Ntuple Indemnity

Those of you who know me know that I am an avid reader of children’s literature. Today, I have a recommendation to make. I recently finished reading all three books in Eoin Colfer‘s ongoing Artemis Fowl series (Artemis Fowl, Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident and Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code), starring a preteen criminal mastermind who crosses paths with the underground kingdom of the fairies.

Colfer’s flagship novels can best be described as a modernization of traditional fantasy, which should and does draw comparisons to Harry Potter, but there are a few key differences between them and J.K. Rowling’s juggernaut franchise. Some of it has to do with the fact that the Fowl books are firmly rooted in the land and lore of Ireland, but where the two really begin to differ is in how they approach the historical development of the respective secret magical society. Whereas Muggle artifice is incompatible with the magical world in the Potter series, in Colfer’s universe, the fairy creatures of the Lower Elements embrace technology full-on in such a way that jet packs have gradually replaced wings and goblin rebels carry illegal laser weapons. The stories primarily revolve around how Artemis, our title antihero, tries to capitalize on this futuristic fairy technology for his own ends.

The downside is that the longevity of the series is questionable, given how closely it is tied to the context of this specific decade; references to current trends in technology abound, with mentions of everything from Apple to Napster. But at the moment, Colfer’s fast-paced, high-octane yarns exhibit an aura of high technology, and this includes much of the nomenclature and wordplay. (‘Leprechaun’, he tells us, is actually derived from ‘LEPrecon’, the reconnaissance unit of the Lower Elements Police.)

While they are not the deepest read – you won’t see endless debates of symbolic extrapolation about how everything thematic should pan out in the next book, Artemis Fowl: The Opal Incident – they are fun, stylish techno-thrillers that, while squarely aimed at the twelve-year-old bracket, can be enjoyed by all ages. And unlike similar authors in the genre like Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler, Colfer gives himself every excuse to be ridiculous. His wit keeps the occasional Russian mob or Italian gangster clichés from being outright annoying and even goes so far as to make them look fun, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. The cast of recurring characters is especially likable, and make the already comfortable cover-to-cover reads all that smoother.

Take that, The Da Vinci Code.

By the way, word on the street is that the afternoon I spent playing Scrabble with Dan Lazin is the cover story of today’s ed Magazine supplement in The Edmonton Journal. I have yet to see it myself, but I hear there is a picture of me looking like (I quote) “some sort of evil Scrabble doctor.” Who knew?

Last night, on a whim, I decided to whip up a Google search for “Dan Brown” and “prose” to see if others find his narrative style, if you can call it that, as irritatingly bad as I thought it was. As it turns out, this is exactly the search string you should punch in if you are exclusively looking for negative reviews.

My favourite one of the bunch – at least, in the first few pages of results – comes from the linguistics journal Language Log, which is the best weblog I have discovered in weeks, if not months. Geoff Pullum eviscerates the first page of The Da Vinci Code in a level of detail so meticulous that it captures down to the very word exactly what it was that bothered me about the biggest publishing hit this side of The South Beach Diet – the first page, at any rate. It is still a good indication of what the entire novel is like.

It was high time I found a new blog to satisfy my linguiphilic tendencies, now that Adam Pauls learning Japanese is winding down. There is some fascinating material on that site, and knowing the readership that regularly drops by here, many of you will probably want to read about gender-neutral word choice and the Persons Case, then follow it up with a contrary opinion, which results in debate.

Returning for a moment to the subject of Dan Brown, I think he is fast becoming my second-favourite outrageously successful author to pick on relentlessly, for the same deserved reasons as the one ranked first. By the way, that would be Robert Jordan of The Wheel of Time infamy, whom I like to call “the Bill the Butcher of fantasy literature” because of how he hacks away at his craft with abandon.

At first glance, Brown and Jordan could not be any more different. Brown writes chapters that average two or three pages in length; Jordan spends ten pages at a time describing what a random ageless Aes Sedai wizard-chick from the Plaid Ajah is wearing on this fine evening. Brown keeps a breakneck pace going by going from event to event with only the odd longwinded pseudo-historical lecture in between, whereas the only thing breakneck about reading Jordan is what happens if it makes you fall asleep on something sharp.

