♪ (heroic music) ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer-artist Howard Chaykin.

Howard, welcome back to Comic Culture.

Hi, Terence.

It's always a pleasure to see you.

Even having spent so long waiting for this particular moment, it's really fabulous.

I'm kind of excited.

I don't get out enough, you know?

Nice to see you.

- Nice to see you.

You know, I do get a chance to see you at conventions, and it's always a fun conversation as we talk about comics and restaurants.

And one thing that I'm amazed about is just the fact that you do comics, well, not just in one genre.

You span a lot.

I mean, I think some of your most famous work is the satirical sci-fi.

You've done swashbuckling sci-fi.

You've done war comics.

You've done comics that are more biographical or rather historical.

So I'm just wondering, as you are going from project to project, how do you sort of manage to do something that's convincing for sci-fi or maybe convincing for 1930s slice of life?

- It helps to not be a one-trick pony.

Comics is so trope-based that frequently talent draws itself.

And I'm not talking about the writers.

For writers, comics is a transient medium.

And it's frequently a place to learn your craft, polish your craft, build a reputation, and then turn your back on it and find something else to do for a living, be it YA fiction, that miserable crap they call YA fiction, television, movies, whatever, or even mainstream fiction.

Comic book artists, for the most part, are frequently stuck by the fact that they've been trained to serve a corporate master with a series of trope-based imagery, imageries.

Significantly, you rarely see actual comic book talent being hired to draw illustrations in mainstream venues.

Rather, they hire illustrators to draw comic book style drawings that reflect the memory of the art director.

In my experience, I never-- as a little boy, I wanted to be a superhero guy because those are the comic books that are most impacted on my reading and my fandom.

And then I discovered EC, and that opened my eyes up to alternative uses for the comic book language.

And when I got into the business, most of the work I got for the first couple of years of my career was under false pretenses because I really wasn't good enough to do the work.

But I got the work because I had one skill set that was very serviceable to writers, which is that I did much of their work for them.

Most comic book artists-- my generation was the last comic book generation of artists who actually read for pleasure.

And after that, most people, male, female, artist, writer, or whatever, don't read at all for fiction.

They get their fiction-- they get their narrative story from movies, television, comics, and stuff like that.

And I've always been an avid reader, and I read widely.

I don't read nothing but super duper laser and neutro dragon space stuff.

I don't read only science fiction.

I don't read any SF at all anymore these days.

But I read a lot of different stuff, and that inspires me in a lot of ways to do different kinds of stories.

I never developed a strong following in superhero stuff, and my contempt and disdain for the material is on record.

So it doesn't really encourage people to say, oh, go on.

He's just kidding.

He's not kidding.

But I like different kinds of stuff.

I like crime stories.

I like historical stuff.

I like filth.

I wish I was better at doing Bigfoot humor, because I'd like to do some Bigfoot humor now and then, but I don't have that skill set.

So a lot of it really boils down to the fact that it's defensive.

Since I'm not a good superhero guy, I got to do a bunch of other stuff.

And none of that other stuff I do really interests anyone.

I mean, I have no commercial footprint whatsoever, except when I do Star Wars or stuff like that.

And when people react to the Star Wars material, they're reacting to the content, not the form.

And one of the things that-- you got a long answer to a short question.

I'm sorry, Thomas.

But one of the things that was a result of the advent of the Comics Court Authority in 1955 was a bifurcation in readership in the audience.

It drove away anyone who was really interested in anything that was potentially transgressive, because there was the cusp of transcendence going on in transgression at that time with EC.

And even with the really shitty EC imitators, they were willing to really pull the plug on good taste.

And I have-- Picasso said good taste is the enemy of art.

And I just-- and in retrospect, I realized what that did was that A, it created the underground.

But that sensibility of the underground never had an opportunity or a venue or a place to return to mainstream stuff, to infect mainstream stuff with an underground sensibility.

And to a certain extent, that's what I do.

I like-- one of the things about Star Wars that I find so irritating is its prissiness, its puritanicalness, its puritanism.

It's just this-- so much of the presentation of adult behavior in mainstream comics is a 15-year-old boy's idea of how such a person would behave and react, written frequently by 30- to 50-year-old men or women.

And I'm just not that interested in that.

I know full well that if actually super creatures existed in our world, we'd be under their thumb from day one, because they don't give a shit about us.

They really don't.

I think one of the most interesting aspects of the James Gunn Superman movie is the video left behind by Bradley Cooper, his dad, about make a harem.

I thought that was a pretty interesting observation.

And it pointed out just how much nurture matters over nature.

Long answer.

- Good answer.

And what I find fascinating-- I do want to go back to this, because you worked with Gil Kane, who was one of these artists who-- I think he was working in the Golden Age, but he also became, I guess, a bigger star in what we call the Silver Age.

So as you were talking about this comic code authority coming along and changing comics from being this medium that has-- I mean, if you go to a bookstore, you can buy young adult books.

You can buy kids' books.

You can buy a novel for a grown-up.

And you can buy, as you said, the smutty stuff.

But in comics, that seemed to be that time when we just chopped off anything sophisticated and said, if it's not four-color heroes, we really don't want to get into the business of printing it.

So as you are working with someone like Gil, who is bridging this gap, are you sort of picking up those stories from the era when you were a reader?

Maybe he was telling you some stuff about a creator that kind of fills in this sense of history that you have for American comics.

