I believe I picked up a copy of this because I was under the impression that it was a graphic novel. But while Michael Chabon has given us a great story about the golden age of comic books, this novel does not itself have any pictures. Instead, it's an epic coming-of-age story told in the old fashioned way, although some of Chabon's descriptions of the two cousins' work in the nascent world of the graphic novel are so precise and evocative that we feel we can almost see the page. Even though the book was quite long, I feel almost sad to have finished it, and to have left behind the romantic promise of Sam and Joe's youth and happiness for the complexities and disillusionments of middle age. It was certainly one of the most thoroughly satisfying novels I've read in a long time. There was page-turning adventure and swooning romance, but alongside it a depth of psychological complexity and a sense of social and political situatedness in mid-20th century NYC that made the fantastic possibilities and uncertainties of that bygone era seem almost tangible. You might say that Kavalier and Clay are just like the super-heroes they draw, good men capable of improbable deeds. But if so, they are cut from the superhero cloth laid out in The Watchmen -- men with flaws and backstories and limitations that sometimes overwhelm them.
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