But fundamentally, they have the same bad habits. Both of them binge on perspective-hopping in addition to italicized passages of internal monologue that justify everything writing instructors say about the technique being outright cheating in the face of the limits of the third person. Neither of them have any regard for the old adage “show, don’t tell.” Both of them write characters that are the spitting image of what fan fiction circles refer to as “Mary Sues”: the heroes are fantasies of self-insertion that regularly cross paths with beautiful and intelligent princesses, and invariably make out with them at the end of the day.

Both of them use a device that is almost identical in its respective implementations, which are therefore identically annoying. It always involves a master and his servant, typically belonging to a Generic Fanatical Organization (GFO), with the master telling the servant that he is about to reveal his evil plot and assign him a whole new set of nefarious orders. Sometimes it even ends with an ellipsis; i.e. “Now I will tell you about my evil plot, dot-dot-dot.” We, the readers, never actually hear the plan, but we are subjected to a sentence along the lines of, “As the servant listened to the evil plot, he smiled, for it would be an honour to serve his ingenious master and the GFO’s noble faith.” End of chapter.

It’s cheesy enough as it is, and these guys do it all… the… smegging… time.

And despite all this, both of them are good enough at dropping breadcrumbs of unsolved mysteries that one is compelled to keep on reading, just to see if the authors could answer some burning questions already. To Brown’s credit, he drags the reader through the mud at a hundred knots by dropping these unanswered puzzles and revealing them bit by bit. As for Robert Jordan, there is a clear explanation out there of why anyone ever stuck with him after the first few volumes. It is because he ends the fifth Wheel of Time volume, The Fires of Heaven, with a shocking and anonymous murder that contains all the excitement that was lacking for much of the preceding eight hundred pages of fluff. It’s last-minute, last-chapter desperation plays to keep the audience’s attention like this one that compels people to keep on buying his books. Jordan is through ten now, and from what I hear, he has yet to even mention the incident again.

With these two authors, we have two major arguments at the ready for any aspiring English teacher to emphasize the value of revision. If anything, The Da Vinci Code and the books in the Wheel of Time series (the ones I’ve read, anyway – I quit after seven) feel like first or second drafts, refined and admittedly intriguing plot summaries that go completely unsupported by any semblance of storytelling ability.

They also have generic names, though ‘Robert Jordan’ is a pseudonym.

This is itself a point of interest, as Dan Brown is also the name of a CBC Viewpoint columnist who writes about much the same kind of things I do – movies, comic books, Dan Brown, you name it. Of the two Browns, one is an excellent writer. I would recommend his article entitled “I am not Dan Brown” over The Da Vinci Code any day of the week.

On a completely different note, I saw Garden State last night. It is one of those movies that is difficult to write about, and not because I am at all uncertain as to how good an impression it left. Zach Braff’s self-starring directorial debut is marvelous, which makes it very hard to criticize, but what makes it so great has a lot to do with how it unfolds and tells its own story, which makes it very hard to praise to high heaven without robbing a reader of some of the pleasure that the movie offers on its own. Not a week ago I was complaining about how devoid of truly amazing movies this year has been with the exception of a few key sequels (though to be fair, I regret never getting around to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I am told is wonderful). After seeing Garden State, that simply isn’t true anymore. I implore you to go and see the movie while it is still in relatively wide release, so I can talk about some of the very specific things that struck me about it without spoiling the experience.

But I will stop for now, as Garden State is very well written indeed, and has no business dawdling around in this post.

Ain’t-It-Cool News has a lot of production art from the post-Chicken Little Walt Disney Feature Animation pipeline – American Dog, A Day With Wilbur Robinson and Rapunzel Unbraided. I heard about these upcoming projects two weeks ago by way of a recent article on one of my daily stops, Jim Hill Media, which was highly critical of the new WDFA policy that prohibits animators from working on a production until it had an approved screenplay, contrary to how animation actually works.

