He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition - one of a thousand - of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall.
He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air. Yet his account of his role - of the role of his own imagination - in the Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London.
It was called 'Metamorphosis.' It was never just a question of escape. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. I n later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
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