Entrancing story about escape worth escaping into

Comic book creators have given us wonders, from a wisecracking man who crawls walls like a spider to a philosophizing extraterrestrial who soars through the cosmos on a silver surf board. It would be hard to find in all of literature a character more complex than Batman, whom dozens of different writers and artists have made into everything from a shadowy avenger to a camp punchline.

But most of us who are familiar with their creations know little about the people who gave form to these fantastic figures. We are more likely to have heard of artists who have been inspired by comic books -- such pop celebrities as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein -- than we are to have heard of the sources of their inspiration -- such pioneering geniuses as Bob Kane and Jack Kirby.

Michael Chabon, author of Wonder Boys, changes a little of that in his spellbinding The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His two main characters are fictional, but Chabon's solid research enables him to ground his protagonists in the real-life world of the visionaries who established the comic book industry in the late 1930s. Chabon helps one to finish the novel feeling informed about the actual artists who gave the world a new and vibrant art form.

Chabon's story is about Josef Kavalier, a young man whose Jewish parents and brother in Prague sacrifice everything so that he may escape the Nazis. Leaving his family behind, Joe makes his way to the United States, where he meets a cousin, Samuel Klayman, with whom he goes on to create a successful comic book hero. Their creation, the Escapist, is the inheritor of the mystic powers of a mysterious order whose members use their extraordinary gifts to help all who must escape oppression.

Chabon takes Joe and Sam on a rollicking thrill ride that has them encountering real-world notables from Orson Welles to Salvador Dali. His narrative draws them and their friends from the time of hope, dread and uncertainty before the United States entered World War II to the period of post-war paranoia about subversion of the American Way of Life. The story peaks on the Empire State Building in a scene that is probably the most memorable there since the end of King Kong, and it ends with the U.S. Congress' hearings in the 1950s about the comic book industry's allegedly corrupting influences on children. Those hearings affect our heroes in a way that is touching and, perhaps, surprising.

In a novel about our frequent needs to get away, the parallels to Joe's escape from the Nazi Holocaust and his longing to bring his family to safety with him could have been heavyhanded. But nothing about Chabon's nimble and assured storytelling is clumsy. Typical of the deftness of Chabon's approach is his off-hand acknowledgement of pervasive anti-Semitism on this side of the Atlantic as well. When Joe's first proposal for a superhero is a character based on the myth of the Golem that protected believers in Judaism, Sam, who is of Hebrew ancestry but who has Americanized his name, blithely dismisses the concept as "too Jewish."

Chabon writes lovingly about his creations, and on every page his elegant writing engages the imagination. Here, Sam retreats into thoughts about his father, a circus strongman whom he barely knows. He

dreamed often and intensely of the tiny, thick-muscled man with the gondolier mustachios who could lift a bank safe over his head and beat a draft horse in a tug-of-war. The plaudits and honors described by the [newspaper] clippings, and the names of the monarchs of Europe and the Near East who had supposedly bestowed them, changed over the years, but the essential false facts of the Mighty Molecule's biography remained the same: ten lonely years studying ancient Greek texts in the dusty libraries of the Old World; hours of painful exercises performed daily since the age of five, a dietary regimen consisting only of fresh legumes, seafoods, and fruits, all eaten raw; a lifetime devoted to the careful cultivation of pure, healthy, lamblike thoughts and to total abstention from insalubrious and immodest behaviors.

Years later, Sam borrows a page from his father's book. When fans ask him about how they came up with the Escapist, he embellishes his varying accounts of the hero's genesis.

Chabon's story pulses with different kinds of energy, from the eagerness of boys curious about the world in which they long to make their way to the enthusiasm of young men who have begun their journeys. But it ends with some of the weariness of mature men for whom much of life might lie ahead, but for whom the most interesting moments almost certainly do not.

The structure is like that of the solution to the riddle of the Sphinx, but the answer is incomplete. This reflects the characters' own uncertainty about their futures, but it does so with the infectious optimism about life's possibilities that fortified them as they braved the challenges and savored the triumphs that Chabon chronicles. After a story of wonders, it is an especially graceful ending.