American Dog is from Chris Sanders of the delightful but perhaps slightly overrated Lilo & Stitch, and the preliminary art boasts a charming, edgy aesthetic. Of course, what makes animation great is not the individual frames but how they connect to one another to tell a visual story, so let’s cross our fingers that it all comes together. A Day With Wilbur Robinson, slated for 2006, is an adaptation of William Joyce’s children’s book of the same title, which I have never read, but have heard is fantastic. The story reel, the animation equivalent of the storyboarding and pre-visualization that goes into live-action, is reportedly phenomenal.

The art for 2007’s Rapunzel Unbraided is enchantingly beautiful, but the content itself is a big question mark; I know very little about the film at this stage, but it looks like Disney is trying to pull it closer to the Shrek end of the spectrum like they once tried with the never-made Frog Prince. To which I say, go ahead and make it satirical (The Princess Bride, anyone?) but please, for the love of Mickey Mouse, don’t try to make it all hip and contemporary. PDI’s approach is already showing signs of overstaying its welcome; no need to imitate it further. The Disney reputation was built on timelessness, not the cheap temporal appeal that has reduced many a feature from great to good. Case in point: regardless of whether or not you like the music of Phil Collins, he has absolutely no place in Brother Bear, and I am quite serious when I say that his inclusion takes away from the movie.

I really do hope Disney digs itself out of its hole with these three projects. Hopefully they are as daring and creative as they look, and escape the executive-level mismanagement that has led the Disney brand down a path of decay. Unfortunately, scoring box-office hits with these upcoming features will have the side effect of further convincing Michael Eisner and his cronies that traditional animation is dead, and we may have a long wait ahead of us until Disney returns to its roots.

There are few things the movie industry needs more than a kick in the pants to remind studio execs that 3D computer animation does not a better film make. Or, considering the success of the outstandingly funny Chicken Run and next year’s anticipated hit The Wallace & Gromit Movie: Curse of the Wererabbit, 2D traditional film does not equal a bomb. So maybe the dollar figures say, “Yes it does,” but that is an oversimplification. What we really need are distributors who recognize a great film when they see one and know how to promote it properly, unlike how Warner Brothers completely dropped the ball with The Iron Giant, which will hopefully see a revival as its upcoming DVD re-release rides the hype around The Incredibles. We don’t need people releasing Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s seminal masterpiece and the biggest box-office hit in Japanese history, dubbed over in English when foreign films have demonstrated a record of doing better when released properly – that is to say, subtitled. We don’t need more grounds for marketing conspiracy theories like the ones surrounding Home on the Range.

SaveDisney.com‘s feature, “Killing Traditional Animation”, says it better than I do.

While on the subject of Disney films, I want to say a few words about a book that mentions some of them in passing: Dan Brown’s mega-hit novel The Da Vinci Code.

Normally I don’t review the novels I read, and there are a number of reasons for this. Foremost is that if I afforded each and every one of them the analysis I wish I could, I would never get through my extensive reading list. Then there’s the matter of personal pride, in the sense that I do not wish to reveal the full extent of how much I haven’t read. Following that is the fact that I spend most of my time reading established classics instead of current releases, and in most cases have nothing to add to the volume of discourse that already exists around them.

Once in a blue moon, though, I get a little curious about just what it is that has propped up authors like this Dan Brown fellow into the #1 slot of The New York Times for such an extended period of time. Besides, it is always good to get an indication of what it is that the public is consuming at large.

So my question is this: is it just The Da Vinci Code, or is the prose in all contemporary pop literature so juvenile?

I’m not saying Da Vinci is bad – far from it. The plotting is tight, the puzzles are clever, the premises are a conglomeration of outlandish but intriguing theories that run contrary to all conventional wisdom, and are proud of it. It’s just badly written. The two protagonists that carry us through the mystery, symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu, are not characters so much as they are physical manifestations of their respective -ologies. At times, we see every tired prosaic cliché worthy of a loud and sonorous groan – among them, childhood flashbacks and italicized internal monologue up the wazoo. It’s like the entire thing was written with the prospective movie rights in mind, because if anything, The Da Vinci Code feels like a detailed screenplay treatment.

