Let me see.” Anapol crossed the space that formerly had been occupied by the desks and file cabinets of the Empire Novelties shipping clerks, but which were now filled, to Anapol’s oft-expressed surprise, with the drawing boards and worktables of Empire Comics, Inc.
The previous January, Amazing Midget Radio Comics had debuted with a sold-out print run of three hundred thousand.* On the cover of the issue now on the stand—destined to be the first of the Empire titles (there were currently three) to break the million mark in circulation—the words “Amazing” and “Midget,” which had been shrinking each month until they were a vestigial ant-high smudge in the upper left-hand corner, had been dropped forever, and along with them the whole idea of promoting novelties through comics. In September, Anapol had found himself compelled by the implacable arguments of good sense to sell off the inventory and accounts of Empire Novelties, Inc., to Johnson-Smith Co., the country’s largest dealer in cheap novelties. It was this epochal sale and its proceeds that had financed the two-week trip to Miami Beach from which Anapol had just returned, red-faced and shining like a dime. He had not taken a vacation, as he had informed everyone several times before his departure, in fourteen years.
“How was Florida?” Joe said.
Anapol shrugged. “I’ll tell you what, they have a nice setup down there in Florida.” He seemed reluctant to admit this, as if he had invested considerable effort over the years in running Florida down. “I like it there.”
“What did you do?”
“Ate, mostly. I sat out on the veranda. I had my violin. One night I played pinochle with Walter Winchell.”
“A good cardplayer?”
“You might think so, but I cleaned his clock for him.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, I was surprised, too.”
Joe slid the stack of pages across to Anapol, and the publisher began to sort through them. He tended to take a greater interest in their content, and to show a slightly more discerning eye, than he had on his first exposure to comics. Anapol had never been a devotee of the funny papers, so it had taken him a while simply to learn how to read a comic book. Now he went through each one twice, first when it was in production and then again when it hit the stands, buying a copy on his way to his train and reading it all the way home to Riverdale.
“Germany?” he said, stopping at the first panel of the second page. “We’re calling them Germans now? Did George okay that?”
“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 became 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 State 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.”
“Look,” Anapol said. “I won’t stop you from cutting their goddamned heads off if that’s what you want to do, as long as it sells enough comic books. You know that.”
“I know.”
“It’s just … it makes me nervous.”
The entire phenomenon of comic books, as it had turned out, made Anapol a little nervous. For fifteen years he’d broken his back traveling to the remote, humorless hinterlands of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He had slept little, flirted with bankruptcy, driven six hundred miles a day, eaten appalling food, developed an ulcer, neglected his daughters, and worked his ass off trying to get novelty dealers to laugh. Now, suddenly, having done nothing more than allow himself to be persuaded by someone he had hitherto considered a young maniac to put up seven thousand dollars he could just barely afford, he was rich. All of the tables and equations for calculating the nature of the world had been thrown into question. He had broken off his affair with Maura Zell, moved back in with his wife, attended High Holiday services for the first time in forty years.
“I’m worried about you, Kavalier,” he went on. “I suppose it can only be healthy for you to get your killer instincts or what have you out of your system that way”—he gestured vaguely toward the studio room—“but I can’t help thinking that in the long run it’s only going to make you … make you …” He seemed to lose his train of thought. He had been rummaging inside the paper bag, taking out various other souvenirs of his trip. There was a conch shell with its lush pink lip. There was a grinning monkey head made out of two coconut halves. And there was a framed photograph of a house, the colors hand-tinted and garish. The house in the picture stood on a patch of vibrant emerald lawn. The sky behind it was lurid blue. It was a modernistic house, low and flat and pale gray, charming as a carton of eggs. Anapol stood the photograph on his desk, beside the pictures of his wife and daughters. The frame was sober, plain black enamel, as if to suggest that the picture it contained was a document of rare importance, a diploma or government license.
“What is that?” Joe said.
Anapol blinked, looking at the picture. “That is my house in Florida,” he said, sounding tentative.
“I thought you went to a hotel.”
Anapol nodded. He looked queasy and happy and doubtful all at the same time. “We did. The Delano.”
“You bought a house there?”
“Apparently. It seems crazy to me now.” He pointed to the picture. “That isn’t even my house. There is no house. There’s just a piece of muddy sand with string tied around it on little sticks. In the middle of Palm River, Florida. Only there is no Palm River, either.”
“You went to Florida and bought a house.”
“Why don’t I like t
he way you keep repeating it? Why do I feel like you’re accusing me of something? Are you saying I don’t have a right to throw my money away on whatever I damn well feel like, Kavalier?”
“No, sir,” Joe said. “I would not dream.” He yawned, a deep, joint-tightening yawn that made his entire body shudder. He was exhausted, but the yawn that racked him was the product of his anger and not his fatigue. The only people winning the war that Joe had been fighting in the pages of Empire Comics since January were Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy. Between them, they had pocketed something in the neighborhood, according to Sammy’s guess, of six hundred thousand dollars. “Excuse me.”
“That’s right,” Anapol said. “Go home. Get some sleep. You look like hell.”
“I have an appointment,” Joe said stiffly. He put on his hat and slung his jacket over his shoulder. “Goodbye.”
* 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.
UNDER ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES, the trip downtown to the German consulate discouraged Joe; today he found it difficult even to get himself on to the subway. He felt obscurely furious with Sheldon Anapol. He took a comic book out of the hip pocket of his jacket and tried to read. He had become a constant and careful consumer of comic books. By stalking the Fourth Avenue bookstalls, he had managed to acquire a copy of nearly every one that had been published in the past few years, acquiring also, while he was at it, stacks of old Sunday New York Mirrors so that he could study Burne Hogarth’s vehement, precise, and painterly work in Tarzan. The same masturbatory intensity of concentration that Joe had once brought to the study of magic and wireless sets he now focused on the fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form into whose raffish embrace he had fallen. He noticed how strong the influence of movies was on artists like Joe Shuster and Batman’s Bob Kane, and began to experiment with a cinematic vocabulary: an extreme close-up, say, on the face of a terrified child or soldier, or a zoom shot, drawing ever closer, over the course of four panels, on the battlements and keep of a grim Zothenian redoubt. From Hogarth he learned to trouble over the emotional occasion, so to speak, of a panel, choosing carefully, among the infinitude of potential instants to arrest and depict, the one in which the characters’ emotions were most extreme. And from reading the comic books that featured art by the great Louis Fine, like the one in his hands right now, Joe learned to view the comic book hero, in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier & Clay; Joe’s work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats.