SOURCE: “The Novelist as Wonder Boy,” in Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2000, pp. E1, E4.

In the following interview, Ybarra provides an overview of Chabon's life and literary career, discusses Chabon's comments about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and examines the author's interest in comic books and 1940s-era American culture.

When Michael Chabon was a child, his pediatrician father would lug stacks of comic books back to their Columbia, Md., home, where the young devotee devoured each issue, especially the work of Fantastic Four creator Jack Kirby, amassing thousands of skinny volumes. Three decades later Chabon, 37, a celebrated prose stylist whose first two novels were bestsellers, has written an effusive, magisterial paean to the genre and its creators; the 600-page story [The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay] plumbs the admittedly shallow depths of the Golden Age of Comics while at the same time sounding the unfathomable abyss of...