The apologists undoubtedly say, well, plot-driven thrillers don’t need characters, tone and style, or thematic resonance, and only the most pretentiously snobby Ulysses-wielding literati would presume to demand such literary luxuries. Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald and Ian Fleming beg to differ. To name a few.

Full marks for plot construction, though – well, aside from an obvious villain with a concealed identity and a few puzzles that should not have posed our heroes as much trouble as they did. I won’t deny that this is a book that kept me turning the pages to find out what happens next. It’s easy to see why The Da Vinci Code has attracted so much discourse: whether by accident or design, Brown often diverges into passages where he dumps a lot of detailed information geared towards supporting his ideas about revisionism in theological history, and presents them with a non-fictional authority that sends people straight to their search engines in an attempt to separate what is real from what is not.

The downside is that when you do this in front of people who know their stuff, they see right through some of the more frivolous contortions of truth. I’m not referring to the theological debates about the Council of Nicea and the deification of Jesus Christ, but the small things, the details that make the book seem really clever in the eyes of a layman. Observe how in one instance, Brown claims that the Romans referred to the wonders of anagrams as ars magna, the Great Art. Nice try, Mr. Brown. Ars magna is a clever anagram of “anagrams”, but the English word itself was derived from the Greek word anagrammatismos, which lacks the same connection. Such a claim is like saying the Eastwoods dubbed their son Clint deliberately because they could rearrange his name to spell “Old West Action”.

This is also where the Disney connection comes in. Brown has obviously been reading a lot about the surreptitious symbols and malicious metaphors in Walt Disney’s secret destructive agenda, or something to that effect – without much regard for who does what in the development of an animated feature. He claims how Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty is concealed under the name “Rose” as an extension of Disney’s purported agenda to spread the truth about the Holy Grail and goddess worship that lies at the centre of the novel – neglecting to mention, of course, that the name is taken directly from Briar-Rose, Sleeping Beauty’s name in the original text of the Grimm fairy tale. Then he leaps forward to make a connection to the modern era of The Little Mermaid, over which Walt had no direct say, being dead and all. Sometimes it is hard to tell if Brown is intentionally mistaking memetics for conspiracies.

In spite of these misgivings, I do think The Da Vinci Code is worth a read, if only to catch up on the controversial things it has to say. But this may be a case where the movie, currently attached to Ron Howard, may very easily eclipse the book.

On the subject of bestselling literature: J.K. Rowling delivered a reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Edinburgh this weekend, and followed it with a question-and-answer session about a number of things, The Half-Blood Prince among them. The book itself is halfway to completion, and Rowling draws attention to some unanswered questions to consider. Very interesting indeed:

There are two questions that I have never been asked but that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean. If you want to speculate on anything, you should speculate on these two things, which will point you in the right direction.

The first question that I have never been asked – it has probably been asked in a chatroom but no one has ever asked me – is, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” Not, “Why did Harry live?” but, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” The killing curse rebounded, so he should have died. Why didn’t he? At the end of Goblet of Fire he says that one or more of the steps that he took enabled him to survive. You should be wondering what he did to make sure that he did not die – I will put it that way. I don’t think that it is guessable. It may be – someone could guess it – but you should be asking yourself that question, particularly now that you know about the prophecy. I’d better stop there or I will really incriminate myself.

The other question that I am surprised no one has asked me since Phoenix came out – I thought that people would – is why Dumbledore did not kill or try to kill Voldemort in the scene in the ministry. I know that I am giving a lot away to people who have not read the book. Although Dumbledore gives a kind of reason to Voldemort, it is not the real reason. When I mentioned that question to my husband – I told Neil that I was going to mention it to you – he said that it was because Voldemort knows that there are two more books to come. As you can see, we are on the same literary wavelength. [Laughter]. That is not the answer; Dumbledore knows something slightly more profound than that. If you want to wonder about anything, I would advise you to concentrate on those two questions. That might take you a little bit further.

