I had read Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay many years ago. It was a story about a fictional pair of comic book creators in the 1940s. It was a pretty good book.
What I didn’t know is that Dark Horse published a series of comics about the Escapist, the superhero character created by the fictional Kavalier and Clay.
I picked up a collection of the Escapist issues—it treats Kavalier and Clay as real people and features stories from various eras of the fictional publication history of the Escapist stories interspersed with fictional essays about the comics and their creators.
Some of the humor is so meta that I feel like I’m missing the joke. Has anyone read these who wants to talk about them?
I’m about two-thirds of the way through the collection and there is some stuff that’s just weird. In particular, the occasional “Escapenot” strips, which seem to feature strange existentialism and philosophy. Can anyone explain these to me?
And then there’s a series of strips that seem to parallel a “real-life” labor dispute between comic book creators and their publisher. The stories seem to feature alternate endings favoring first labor and then management. I can’t figure out exactly what’s meant to have happened.
Overall I like this series, but I wonder whether some of the content is completely referential, that is, entirely dedicated to parodying or paralleling some real-life event from the history of comic books without any intent to be a good story in and of itself.
Thoughts?