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79 Howard Chaykin Puts it all Back together again Kim thomPSon / 1987 From Amazing Heroes #132, 1 January 1988, pp. 23–41. reprinted by permission of kim thompson. at the age of thirty-seven, Howard Chaykin may be the oldest young turk in the comics business. a prolific, eclectic, and respected cartoonist since the early ’70s, Chaykin blindsided the entire industry in 1983 with the release of the first issue of his American Flagg! inventive, fast-moving, erotic, bold, witty, profane, and above all funny, Flagg! instantly became one of the first great comics of the ’80s. after writing and drawing twenty-four issues of Flagg! (and scripting another five), Chaykin attempted to escape the drudgery of a monthly series. He handed over Flagg! to the tender mercies of the First Comics editorial staff and embarked on several new projects. the results were mixed: his Time2 seemed too esoteric to some, too much like Flagg! to others, and was held back by its expensive (albeit high-class) graphic-novel format. Chaykin’s four-issue Shadow series fared better commercially, but did cause a major ruckus among shadow aficionados for its violent, profane, cynical portrayal of the hero.* things became very quiet on the Chaykin front after The Shadow. Under the hands of the usually talented J. M. deMatteis, Flagg! quietly degenerated into a pathetic travesty of its former self while the first Time2 sat in lonely splendor on the bookshelf. what the hell was Chaykin doing? Just about everything, it turned out. and due to the vagaries of scheduling, just-about-everything is being released within a dizzying six-month period. * on his radio talk show Hour 25, Harlan ellison called Chaykin’s Shadow “vile and detestable” and bemoaned dC’s failure to rein in “auteurs” like him who were “mucking with legends.” a few months later, however, ellison was screaming blue murder over dC’s attempts to “censor” Frank Miller’s portrayal of Batman and Catwoman as (respectively) a fascistic psychopath and a b&d hooker. evidently ellison’s train of thought had taken a side track a few stations back, although the volume of its whistle remained undiminished. —kt 80 howard chaykin: conversations in august, Chaykin returned to the moribund Flagg!, and, in his new role as overseer, began steering it back on track. september saw the release of the second Time2 book, The Satisfaction of Black Mariah. in october, readers got the first taste of the new Chaykin-newell-vosburg-ory-van de walle-BruzenakMoore team on Flagg! in november, dC released the first of Chaykin’s threevolume Blackhawk series. when the final Blackhawk and the first issue of (ahem) Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! are released in January, Chaykin will have been the principal generator, in one way or another, of well over three hundred pages of material in under six months—and every page of it so far bears Chaykin’s unmistakable mark. it seemed time to check in with Chaykin (so to speak), and since the Man resides in Los angeles and i’d never interviewed him, i reserved the pleasure for myself. this interview was conducted on Monday, november 2; it was transcribed by Mark thompson and copy-edited by myself, with some corrections by Chaykin. note: all cat incidents and resultant dialogue guaranteed verbatim. —kiM tHoMPson AMAZING HEROES: We haven’t seen much new work from you since the end of The Shadow, which was over a year ago; now, suddenly, there’s this raft of stuff: Time2 , Blackhawk, the new American Flagg! I assume it’s a case of several projects coming to fruition simultaneously, rather than some sudden burst of productivity. HOWARD CHAYKIN: Oh, yeah, no question. It wasn’t as if I was sitting on my hands in all that time; I was busy. There are always these blank times, where nothing is hitting the stands. Anybody who has been in the business long enough or who has been reading the material long enough knows that there’s always an enormous lag-time—particularly on the big, fat projects that take a long time to do. It’s just a matter of things coming together and happening at one time. AH: One of the most noticeable things about your new work is that you’ve started working with a fairly large team of collaborators. You’ve worked with assistants before, such as Larry Stroman on Flagg!, but this seems more— CHAYKIN: Well, the simple fact is that on the first graphic...

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