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The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #1-2

The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist

michael chabon glen david gold kevin mccarthy howard chaykin bill sienkiewicz

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Leaping onto center stage from the wings of comics history comes that dazzling Master of Elusion, foe of tyranny, and champion of liberation - the Escapist. Operating from a secret headquarters under the boards of the Empire Theater, the Escapist and his crack team of associates roam the globe performing amazing feats of magic and coming to the aid of all those who languish in the chains of oppression. The history of the Escapist's creators Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay was recently chronicled in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Now the best of the Escapist's adventures are collected into one volume for all to enjoy.

159 pages, Paperback

First published April 28,2004
Series
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist

This edition

Format
159 pages, Paperback
Published
May 18, 2004 by Dark Horse
ISBN
9781593071714
ASIN
159307171X
Language
English

More editions

About the author

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michael chabon

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Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.
His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.
Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
34(34%)
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31(31%)
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35(35%)
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100 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
mrboko1234
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Despite contributions by Michael Chabon, the creator of the creators of the Escapist, and Glen David Gold, author of the fabulous 'Carter Beats the Devil' and 'Sunnyside,' this didn't do it for me. I wanted a simulated artifact--the work of Kavalier and Clay, especially from the 30s and 40s--and although that's what this work seemed to promise, it didn't deliver. I liked 'The Escapists' much better, because it defines itself clearly as being tangential to Chabon's novel, starting after that book stopped.
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XxYoursTrulyxX
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A collection of stories by some very well-known comics creators based on characters from Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." There are some nice-looking styles respresented, but the stories struck me as a bit too campy.
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yumedarling
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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a fun graphic depiction of the Escapist. It adheres closely to Kavalier & Clay canon. Nothing breathtaking that wasn't done in Kavalier and Clay proper, but a joy to see the story laid out as a real comic.
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Tsujikicksass
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Hit or miss, but overall delightful to read right after finishing Kavalier & Clay.
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slavgaard
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Sorry, but this book could not live up to what I had imagined while reading "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." A couple of the Escapist pieces were good, but otherwise...I kind of hoped it would look like something from the 40s or 50s.
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KissMyAnthia
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The exact book I read isn't on Goodreads, but is bigger than this one and called "The Escapist: Amazing Adventures." Being a collection of comics and a few stories, it's a mixed bag, with some very very good stuff, and other stuff that's meh. On the whole, though, I like that they've taken the fake comics of the Kavalier and Clay novel, and made them real. It feels like a alternate history kind of thing.
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an1mnte
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Originally from In Lesbian With Books

I told you, I'm shamelessly obsessed with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I can't seem to move on with the book hang-over after reading it and to make the matter worse, I discovered the graphic novels entitled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist by Michael Chabon featuring Kavalier and Clay's brainchild, the Escapist. It has different fictional news, history, and essays about the comic books during the birth of comic books and the Escapists, the Depression, the WWII, and the Golden Age which made the book somewhat real (and I really thought the history the book was telling was true because the contributor writers mentioned a LOT of famous comic book artists). Aside from that, it included the main attraction of the book: the story of the Escapist. If you don't know, the Escapist is an escape artist (you know, like Houdini) showing amazing feats of escapology and he's a part of the League of the Golden Key that fights tyranny (Iron Chain gang) and save the oppressed and bounded by the chain!


(please continue to read  HERE . The pictures don't seem to fit the layout of the Goodreads site.
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SugaSuga
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I read "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" years ago and read this when it was selected by my book club. I asked my comic book-loving pre-teen to read it with me, turning it into an opportunity to discuss a book we both read.

I cannot say that I love comics but the detail in this one is very thorough and the illustrator and editor managed to keep the general ideas on the page while bringing the characters very much to life.
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