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172 an interview with . . . Howard Chaykin richarD relKin / 1994 From Comic Culture #9, august 1994, pp. 10–13. reprinted by permission of richard relkin. Comic Culture caught Chaykin, awake since dawn, chomping on breakfast, full of nervous tension and angry at the world. He wanted to play two, but we only had enough in the budget for one interview . . . CC: Keith Giffen paid you the compliment of calling you the most cynical man in comics. Chaykin: If I were as cynical as they say, I would pander to the audience, seek out the audience’s most basic needs and suck that tit until it was bone dry. What I do is try to demonstrate to the audience that their perceptions, the material they read, the world in which they live, and the beliefs they hold dear are arrant horseshit. If that’s being cynical, what is a character like Lobo, the safe-sex version of rebellion, the comic book equivalent of Details magazine? A corporate funded non-conformism. The character of Lobo is a perfect example of what comic books are about today. Lobo is a neutered bull who still thinks he’s hot shit. He’s the perfect character for the comic book reader who wants to feel like he’s safe but cutting edge, but not too cutting edge. Cutting edge as butter knife. I am far from a cynic. I think Jim Lee is a cynic. He is clearly far brighter than his audience. You don’t get out of Princeton without being a little smarter than the average comic book reader. Yet he produces some of the most idiotic work I’ve ever seen. CC: The comic book American Flagg! predicted the politically correct movement by five years or so. Chaykin: I wasn’t so much predicting as seeing what the world was like that day for me. Unlike a lot of my peers in comic books, I pay attention to the world in which I live. I don’t get my information from comic books or mov- richard relkin / 1994 173 ies about comic books. I also don’t mistake information for knowledge. The world that I portrayed in American Flagg! looked to me pretty much like the world I was living in, dressed up and gussied up in science-fiction terms, so it wasn’t so much a prediction as my take on the world. CC: Nevertheless, you had shows like Bob Violence and then along comes COPS. Chaykin: Reality TV. Perhaps what Giffen was reading as cynicism was my own bitterness. I would much rather have the world be like the world comic books thinks it is. I’m a profound romantic; that’s why I’ve been married so often. I take my work pretty seriously, although I don’t take myself as seriously as I should, perhaps. I think American Flagg! was a profoundly influential comic book, but only on the talent pool. It gave an enormous number of second degree talents a lot of material to pick over and use in various contexts. And the fact that magazines now tout Flagg! as an undiscovered find that you can find in quarter bins, I find bitterly amusing. Flagg! is much less accessible on its own terms because it makes more demands of the reader than a book like Lobo or like X-Men or other guys riding around in their underwear. Comic book fans, at heart, like it easy and I speak from personal experience. I am an ex-comic book fan. I have pictures of myself at 265 pounds, looking like every fan boy geek you’ve ever seen. CC: Does that mean you’re not a comic book fan anymore? Chaykin: I like the form of comic books enormously. There’s nothing out there in the mainstream market that I read. The books that I read are by guys that hate my work, because I’m perceived as being hopelessly mainstream by more marginal talents like Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown. The guys in the mainstream consider me dangerously weird. So fuck ’em all. CC: You then seem to not be accepted anywhere? Chaykin: Democrats, Republicans, and me. My skills dictate the work that I do. I spent a weekend with Walter Simonson, an old pal. A phrase that kept coming up in the conversation was “failure of nerve.” Which seemed to dictate a lot, and I feel like my own failure of nerve is that I haven...

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