Howard Chaykin: Conversations

Introduction

vii introdUCtion When Howard Chaykin first began drawing comics professionally in the early 1970s, his goal was to turn his childhood hobby into a way to make a living. The scope of his ambition was defined by the comic books he had grown up reading: diverting but uncomplicated action tales occasionally elevated by the work of artists such as Joe Kubert, Gil Kane, and Carmine Infantino. Yet within just a few years, Chaykin had begun to reconsider that scope and to develop the signature visual and narrative style that has made him one of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics. Over the course of his career, Chaykin has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller whose work offers pulp-adventure thrills and sexy humor alongside a thoughtful engagement with real-world politics and culture. His body of work is animated by the belief that comics can be a vehicle for sophisticated adult entertainment—for narratives that utilize the medium’s unique properties to explore serious themes with intelligence and wit. Chaykin’s contribution to comics as an art form as well as to the comic book as a mass cultural form capable of offering both beautiful surfaces and profound depths is enormously rich. Novelist Michael Chabon, who lauds Chaykin as an “artisan of pop,” aptly compares his comics to Orson Welles’s films: “Welles and Chaykin may not have invented or pioneered all the stylistic and technical innovations on display in their masterworks, but they were the first to put them all together in a way that changed how their successors thought about what they could, and had to, and wanted to do.”1 A close look at Chaykin’s career reveals a restless talent who refuses to accept the unspoken assumptions, philosophical and formal, that govern the work produced in mainstream comics. Even his earliest work as a writer bears evidence of his attempt to inject into popular genres more complex characterization and a less simplistic approach to questions of morality, and as he developed as an artist he began exploring new ways to exploit more fully the possibilities of the comics medium in mainstream comic books—to use the viii introduction viii introduction comics form to tell stories that both demand and reward the reader’s attention . Not long after his first work for DC on their romance and horror titles, Chaykin began to create his own characters, swashbuckling rogues including Ironwolf, the Scorpion, and Dominic Fortune who prefigured his later reluctant -hero adventurers such as Reuben Flagg. Although his work penciling the Marvel Comics adaptation of Star Wars undoubtedly reached his largest audience to that point, his dissatisfaction with material he found uninspiring and with his position in the assembly line production system is evident in his earliest interviews. He turned his ambitions instead to long-form works of a sort mostly unfamiliar to the mainstream comic book audience of the day, graphic novels such as Empire, The Stars My Destination, and The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell that were informed by his interest in classic American illustration and that afforded him the opportunity (though not always unrestricted) to experiment with the narrative possibilities of page design and color and with a range of embellishing tools far more diverse than those employed in the penciling and inking of a typical comic book. His Cody Starbuck serial in Heavy Metal, a science-fiction yarn told through lavish and intricate visual design, is perhaps the apex of this era. After a stint as a paperback cover illustrator during which he continued to hone his drawing and design chops, Chaykin returned to comic books with the series for which he remains best known today: American Flagg! A fiercely barbed but fundamentally humane science-fiction satire, the series blended irreverent wit, risqué-for-the-day sexuality, and a deeply skeptical attitude toward the ways in which consumer culture, corporate avarice, and an increasingly pervasive media collaborate to eliminate the very concept of depth from modern life. Chaykin brought everything he had learned about the relationship between design and narrative to bear on American Flagg!, developing a distinct and dynamic visual style that employed, especially in early issues, densely overlapping panels, corporate logos, and sound effects to suggest the radically disorienting nature of life in the postmodern funhouse of the series ’ not-so-distant future Chicago. An immediate critical success with a farreaching influence on mainstream comics, American Flagg! is, along with Alan Moore...