Howard Chaykin: Conversations

An Afternoon with Howard Chaykin

250 an afternoon with Howard Chaykin Brannon coStello / 2010 Previously unpublished. Printed by permission of Brannon Costello. this interview was conducted at Chaykin’s home in California in March 2010, with follow-up questions by telephone in april. Howard Chaykin and Brannon Costello copyedited the typescript. Costello: I want to start by asking about class. In a lot of genre entertainment there’s often a kind of cheap populism, but not very much specific attention to the realities of social class. Your work is among the few instances of comics in mainstream genres that takes class seriously—beyond the romanticization of the common people. Even if class isn’t central it’s never invisible. Is that a deliberate choice? Chaykin: My mentor was Gil Kane, who was an autodidact and brilliant in his own way, but hampered by his own needs and wants and financial state, and also by what Gary Groth has called the hyperbolic style that he ultimately developed as his most successful calling card. Gil always insisted that quality work had a point of view, and the idea of applying a personal point of view to the work I do really evolved out of American Flagg! Before that I kept it fairly generic. Flagg! was an expression of some outrage in a commercial venue. I’ve never understood why my work didn’t have a huge commercial following— I’m a cult figure and I’ve come to accept that with a little bit of bitterness and a certain serenity. But since Flagg! I’ve always felt it’s important to let my feelings underpin the material. For the most part I’m a left-liberal guy. I’m a product of a welfare childhood and popular front parents. I grew up in poverty , but I no longer live in poverty. I’m a very lucky man in that I’ve managed to put that aspect of my life behind me, but it’s still there and it resonates in my work all the time. And I think it’s an imperative in the work that I do that I don’t ever lose touch with that—with the poor Jewish background, the ghetto background, with growing up with want. brannon costello / 2010 251 Costello: In terms of your seeing yourself as a cult figure, do you think the emphasis on class in your work is something that prevents identification with the mainstream audience? That it’s not selling the same fantasy that a lot of genre entertainment sells? Chaykin: I don’t think that has anything particularly to do with it. I get really weary of being called a “cynic” by the marketplace and by critics. I’m a skeptic, I’m a romantic realist. If I were a cynic, I would not be doing work with a point of view; rather, I’d be doing work that pandered to the very beliefs that I have contempt for. I’m not saying that the people who are doing the kind of work that achieves huge popular acclaim are necessarily cynical, but rather that that’s the perfect venue for cynicism. If I were to actively take and put my own personal feelings aside and do work that I had no respect for with an eye on solely satisfying the audience, that would be cynicism. On the other hand, I think that the work I do lacks the kind of crowd-pleasing self-satisfaction and self-congratulation and audience-congratulation that’s a guarantor for success. Costello: In addition to themes that show up in the work, did your own class background shape your conception of what you wanted to do as an artist? Not necessarily what stories you wanted to tell, but how you conceived of success as an artist? Chaykin: I don’t think so. I wanted to be the next generation of Gil Kane and Carmine Infantino and Alex Toth and Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert because that was what I knew. All sensibilities are formed and shaped by what previously exists. The audience, for example, can only ask for what it’s already seen but better or different—without really being able to clarify what better or different is. And I was that guy. It never occurred to me that there would be other paths to travel. When I came into the comic book business in 1971, the assumption was that comics would be gone by 1980 because the combination of the paper...