Table Of Content

Howard CHay kin: Conversations Major Works by Howard Chaykin (as both artist and writer unless otherwise noted) Sword of Sorcery #1–4 (1973); art only “Ironwolf” serial in Weird Worlds #8–10 (1973–1974); artist and co-writer The Scorpion #1–2 (1975) Star Wars #1–10 (1977); artist Empire (1978); artist Cody Starbuck (1978) The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell (1979), artist and co-writer The Stars My Destination (1979), artist “Cody Starbuck” serial in Heavy Metal (May–September 1981) American Flagg! (1983–1985 as writer/artist) The Shadow (1986) Time2: The Epiphany (1986) Time2: The Satisfaction of Black Mariah (1987) Blackhawk (1987–1988) Black Kiss (1988–1989) Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (1990); writer/adaptation Twilight (1991); writer Ironwolf: Fires of the Revolution (1992); co-writer Midnight Men (1993) Power and Glory (1994) Batman: Dark Allegiances (1996) Cyberella (1996–1997); writer Thrillkiller (1997); writer American Century (2001–2003); co-writer Mighty Love (2003) Barnum! (2003); co-writer Bite Club (2004); co-writer Solo #4 (2005) Challengers of the Unknown (2005) Legend (2005); writer/adaptation City of Tomorrow (2005) Century West (2006) Bite Club: Vampire Crime Unit (2006); co-writer Blade (2006–2007); artist War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle (2008); artist Dominic Fortune (2009) Conversations with Comic Artists M. Thomas Inge, General Editor Howard Chaykin: Conversations Edited by Brannon Costello University Press of Mississippi Jackson www.upress.state.ms.us the University Press of Mississippi is a member of the association of american University Presses. Unless otherwise noted, all images copyright © Howard Chaykin, inc. Used with permission. Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi all rights reserved Manufactured in the United states of america First printing 2011 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Chaykin, Howard v. Howard Chaykin : conversations / edited by Brannon Costello. p. cm. — (Conversations with comics artists) includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-1-60473-975-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isBn 978-1-60473-976-3 (eBook) 1. Chaykin, Howard v.—interviews. 2. Cartoonists—United states—interviews. 3. Comic books, strips, etc.—authorship. i. Costello, Brannon, 1975– ii. title. Pn6727.C44Z46 2011 741.5’973—dc22 [B] 2010039052 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data available Contents Introduction Chronology vii xv Howie Chaykin Unmasked! Dave Sim / 1975 3 The Chaykin Tapes 14 Jerry Durrwachter, Ed Mantels, and Kenn Thomas / 1978 The Howard Chaykin Interview Richard Howell / 1982 26 Howard Chaykin 39 Paul Duncan and John Jackson / 1984 Howard Chaykin: Heading for Time2 Ed Bryant / 1985 57 Howard Chaykin Puts It All Back Together Again Kim Thompson / 1987 Howard Chaykin: Home on the Plexus Range Kim Howard Johnson / 1988 79 109 RRRRRRED2 116 Paul Gravett / 1988 Howard Chaykin 121 Robert Hambrecht / 1988 v vi c o n t e n t s Writer/Artist: Howard Chaykin Hugh Surratt and Jeff Gelb / 1989 130 Real World Bravado 164 Kim Howard Johnson / 1994 An Interview with . . . Howard Chaykin Richard Relkin / 1994 Sting of the Scorpion Jon B. Cooke / 2001 172 181 Still Chaykin After All These Years: A Life in American Comics Jon B. Cooke / 2004 My Lunch with Howard Chaykin Philip Schweier / 2004 An Afternoon with Howard Chaykin Brannon Costello / 2010 Index 289 242 250 188 introdUC tion 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 vii viii i n n tt r r o o d d u u c c tt ii o o n n 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 and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, an essential series in the 1980s development of comic books in popular genres dealing with serious themes. But as these interviews reveal, Chaykin would likely be quicker than Miller or Moore to emphasize that dealing with serious themes does not require being so serious all the time: A recurring topic is the essential ingredient of humor in any authentic representation of adult life. i n t r o d u c t i o n ix an example of the innovative approach to page design that made American Flagg! so distinctive. From American Flagg! #1 (1983). The success of American Flagg! earned Chaykin tremendous respect in the comic book industry and thus the opportunity to pursue a variety of radically different projects. His intensely personal Time2 graphic novels filtered autobiography through crime novels, science fiction, Broadway musicals, and jazz. Visually stunning, Time2 offered a vision of barely ordered chaos which built on and extended the innovations of American Flagg! to achieve a synthesis of form and content unlike anything else in the mainstream marketplace of the day. Less personal but no less accomplished were Chaykin’s iconoclastic and controversial takes on established corporate properties. His Blackhawk miniseries reclaimed the history of the heroic left in the United States by recasting the square-jawed World War II aviator as an antifascist communist hounded by a McCarthy-esque politician, and his The Shadow functioned both as a critique of death-obsessed 1980s Cold War culture and a wry look at the chau