A Literary Comic Book

Pulitzer-prizewinning novels don't usually get comic-book tie-ins, but with Michael Chabon's comic-themed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the move makes sense. The Escapist (Dark Horse Comics), a new quarterly anthology series, collects stories starring the novel's Houdini-like superhero. The first issue includes the Chabon-written origin of the Escapist, with art by Eric Wight, along with several tongue-in-cheek tales by other comic-book writers and artists. Each one evokes a different period of the medium's history: Howard Chaykin turns in a '50s-style hard-boiled story of a red-baiting Senator with a diaper fetish; another, by Jim Starlin, flashes back to a trippy "cosmic" look of the '70s. The Escapist is sometimes amusing, but it lacks the emotional ambition of its literary source.