Howard Chaykin: Conversations

Howard Chaykin: Home on the Plexus Range

109 Howard Chaykin: Home on the Plexus range Kim howarD JohnSon / 1988 From Comics Scene vol. 3 #2, 1988, pp. 22–25. reprinted by permission of kim Howard Johnson. Howard Chaykin is proudly waving his American Flagg! After creating the title for First Comics and working on it for more than two years, he says he tried to retire. But now, the writer/artist has returned to start again with Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! After years of absence, he admits it feels a little strange to be back. “It has been a while since I really looked at the book and thought about the material,” he says. “I spent time figuring out what it would take to revive Flagg! and bring it back to some semblance of what it deserved, and also come up with a solid structural basis. We’re not so much ignoring the issues that followed my original tenure as disregarding them—there is a semantic difference . Continuity means as much to me as ice hockey, and that ain’t much! I’m willing to make adjustments, rather than deal with unnecessary baggage.” Coming up in the first issues of the new Flagg! is a change of scenery set up in American Flagg! #47–50. “We’re moving a number of characters to the Soviet Union, with Flagg teaching the Soviets how to be Americans by the standards of the late 1950s,” Chaykin explains. “I’m not simply starting this out with ‘Here we are in the Soviet Union’— we took four issues to pull Flagg out of Chicago, get him to Europe, and get the new characters and situations underway with as high a level of moral outrage as I did. Frankly, this book offends and insults a good part of the comic book audience who are much too complacent, anyway.” Despite the other changes, Reuben Flagg is pretty much the same. “He’s still the basically moral guy who can be seduced by sex or power— so, he’s like anybody else. I’ve said more than once that I don’t do Boy Scout characters because I can’t write somebody who’s morally superior to me, and it’s difficult to write a lead who is morally inferior to me.” 110 howard chaykin: conversations Not surprisingly, Chaykin admits that he empathizes with the Plexus Ranger. “Flagg was created as my in-panel persona. People who know me well recognize the voice, tone, attitude, and manner. I’m obviously not 6’2” and gorgeous with a great nose—but then, I wouldn’t make a very good comic book character! So, I created my doppelganger. “All of my characters reflect in some way the persona that I’m feeling at that point—some consider it a failure, but I just consider it my kind of consistency . I’ve taken a great deal of flak for drawing the same hero, but frankly, I feel that drawing is a skill that can be taught to morons, and it’s less relevant than having more than one idea,” remarks Chaykin. “American Flagg! is about sex and violence. Interestingly enough, whenever anyone else has come onto the property, there has been a presumption that I used full frontal nudity and foul language, neither of which I did. Bear in mind that at least a percentage of the audience took the United Fruit Company reference as a homophobic remark. That was a hurtful situation that occurred years ago, but I’m not going to adjust the book’s frame of reference to explain to the passively ignorant.” Chaykin says that ultimately, he writes to please a very tiny audience: himself . “There have to be at least a couple of guys out there like me!” he observes. “I’ve described my position in this business more than once as ‘Republicans, Democrats, and me!’ The mainstream largely regards me as hopelessly outre and avant garde, while the elitists regard me as hopelessly mainstream—so, that puts me in the middle. I’m trying to reach an audience that is at least beginning to recognize that their intelligence is being insulted by most of the mass-market material, but still enjoys it. They also find appeal in the elitist material, but they’re interested occasionally in entertaining genre fiction. That’s the audience I’m looking to find. “I don’t feel that ‘genre’ is necessarily followed by ‘trash,’ anymore than ‘sex’ is preceded by ‘gratuitous’ or ‘violence’ by ‘senseless.’ Violence...