Now there’s an author of bestselling literature who knows a thing or two about presenting elaborate mysteries under the cloak of witty wordplay and a dramatis personae worth volumes of character analysis.

I’m about a week or two late on reporting this one, but for the Harry Potter conspiracy theorists out there: I was right about Mark Evans, so there. According to J.K. Rowling’s latest FAQ update:

Mark Evans is… nobody. He’s nobody in the sense that Mr. Prentice, Madam Marsh and Gordon-Dudley’s-gang-member are nobodies, just background people who need names, but who have no role other than the walk-on parts assigned to them.

…

The fact is that once you drew my attention to it, I realised that Mark Evans did indeed look like one of those ‘here he is, just a casual passer-by, nothing to worry about, bet you barely noticed him’ characters who would suddenly become, half way through book seven, ‘Ha ha! Yes, Mark Evans is back, suckers, and he’s the key to everything! He’s the Half Blood Prince, he’s Harry’s Great-Aunt, he’s the Heir of Gryffindor, he lives up the Pillar of Storgé and he owns the Mystic Kettle of Nackledirk!’ (Possible title of book seven there, must make a note of it).

Then why – WHY – (I hear you cry) – did I give him the surname “Evans”? Well, believe me, you can’t regret it more than I do right now. “Evans” is a common name; I didn’t give it much thought; I wasn’t even trying to set up another red herring. I could just as easily have called him ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ (or ‘Black’ or ‘Thomas’ or ‘Brown’, all of which would have got me into trouble too).

I don’t know about you, but I would lay down a hundred Galleons for a Harry Potter walk-on part by Smith or Jones.

A refresher on recent happenings: Tales of Symphonia has indeed been released, though it is sold out at every video game retailer in the city. That’s okay, since I am on the verge of finishing another RPG, the delightful Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. It features the return of the seven Koopa Kids from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, among other appreciated touches that make it feel like the great SNES game that was never made. It does not have quite the depth or length of the classic Squaresoft titles, but is no slouch when it comes to charm.

Someone, somewhere heard me and released De-Lovely in Alberta; it plays at the Sunridge Spectrum in Calgary and North Edmonton in, well, Edmonton, neither of which are in the most convenient locales. I caught I, Robot on Friday and may write about it at some point, though I make no promises; it is proving more difficult to subject to relentless mockery than I had originally expected, because chunks of it are really quite good.

No indication yet as to whether or not I will have broadband on hand in New Orleans, but if I do, Scrabble coverage will follow accordingly, potentially even on a game-by-game basis.

Ken Jennings update: Not only has he won twenty-six consecutive episodes of Jeopardy!, tonight he swept the “Marvel Comics Heroes” category. I am suitably impressed.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have plenty of time to mull over all the facets of Spider-Man 2 in terms of its content, since the ever-shortening summer movie season is effectively over barring a surprise success on the part of I, Robot. Today, I will instead act like a Comic Book Guy poseur and talk about a few of the mice and men behind the movie.

First of all, Apple has a fantastic article featuring Nels Israelson, a professional one-sheet photographer (“poster boy”?) who designed the outstanding promotional material for the movie. A must-read for any photography buffs out there, it covers how he creates and shoots the superhero poses in a digital format. Naturally, he uses a Macintosh.

