"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 on Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis'. It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation". As a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikolai Tesla, Louis Pasteur and Jack London. 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. His dreams had always been Houdinesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
He had never had so naturally gifted a student, but his own discipline --which was really an escape artist's sole possession-- had not been passed along. He didn't tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artist not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains --walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too forseeable. Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. "Never worry about what you are escaping from", he said. "Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to". Two weeks after Josef's disaster, with Thomas recovered, Kornblum caled at the flat of the Garben to escort the Kavalier brothers to dinner at the Hofzinser Club.
