Howard Chaykin: Conversations

My Lunch with Howard Chaykin

242 My Lunch with Howard Chaykin PhiliP Schweier / 2004 From Back Issue #10, June 2005, pp. 9–15. reprinted by permission of Philip schweier. at the 2004 Comic arts Forum at the savannah College of art and design in november, legendary comics artist and writer Howard Chaykin was a featured guest, participating in workshops and conducting portfolio reviews. Philip schweier, a freelance writer and Chaykin enthusiast, interviewed him about everything from his early work in comics to his time in Hollywood to his ambitious plans for future projects. PHILIP SCHWEIER: I just want to do a quick overview of your career. HOWARD CHAYKIN: Sure, okay. SCHWEIER: In the ’70s, in the early ’70s, you were doing comics . . . CHAYKIN: When I was eleven. Let’s accept that right here and now. SCHWEIER: (laugh) Okay. CHAYKIN: I was a tad, I was a child, I was the Mozart of comics. SCHWEIER: I always thought so. CHAYKIN: Well, there you go. What a guy. SCHWEIER: At a time when superheroes dominated the landscape, you were kind of all over the place, what with Ironwolf at DC, The Scorpion at Atlas— Dominic Fortune at Marvel came later, I think— CHAYKIN: Hm-mm. SCHWEIER: —at a time when superheroes were so prevalent, you took the road less traveled. Why is that? CHAYKIN: Well, I think I take issue with the superheroness of it all. One of the things that—and again, you ask me a question, a short one, you get three hours of answer—the reality is I’ve always said that as my generation came in, superhero comics were being done by men our fathers’ age. The Marvel Bullpen in those days was old guys, and most of us were E.C. fans, or pretentious illustration fans, and came out of an entirely different world view. Very philip schweier / 2004 243 few of us were superhero-based types. Rich Buckler was the most superheroappropriate character in the bunch. [Bernie] Wrightson was doing the horror and mystery stuff, [Michael] Kaluta was doing the same. [Walter] Simonson came in shortly after I did, with a science-fiction portfolio. So none of us were really prepped to do superheroes. All of us had grown up on that material, but by the time we’d become professionals—and I’m speaking for myself, and fairly certain I speak for most of those guys—were interested in a wider range of material. Since we all assumed—and this is not a joke—that we were the last generation of comics talent. You’re probably too young to remember the idea of the paper shortage of the early ’80s. The perception was that paper would disappear, with the advent of the personal computer, hardcopy was going to go away. So we didn’t realize we were actually playing the role of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. We were holding down the fort until the generation after ours, like Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, could come in and then do superhero comics. So all of us came as Johnny-come-latelys to the superhero world, and I was a superhero fan as a boy, but as I became a professional , the skills that I had weren’t really applicable to what was expected of a superhero artist. So, I did everything else I could. I did pulp fiction, and I liked dirty stuff later on, and science fiction, sword and sorcery. I was just testing the waters on everything I could get. Told ya, ask a question, get an endless answer. SCHWEIER: I don’t mind that at all. Now, when you did (Marvel Comics’) Star Wars, the movie hadn’t broken yet. When you were working on it, did you have any idea where it was going to go, how big it was going to be, or was it just another job? CHAYKIN: Not the faintest. I was talking to Phil Noto about this, because he was six years old when the movie came out, for which I’m going to kill him. And I said flat out that I wish I’d been fifteen when the movie came out because A) I would have been an obsessive fan, and B) my life would have been very different. I would probably still be a nose-picking geek—no offense . . . SCHWEIER: None taken. CHAYKIN: At any rate, I was in Burbank in ’75, before the picture came out, when they were doing the post work, and I went to...