Those of you who have seen the film will remember the stunning opening credits sequence, which re-created memorable images from the first Spider-Man (such as its most iconic moment, the upside-down kiss) in dynamic comic-book panels. The art in those panels was by award-winning painter Alex Ross, who rose to fame in the mid-nineties with his distinct romantic-yet-realist tapestries of costumed superheroes in two all-star graphic novels. The first was the Marvel project Marvels, written by Kurt Busiek, which re-created select famous events in the Marvel universe in the eyes of an ordinary civilian, which was a pretty decent concept, but was better as an Alex Ross art book than it was a story, especially to this here reader who was only casually acquainted with such calamitous crises as Gwen Stacy being dropped off a bridge after having seen it happen to Mary-Jane Watson in the movie. (I still don’t know what all that hocus-pocus about the Sentinel robots in that X-Men chapter was about.) His second big hit was a project for DC Comics entitled Kingdom Come, which took your Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Flash, Sandman and a few hundred others, aged them a few decades and made them fight each other. Again, I imagine it would be more fun for seasoned comics fans who actually recognize all the cameos, but the painting was great. All in all, though, while you will never find as detailed and lifelike portrayals of your favourite superheroes as those in the Alex Ross portfolio, I find his art to be much better suited for stand-alone epic imagery than sequential storytelling. In the opening credits to the Spider-Man sequel, however, it is a perfect fit.

Novelist Michael Chabon receives partial credit for the screenplay to Spider-Man 2, which was a significant improvement over Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp’s work on its predecessor. It is hard to discern the extent to which Chabon’s contribution remains in the final cut, but holistically speaking, the impact is noticeable.

Michael Chabon, as I continually inform anyone who will listen, is the guy who got me interested in comic books. (Note that by comic books I don’t mean comic strips – I was weaned on Peanuts from birth – but full-fledged comics, often of the superhero variety, sometimes not; graphic novels and their shorter, monthly kin.) The culprit is that Pulitzer-winner of his, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is a tremendously enjoyable read and alongside J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, my favourite work of literature published in recent years. It is indeed a rarity to find a writer of his calibre who respects the mythology of comics the way he does. If you turn at the last chapter of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and examine Bill’s monologue about Superman’s critique of the human condition, you can see just what an impact comics had on Quentin Tarantino, and how he longed to express it to a larger audience in a medium that was more firmly entrenched in the mainstream – in his case, film. With Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon pulls off an equivalent in print, weaving a six-hundred-page adventure full of that same reverence for superhero mythology, that same implicit desire to share it with everyone else.

It so happens that back in 1996, before he really exploded on the scene with the likes of Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon was one of many writers approached to tackle the then-in-development-hell X-Men film. His (rejected) proposal, which can be found on his website, is not just your run-of-the-mill screen story treatment; it begins with a full-blown treatise that delineates the appeal of the X-Men into four elements – I particularly like the last one: “Stuff exploding, wild technology, cool powers, fighting. I have this stuff too.” Now that X-Men has actually been made into a film by which I was generally unimpressed, but spawned a surprisingly exhilirating sequel, one looks back and imagines what might have been – but considering that he went on to give us Kavalier & Clay instead, who am I to complain? Happily, it all worked out in the end, and he got to pen a little bit of Marvel’s other A-list franchise, and with admirable results.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay itself spawned a byproduct in the form of a quarterly eighty-page comic paperback, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist – a realization of the fictitious comic that our titular heroes Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay create in Chabon’s novel. Those of you with long memories or a predilection for digging around in the archives may recall that one of this weblog’s first posts was about that very announcement. After months of hunting around comic book retailers in Alberta in vain, I ordered the first two issues from Things From Another World a little while ago; they arrived at the end of May, but other circumstances have precluded me from reviewing them in full… until now.

To be honest, after the trials and tribulations of publication delays and the small problem of retailers not stocking the series, all the hype for Escapist #1 culminated in a bit of a letdown, perhaps because it was almost too conventional. The book is an anthology of six stories, with a few written segments of invented history interspersed throughout to continue the masquerade that the Escapist is or ever was a real comic book hero that has now been rediscovered by the “history” recounted in Kavalier & Clay. The first one, “The Passing of the Key”, is an origin story that faithfully visualizes Part I, Chapter 8 of the novel – one of the best parts of the original text, a breathtaking encapsulation of comic book panels in the power of prose written in the present tense, a passage that made one wish the comic was real. Well, now the comic is real, and this may sound harsher than I intend, but the book was better.

