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October 18, 2006

Jews with Swords.

It's just his working title, you see. Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, talks about his upcoming serialized novel for the New York Times and about comics:

The Escapist, the fictional comic book of "Kavalier and Clay," has now actually become a real comic book character. When I see his comic book on the rack, I have to catch myself from saying, "Oh, that's so great that they brought that back," since it only existed in your imagination.

I'm glad that's your reaction and not "Oh, what a crass attempt to cash in and exploit a literary property."

Did you worry that that would be the reaction, that it would be like merchandising for your novel?

Yeah, I'm always worried about that kind of stuff. There is no merchandising the comic book itself. The idea has always been to make something worth reading on its own. We did a good job initially with an anthology format, but that had limitations of its own.

What's out there now, the Brian K. Vaughan-written and Steve Rolston and Jason Alexander-drawn "Escapists" is wonderful. It's just great in its own right, and doesn't lean on the novel very heavily at all. I think it would be an intensely entertaining piece of work even if the novel had never existed. That's what I really was hoping for from the beginning. It's exciting to see a writer as good as Brian K. Vaughan take over this material and make it his own.

In the past, you sometimes weighed in and defended or promoted comic books and graphic novels as an art form. Do you think that's broken through to the mainstream?

I think so. If anything, at this point I think that it's possible that comic books are taken too seriously. There's almost too strong of a bias in favor of adult-oriented material now in the comics world. I think comic books worked so long and so hard to achieve some level of the respect that they deserve as an artistic medium that they along the way abandoned some of the things that prevented them from being taken seriously, such as being written for the pleasure of child readers.

And now when I take my child readers into the comic book store, it's hard to find good things for them to read. There are good things for kids in comics, but people in the comic book world don't like to talk about them that much.

All that writing talent and those smoldering bedroom eyes, too.

Going to be needing a moment or two alone, boys! *Grabs Kleenex*

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Posted by YMB Staff at October 18, 2006 05:25 PM