Thanks for stopping by!—Brannon

New artifact with stories from all yr favorites. Available at Sneaky Beans and from that cool girl in class that you can’t quite manage to talk to yet.

A new zine featuring work from lots of pretty amazing people. Look for it in stores near you this week!*

*A/k/a one coffee shop in JXN and maybe a street corner in Brooklyn.

Well, it’s finally here: Sixteen interviews with comics great (and great talker about comics) Howard Chaykin, from an early 1975 interview with a young Dave Sim to a previously unpublished interview with yours truly conducted in 2010.

Chaykin is a fascinating character in the development of American comics: Steeped in the idioms and tropes of mainstream adventure comics, working mainly in the monthly serial format favored by the industry’s major players, he’s also a fierce proponent of comics as a complex medium capable of offering unique aesthetic experiences and dealing with politics, culture, and human nature with intelligence and humor. Comics may be stupid junk, Chaykin’s work tells us, but they don’t have to be. For anyone interested in the development of comics as an art form and as an industry, Chaykin’s appraisals—sometimes caustic, sometimes hilarious—of his contemporaries and their employers are must reading. I’m glad to have had this opportunity to bring them together and bring them to light again, most of them for the first time since their initial publication.

Assembling this book further cemented my firm belief that Chaykin’s contribution to comics is broader, weirder, and more varied than even many of his staunch fans usually acknowledge. The tendency to see Chaykin as playing endless variations on the first three issues of American Flagg! vol. 1 is understandable—those are aggressively ambitious comics, comics designed specifically to make you feel bad about everything else on your pull list, and many of his most persistent themes and spectacular formal effects are present there in highly concentrated form. But such a view neglects how Chaykin’s art and writing are perpetually evolving, how what seem to be the basic premises of his visual style and his thematic preoccupations are constantly being challenged (as I suggested in this post on the second year of American Flagg!). A major takeaway from the book for me is a sense of Chaykin’s basic restlessness: the Chaykin of “Cody Starbuck” is not the Chaykin of Flagg! is not the Chaykin of Time² is not the Chaykin of City of Tomorrow, and on and on. Chaykin’s range of influences is deep and wide—and completely idiosyncratic—and his reflections on how his relationship to those influences has changed over the years offer valuable insight into his craft. They also underscore just how omnivorous a medium comics can be, capable of adapting visual styles from a diverse array of traditions into the service of narrative.

The book is available from the publisher, as well as from Amazon. Barnes and Noble has it at 10% off (as of this writing). The best discount I’m seeing at the moment is at Sci-Fi Genre, where it’s listed at $31.99. If you prefer to do your buying through the direct market, it should be in comic shops as early as this Wednesday.

I don’t want to rehash the acknowledgments page here, but: Much appreciation is due the crack team at the University Press of Mississippi, including Walter Biggins, Valerie Jones, Shane Gong, and Steve Yates for their patient and unflagging assistance throughout the process of putting this book together. Thanks to Seth Kushner for use of the cover photo. I’m glad to have this book out in the world and delighted at how great it looks.

Batman and Robin #21
Batman Incorporated #3
BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods #3
Captain America and the First 13 #1

Hulk #30. Hand it to Jeff Parker: If he is writing a comic whose cover promises a compound red-green Hulk, then by golly he is going to give you a compound red-green Hulk on the inside. In this Parker, perhaps unwittingly, helps make up for one of the great disappointments of my youthful comics reading life, West Coast Avengers #30:

Come on, doesn’t that look amazing? Wouldn’t you have flipped out over that if you were 13? But o villainy most foul: There is no composite Avenger inside. So my thanks to Jeff Parker for healing the psychic paper cuts of my adolescence.

Incredible Hulks #624

New Avengers #10. Hey, so this Avengers book has Howard Chaykin drawing Dominic Fortune narrowly escaping being murdered by a sexy Nazi spy in stockings. Can you imagine how much better every Avengers book would be if it featured a Chaykin protagonist doing something so distinctively Chaykin-y? What if, at the end of the Kree-Skrull War, instead of Rick Jones extruding a bunch of golden age heroes from his psyche, a transvestite prostitute murdered a vampire with a Nazi blowjob and then listened to some jazz records? The Kree-Skrull War would definitely deserve its reputation then.

Punisher: In the Blood #4. I cannot believe how much Rick Remender has made me care about the Punisher.

Thoreau at Walden. I loved reading this book panel-by-panel; the muted brown tones allow Porcellino to pull off some lovely low-tech chiaroscuro effects, and Porcellino’s rendering of subtle moments—Thoreau lying in bed listening to a whip-poor-will—are achingly effective. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that in focusing so much on Thoreau’s transcendent communion with nature, Porcellino does a disservice to the complex voice that Thoreau develops in Walden. Thoreau is in awe of nature, sure, and maybe that’s even the dominant mode. But he’s also snarky, caustic, and sarcastic—coming across sometimes, frankly, as a self-righteous prick. And it wasn’t until I picked up on that side of Thoreau that I really began to appreciate Walden as a great work of literature instead of an interminable collection of platitudes about living simply, its only contemporary relevance as a source of material to be quoted endlessly over images of flocks of geese at the end of CBS Sunday Morning.

