Goliard Dream: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is felicity’s thumbs up for the remarkable Michael Chabon novel.

I expect she knows I’ve read it, although it was in pre-blogging days (I saw it in a bookstore as i was preparing for a trip and grabbed it – the trip may have been my first to NYC, but time has erased certainty on the matter).

At any rate, I loved the book, and was pleased to learn, later, that author Chabon had won the Pulitzer for the work.

felicity noted both that she was unclear on the factual basis of the novel (a literary reimagining of Sielgel and Shuster’s invention of Superman) and that she wanted the Escapist to be real.

Among other wonders on Chabon’s website is this original art for the cover of Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1, by Joe Kavalier.

Another fantastic gen in Mr. C’s site is the discovery that Steve Ditko, one of the men most responsible for Marvel’s rise and the Silver Age that brought us the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Thor, was, prior to becoming a comics artist at Marvel for a few short years, an escape artist.

Finally, other admirers of Mr. Chabon’s work will be pleased to learn that he works regularly on film scripts, including the adaptation to his earlier novel Wonder Boys, which became a pleasant film starring Michael Douglas as a Pennsylvania-based pot-smoking English professor in a state of mild existential crisis (It’s the exact antithesis of the Burton/Taylor Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), a proposal for first X-Men film, and currently is hard at work on the script for Spider-Man 2, which will again be directed by Sam Raimi and bring in Spidey’s best nemesis, Doctor Octopus.

I can’t wait.