American novelist whose "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" (2000) won the Pulitzer prize. The sprawling epic begins in 1939 and tells the story of two cousins—Joe, who has fled Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sammy in New York—who bond over the creation of a comic book with a Nazi-bashing superhero protagonist. The novel celebrated the early days of the comic-book industry, with its "ink-smirched young men, drinking, smoking, lying around with their naked big toes protruding from the tips of their socks."
Over the years attempts to turn the bestselling book into a film have foundered, despite the superhero genre's box-office domination. In 2025 the Metropolitan Opera adapted it as an opera composed by Mason Bates with a libretto by Gene Scheer. The production, directed by Bartlett Sher, became the Met's top-performing opera at the box office that season, with the highest opening-night ticket sales of the decade. The opera features digital animations and acrobatic dancers on wires to render the book's superheroes, The Escapist and Luna Moth, while wisely never letting them break into song.
There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.