Houdini: The Handcuff King (review)

In the final line of this graphic novel, escape-artist Harry Houdini muses, "Will anyone even remember me a hundred years from now?" Bet on it, Harry, and the fresh format offered here should snag another crowd of devotees. Lutes and Bertozzi follow Houdini through one very long day—May 1, 1908—as he times himself at picking a handcuff lock, goes for a morning run to check the day's venue at Harvard Bridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, meets with the press, hires a roustabout/body guard, makes his regal progress under escort to the bridge, pulls off a literally breathtaking underwater escape in a minute and nineteen seconds, and then heads off to the theater for the evening's paid performance. The day-in-the-life approach fits admirably into the graphic format, and without breaking the continuity with chapter headings, Bertozzi nonetheless sections off the quieter, midday events by cleverly bookending them in long vertical panels of a deep-water dive and hotel elevator rides. Palette is limited to black, white, and shades of blue and blue-gray, which evokes the monochrome media of the day without resorting to obvious sepia possibilities, and the caricature of Houdini himself—handsome, cocky, and prone to run the mercurial gamut from rage (at the press) to besotted bliss (over his beloved wife, Bess)—is right on the money. With their careful attention to contemporary detail and list of sources, Lutes and Bertozzi seem to aim for an information-book audience, but the notes are often more supplemental sidebars than authentication (there's also a bit of waffling about the trick behind Houdini's river escape). Still, it's a great tale, rousingly told and, given the elusive nature of the Master himself, probably as close to the truth as his spellbound followers are likely to get.