Make no mistake – the story as it unfolds in twenty pages of full colour is still a fun read – but the scene that stood as originally written in words and words alone made you believe that the art, the story, and the sheer thrill of escapism in that twenty pages were revolutionary. Perhaps this is a consequence of being desensitized to the present-day quality of comic book art now that every budding penciller has had ample time to idolize the visionary Jack Kirby, but the one thing the Escapist cannot escape here is the feeling of being a little ordinary. Part of it is that outside the context of the novel, the thematic significance of various elements are lost – Tom Mayflower’s crutch an expression of Sammy’s battle with polio, the entire concept of the character founded on Joe’s escape artistry and flight from the Nazis, the very idea of escapism as a human necessity.

See, this is what happens when the first two comic books you ever read are Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which are generally agreed to be the two greatest works of comic art of all time and all time yet to come (a claim that, in my brief experience with comics, remains to my knowledge entirely true): you set your standards too high.

Also in Escapist #1 are “Reckonings”, a very contemporary-style and almost dialogue-free retelling of Luna Moth’s own origin story; “Sequestered”, a lighthearted read where the Escapist fights for justice in the form of jury duty, and the best entry in the volume; “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…”, a mediocre allegory of Joseph McCarthy that never quite connects; “The Escapegoat”, an interesting two-page foray into kids’ comics by way of animal personification; and “Prison Break”, a darker sort of story where the Escapist goes undercover in a maximum-security prison, which features the Saboteur, another character from the novel. The entire project is an enjoyable adaptation, but is unlikely to entice anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus. Of course, in my humble opinion, anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus should remedy that with the utmost immediacy.

The big payoff, however, is in Escapist #2. Part of the original concept of the Escapist comic anthologies was to parallel the evolution of the comic as depicted in Kavalier & Clay, and thus capture a stylistic history of comic books in general. While the first volume hints at this – “The Passing of the Key” has the angular simplicity of the 1930s, the cornball atmosphere in “Sequestered” is reminiscent of the ’60s Batman television series starring Adam West, and “The Escapegoat” is a conceptual children’s work – it is in Escapist #2 that we really see the art branch out into wildly divergent aesthetics, a postmodern collage that finally distinguishes this series from the other comics on the market. The quality of the stories also shows improvement, some of them tackling the motives of heroes and villains in the same abstract, conceptual fashion as the symbolic conflicts in the book.

This collection begins with a Luna Moth story, “The Mechanist!”, the highlight of which is the chaotic pencil work by Bill Sienkiewicz, partially sprayed with colours that run all over the place. The approach is fresh, unconventional, and welcome. But what follows it is the best story in either Escapist volume, “The Lady or the Tiger”, by Glen David Gold (who authored the immensely entertaining novel Carter Beats The Devil). With fine pencilling by Gene Colan underlining a dark and solemn colour palette, it is a moody superhero love story that touches on many of the same ideas of personal desires and responsibility that we see in the two Spider-Man films. The writing is characteristic of an established and respected author, whose one novel to date has very similar appeal to Chabon’s own work.

Then comes “Divine Wind”, a story done in Japanese manga, which is by itself fairly standard but a decent take on the cultural cross-pollination we have already seen with Japanese comics, and which is still quite relevant considering projects such as the Indian Spider-Man. “300 Fathoms Down”, in the style of the Modern Era, brings an aging Escapist out of retirement for a Cold War mission; it is the most conventional of the lot. Escapist #2 concludes with “Old Flame”, a Luna Moth story that does the most we have yet seen with her out-of-costume alter-ego, the librarian Judy Dark.

On the strength of the second volume, I will very likely order The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3 when it is released next week. This one features the cover art that is a source of controversy and a key element in the novel, the Joe Kavalier drawing of the Escapist decking Adolf Hitler – only drawn by Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy. Hopefully it exhibits the same kind of creative daring that made Escapist #2 worthwhile; of all the styles of sequential art out there, many have yet to be explored.

Oh, right… Spider-Man 2. Next post, I promise.