To be sure, no one’s afternoon is going to be wasted by spending an hour or two with Porcellino’s adaptation; and as the adapter, it’s his prerogative to pick and choose which elements to highlight. But I do wish Porcellino had grappled with the thornier aspects of Thoreau—I think it would have been a more interesting book, and I’d be curious to see how such a critical engagement might inflect Porcellino’s voice in his own comics.

Venom #1

Sunday funnies in the Baton Rouge Advocate
Assorted webcomics (same as last week)

Afrodisiac. Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have a (black) dynamite high concept: What if the tropes and idioms of blaxploitation narratives had come to dominate mainstream comics the way that the tropes and idioms of superhero narratives have? How strange, how uncanny, would it be to read a sampling of stories from a world in which these conventions were naturalized in the same way that the no-less-bizarre conventions of superhero comics have been here? I thoroughly enjoyed Afrodisiac, but I can’t help but feel that Rugg and Maruca could have pressed further: I liked the array of imagined covers from a variety of genres and eras (Bronze Age Marvel, Dell funny animal, EC horror, romance, shojo manga, et cetera), but the “excerpts” from various Afrodisiac comics are all drawn in roughly the same style. Why not bring the same variety that we see on the covers to the narrative portions as well? And as long as you’re imagining a world dominated by the blaxploitation genre, why not reflect on the business and economic decisions that led to that dominance? Ultimately the book comes off as fun but slight; maybe that’s all its creators were going for, but it feels like a missed opportunity nonetheless.

Black Heart Billy. You read Tim Jones’s interview with Rick Remender, right?

Fight!

Hark, A Vagrant!

Incognito: Bad Influences #4. Colorist Val Staples is killing it here.

Incredible Hulks #623. My plan was just to stick with the Parker/Hardman Hulk series (justly praised by Chris Sims here) but the issue’s jaunt to the Savage Land convinced me to give it a shot. I actually didn’t realize that Greg Pak was back on board as writer; he wrote some of the best Hulk stories of recent years, so I’ll stick around for a while and see how this plays out.

Joe the Barbarian #8

“Portrait of the Artist as a Young %A?*!” from Art Spiegelman’s reissued Breakdowns.

Secret Warriors #25

Shadow #9 (1988)

Tales of the Fear Agent

Thor #620

Thunderbolts #154. I was perfectly okay with Jeff Parker not explaining why it made any kind of sense for the Man-Thing to join the Thunderbolts, but then we would have missed a clever and graceful story that makes the Man-Thing more monstrous and more human all at once. Parker is adept at pulling together pieces from Marvel’s big patchy shared universe to develop character and generate emotional resonance, not just to earn nerd points. Although nerd points are not to be sneezed at! I’m hoping to redeem mine for a new Schwinn 10-speed. (This reminds me that I once actually sent away for the Captain O sales kit. I didn’t sell much.)

Secret Avengers #10

Secret Six #31 This comic had a very last-season-of-Angel feel. I mean that in the best way.

Sunday funnies in the Baton Rouge Advocate

Uptight #4. Jordan Crane uses visual clutter in a highly appealing way in these two very different stories.

Witchfinder #2

. . . Contessa had her mind on her business, y’all.

Action Comics #898

Amazing Spider-Man #654.1. I dug this intro to the new Flash Thompson/Venom status quo, although it maybe moved the inevitable “when will the symbiote take over” storyline farther down the road than I would have liked so soon. Then again, I’m someone who always complains that not enough happens in any given issue of a superhero comic, so really I guess I’m just hard to please.

Captain America #615.

DeadpoolMAX #5. If you’re going to write a comic about a villainess sadistically murdering a group of cub scouts, you should definitely get Kyle Baker to draw it.

Fantastic Four #588. I liked Nick Dragotta’s art on this mostly dialogue-free requiem for the FF’s fallen member. An issue-long “in memoriam” issue like this is tough to pull off in the superhero genre, since we know that Johnny Storm is coming back at some point, and since Hickman knows we know, and so forth. Smartly, Hickman doesn’t dwell too much on the melodrama but instead focuses on how the various characters’ reactions to their friend’s death set new plot threads in motion. You know what it made me think of, though? Justice League America #40, the funeral for Mister Miracle issue. Still the best superhero funeral ever—an all the more impressive achievement since if you were reading the ongoing Mister Miracle title at the time you knew for sure that he wasn’t dead. Adam Hughes turned in some lovely moody artwork on that, and Giffen and DeMatteis nailed the various JLers responses. I’m pretty sure I cried.

Hulk #28.

