Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Artists: Philip Bond, Eduardo Barreto, Steve Rolston & Jason Alexander
Company: Dark Horse Comics

New York may be where the superhero was born… but in The Escapists, Vaughan makes a pretty good case for Cleveland being the birthplace of comics as we know them today. More to the point, he effectively sets the stage for Cleveland as the rebirth of a little known Golden Age hero known as The Escapist. Not in a literal, superhero battling evil kind of way, but in terms of a dormant character beloved in the fictional universe of Michael Chabon being reborn at the hands of a few talented and dedicated comic book creators.

The Escapists began its life as one of many stories in the pricey (and despite its high caliber of creators, wildly uneven) anthology Michael Chabon’s Adventures of The Escapist. Several retailers and commentators have complained that the dollar-priced first issue of The Escapists is a reprint of the story in that last issue of Adventures Of, and that Dark Horse made no mention of that fact. I look at a great story that was overlooked because it was in the wrong venue and see Dark Horse repackaging and re-marketing it to an audience that largely didn’t know it existed, and see not shady business tactics but smart marketing. Seems to me that the only folks who should be complaining are those who bought the same story twice, and if there are more than about five of those, I’d be pretty shocked.

At any rate, The Escapists is not, unlike many of the stories from Adventures Of, a story of Michael Chabon’s Golden Age style hero. Instead, it’s a story about a young Jewish boy named Maxwell who lost his father at an early age but found solace in his father’s vast collection of Escapist comics and memorabilia. The first issue takes us through the beginning of his story, introducing us to those who will become his artistic collaborators in a revival of The Escapist, a beloved Golden Age hero who is now only barely remembered.

Sounds like standard slice-of-life, borderline autobiographical stuff in some ways, I know. Oh, look, a comic book writer and he’s telling the story of… a comic book writer. But it works. It really works, actually. Partly it’s because Vaughan is so good at getting these characters to leap off the page and feel real. Partly it’s due to the inventive nature of Vaughan’s narrative, which interweaves the comic book tales of The Escapist with the real-life impact of the character on Maxwell Roth. And partly it’s because, while we’ve seen this kind of thing before, Vaughan keeps the reader guessing, with the introduction of a particularly interesting twist in the form of The Escapist’s marketing that further blurs the lines between the “real world” of Roth and friends and the “fantasy world” of The Escapist that they’re creating.

Which is to say, without spoiling anything, that in the second issue, things get a little bit more dangerous and a little bit stranger than most comic book creation tales. Don’t worry, the Escapist doesn’t come to life and start talking to Max Roth or anything like that, but by the end of the second issue, the journey of The Escapist back to the printed page has some intriguing real world consequences for Max and his friends.

Certainly it helps that the artists on board are as strong as they are. Philip Bond and Steve Rolston both ground Maxwell in a realistic setting, whether it’s the gravesides of his parents or the house he inherited, and both are expressive artists who handle the subtlety of reaction and thought that is needed for the real life stories to be engaging rather than dull or mundane. Rolston, in particular, though always a good artist, looks amazing with the expert colors of Dave Stewart backing him up, and there are any number of frozen moments represented in these panels that tell the reader a story and make that reader want to know more by turning the page.

The comic within a comic sections of The Escapists feature the work of Eduardo Barreto in the first issue and Jason Alexander in the second. Barreto serves up a pretty classic, ’70s realistic style version of The Escapist, while Alexander’s moody work (with equally moody coloring by Matt Hollingsworth) is more akin to a modern Alex Maleev/Jae Lee, etc. comic. Fitting, given that these are the eras of comics they are representing, and both artists do an excellent job. I particularly appreciated Alexander’s work on one of the “real world” segments, one in which the “fantasy world” bleeds through in a way. The art nicely represents this bleed, without ever confusing the reader as to whether we’re reading the comic The Escapists or the comic within a comic that The Escapists is about.

Though the story focuses on the story of a writer, artist and letterer creating a new comic book, and thus has more in common with American Splendor or Box Office Poison than Vaughan’s more fanciful Y: The Last Man or Ex Machina, The Escapists is every bit as breezy, readable and completely enthralling as Vaughan’s other work. I’d be very surprised if fans of either Y or Ex Machina did not fall as completely and instantly in love with The Escapists as I did. It really is among the best work that Vaughan has written, and with some of the best artistic collaborators, and I say that as an enormous fan of almost all of his work to date.