Breaking Into The Escapists
Review of Brian K. Vaughan's New Graphic Novel
A pseudo-sequel to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in the comics form, The Escapists delivers postmodern meshing of art and reality.
Writer Brian K. Vaughan and a host of talented artists (Jason Shawn Alexander, Steve Rolston, Phillip Bond, Eduardo Barreto, Matt Hollingsworth, Dave Stewart, Paul Hornschemeier and Dan Jackson)pull together a well-wrought story fleshed out with amazing artwork in The Escapists (Dark Horse Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59307-831-7), a graphic novel continuation of the metafiction that began with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Michael Chabon provides an introduction in which his character Sam Clay meets and inspires Eisner Award-winning writer Brian K. Vaughan. After this brief bit of postmodern prose (Chabon’s mastery of written word apparent in just this small blurb), the comic novel proper begins, detailing the exploits of the young son of an Escapist fanatic who buys the long-defunct rights to Kavalier and Clay’s character.
Fiction and Reality
That young Jewish boy, Max, narrates the story in traditional yellow boxes. His initial plot to bring The Escapist to life through a publicity stunt backfires, and from then on the stories of the young writer and his cohorts interweaves with that of the fiction they produce. Scenes blend from the real world, drawn in a simple, contemporary-fiction style, into the world of the Escapist comic books, dark and tonal and filled with bodies worthy of Adonis and Aphrodite. Words, images, and plot points from each world drip into the other, melding the two worlds just as Chabon relates fictional Clay to real-life Vaughan in his intro.
Just as essential as New York City was to Kavalier and Clay, so is Cleveland to Max, Case and Denny. Various parts of real geography form the backbone set pieces of The Escapists, again creating a bizarre cocktail of reality and fiction. The overall effect of this constant back and forth is mesmerizing.
Artwork and the Story
As the story moves from real world to imagined world, the artwork shifts dramatically. As mentioned above, the real world is depicted in simple cartoon realism. Colors and lighting are basic and realistic. Characters are presented in a colorful, slightly exaggerated style that is just this side of Archie or Doonesbury.
In the fictional world of The Escapists, art shifts to a dark, gritty, tonal world. The characters are sculpted with amazing physiques, heavy, slashy inks, and dramatic motions.
The dichotomy of the art is sometimes troubling, because the fictional art seems of a higher quality than the real-world art. This is not due to any artist being better than the others, but more to the fact that the real world art, it seems, should have more polish than the fiction art.
Or, perhaps that’s the point.
The Escapists is not a proper sequel to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Rather, it’s an interpretation, or an angle, like what Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It’s an excellent graphic novel about comics art, and though it lacks the depth of character and the historic nature of its spiritual predecessor, The Escapists stands alone as a fine story about friendship, comics, and creativity. It’s worth a pass for fans of Kavalier and Clay, the Escapist, writer Brian K. Vaughan, and comics at large.