Iron Man 2.0 #1. I might keep reading this just because they gave at least a passing mention to Rhodey’s stint in The Crew in the character history text piece. Also, there is apparently a story where War Machine travels back to WW2 and fights alongside the Howlers? I’m going to need to read that.

Knight and Squire #3, 5. Paul Cornell’s playful and sweet-natured adventure series takes a sudden turn into the darker DCU proper. I don’t know what the plans are for the characters after this but I hope Cornell keeps working on something in this vein—the DC line-up needs it.

Thunderbolts #152-153. Jeff Parker’s King Hyperion is a great heel.

X-Men #8. This arc probably isn’t an official audition for Gischler to write Spider-Man, but maybe it should be?

Like zen, whatever you expect Practicing Zen to be, it will be different. Think of a source-book on the origins of zen, like the scholarly source-books that we use today to study zen’s origins in Chinese Buddhism and its coming to full flower in Japan. Such source-books are necessarily fragmentary, since much of the original writing has been lost. Now translate that source-book to the 25th century, and replace the fragments from China and Japan with fragments from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the only remaining records of how a version of zen (called Easy) took over the U. S. Throw in a wildly humorous and semi-science-fictional version of history, and spice it up with anecdotes about and utterances by fictional zen masters, who quarreled among themselves.

You can get it at Amazon right now. My copy is wending its way Baton Rouge-ward and I’m looking forward to diving in to a book that is sure to be strange and disorienting—in the very best ways.

Batman and Robin #20

Blackhawk #217 (1966)

BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods #2. Fury’s Tenets of Reading Speculative Fiction #27: A well executed infodump is a thing of beauty. Recognize.

Brave and the Bold #157 (1979). Batman and Kamandi! Also notable because Jim Gordon asks this question of a kidnapped senator: “What did Extortion, Inc. want with you?” Gee, I dunno, Jim! We better call Batman in on this one! No wonder Gotham is the crime capital of the world.

Casanova: Gula #2.

Detective Comics #492 (1980). Notable for slice-of-life Bob Haney/Bob Oskner short about the “Gotham-not-Brooklyn Bridge” and a Bob Rozakis/Romeo Tanghal/Vince Coletta Man-Bat story in which the Man-Bat reveals that he is the least curious superhero of all time.

Devil Dinosaur #3 (1978)

Incognito: Bad Influences #3

Marvel Team-Up #59-60 (1977). Featuring Spider-Man, Yellowjacket, and the Wasp. Boy, someone needs to write about the gender politics of superhero comics in the late 1970s that begins with this Claremont/Byrne collaboration. It’s clearly an attempt to shift the Wasp away from her dizzy dame characterization and to make her more of a credible physical threat in battles, but the solution they hit on—she’s driven by judgment-impairing intense emotion over the supposed death of Yellowjacket, who it turns out isn’t dead at all, and also had been secretly injecting her with a serum to increase her powers—is, let us say, problematic. (On a side note, isn’t it crazy that there is no ongoing Wasp series, or even a planned mini or anything? I mean, aside from the fact that she’s dead right now? Now that Gossip Girl’s popularity has peaked a year or two ago, isn’t this the perfect time for Marvel to debut a series about a strategically daffy but secretly iron-willed socialite heiress superhero? Possibly drawn by Colleen Coover? I would read this, Marvel.)

New Avengers #9. I think we can all agree that a Howard Chaykin-drawn Nick Fury: Caribbean Nazi Hunter series should definitely be in the works.

Our Fighting Forces #174 (1977). Featuring the Losers! Why can’t I go online right now and buy wallpaper featuring Joe Kubert’s Losers covers? I would totally decorate the nursery with them so our children could learn to be ever vigilant against the Nazis, even—especially—when it looks like things are finally going their way.

Osborn #3

Power Man and Iron Fist #1

Sabre #1 (1982). There is something sublime about confronting the sheer volume of text in this comic. Not sublime as in “super-duper,” but as in “too vast to comprehend with the rational mind, and yet somehow there is something pleasurable in the pain of the failed attempt to do so.” I think there is some lovely atmospheric Paul Gulacy artwork under the word balloons, but who can really say?

The Scorpion #3 (1975). The third and final issue of this Atlas/Seabord title, published after editorial conflicts drove series creator Howard Chaykin across the street to Marvel, where he re-christened the character Dominic Fortune. (Or so the story goes; I think the similarities between the characters are vastly overstated.) The new story, by Jim Craig and Gabriel Levy, updates the setting to the 70s, with a new character bearing the name, this one a more traditional superhero type. There’s a pretty good golem rampage here.

Superboy #212 (1975). Actually, forget that: The conclusion of the Legion of Super-Heroes back-up story in this issue is way, way creepier than anything in MTU.

Superman/Batman #79

Superman Family #188 (1978). Jose Garcia-Lopez cover!

Weird War Tales #108 (1981). You would think it would be impossible to write a boring story about the Creature Commandos, wouldn’t you?

Alright—off to Atlanta to talk about Captain America and the South.