- Well, Gil was a complex figure.

He was guilty of everything he was ever accused of.

He was a liar, a cheat, a thief, and a gonath.

He was just profoundly dishonest, morally stained, but incredibly entertaining, complicated, contradictory, and complex, and a font of information.

He got his start in the early 1940s when comics, able-bodied men, were being drafted.

He started working.

He worked in the Kirby Simon studio.

He would do the six pages of a "Newsboy Legion" or "Boy Commando" story.

Jack and Joe would do the splash.

The work was terrible.

It was just really awful.

But they needed to fill pages, which is very much my experience.

I was terrible, too, but they needed to fill pages.

And Gil, like most of the men-- like all the men on whom shoulders I stand, was a terrible writer.

He just really sucked.

And he had ambition to do better work, but he couldn't do it himself.

And the better work that he identified was still in the context of the genre of mainstream material.

Anecdotally, he pushed me really hard into adapting Philip Wiley's "Gladiator" into a four-issue prestige series.

And I did.

I took that book, broke it up, and modernized it.

I took it out of the turn of the 20th century and moved it into the middle of the 20th century.

I transposed the character Hugo Danner's experiences in World War I to Vietnam.

And I gave it to Gil, and he freaked out because his work-- this is much too hard to draw.

I don't know what the **** he was expecting.

I really don't.

But I mean, it's a pulp novel.

There's no question about it.

But it's also a very dark, thoughtful pulp novel, which is-- those are not contradictions in terms.

And ultimately, it was drawn by Russ Heath, who did a really lovely job.

I was really grateful.

But I wrote it expressly for Gil because Gil's hyperbole, the hyperbolic nature of his work, was really right on what I was looking for in "Superstuff."

I mean, Gil's been dead now for, what, like, 25 years?

He died in 2000-- early 2000s, at least 20 years.

His influence remains deep and profound.

But because he was such a **** in so many ways, that influence is disguised and subverted and buried that influence is disguised and subverted and buried by those on whom he imposed an influence.

The work that he did in terms of the choreography of action in comics is just-- it's exemplary.

I mean, people are obsessed with the cliches of his up-the-nose shots and things like that.

But they pay no attention to the fact that over a 50-year career, he constantly reinvented himself.

He became-- he bettered himself.

He improved.

He studied.

He allowed himself to be intimidated by people as diverse as Robert Kaniger and Bern Hogarth.

Both of them were just miserable human beings.

But it intellectually inspired him to read more and read deeper.

But all that deep reading never had any impact on him developing a sense of how to write mainstream material.

He wrote like someone was translating a Marxist dialectic.

I mean, it was just-- it's just dreadful.

There was no sense of-- an easiness of speech.

And the influence he had on me-- I mean, my work looks nothing like Gil's work.

I don't draw anything like him.

But I learned how to sit down at my table for eight hours a day watching him do just that and understand the rhythm of it.

And his influence on me can never be overstated.

But he found his metier in the '60s when Julie Schwartz tapped him for "First Green Lantern" and then "The Atom."

But he was so ornery and thorny and difficult a character and always one step ahead of the law because he was kiting checks.

He was broke all the time.

He could never slow down enough to be better than he was.

He hit a plateau of good and stayed there.

A colleague of mine, an assistant of mine then, now a colleague, we tried to teach him how to work from photographs to move beyond the generic, you know, the generic Gil Kane city, the generic Gil Kane car, the clothing, and everything else.

But never-- he could not do it.

He could not accommodate the slowing down to do research.

And I love doing research, OK?

One of the projects that we considered that died, I wanted to do a pastiche of the life of Tom Mix in comics because Mix is a fascinating character.

And I called it "Code of the West" or "Tall on the Saddle," depending on what day we were talking about.

And he just couldn't want to.

I think it required too much work because it would require him to be-- to go from-- to really delineate the difference between what a cow puncher looked like in real life in the 1890s, who then went and served in the Spanish-American War, and then translated the actual cow puncher experience into the circus nature of early Hollywood movie making about cowboys.

And we concocted a fictional exchange between him and William S. Hart, who-- Hart, who is known-- I'm talking way overhead of your audience because your audience is like super comics.

Hart was a Shakespearean actor of minor renown who played Masala up in Ben-Hur and went back to the Hippodrome.

He was an old man by the time he went in silence.

But he portrayed what he perceived as an actual American gun fighting West, whereas-- and had no actual experience in this, whereas Mix, who actually did have that experience, and created the rodeo circus, the singing-- the silent version of what ultimately became the singing cowboy.

And-- and then Gil-- yeah, and Gil-- Gil never really responded to stuff that was going to require him to push himself farther than he already had pushed himself.

And it frustrated the **** out of me.

- Well, you know, it's-- it's-- it's fascinating to hear these-- these recollections because, you know, I-- I remember encountering Gil as-- as a young reader and then years later coming across some of his work towards the end of his career and always being impressed the fact that he did have that dynamic way of, I guess, a fluidity-- fluidity to the figure that even today is-- is impressive when you look at it.

And I think a lot of modern comics are a little too stiff because they have to be more realistic because we have the Marvel films, I suppose, that we can all say, well, that's not Captain America.

But, you know, one thing that you-- - Eric Larson-- Eric Larson always said that's why guys don't make deadlines anymore because they're stuck drawing real belts and boots and real-- the way-- the way boots actually have soles and laces and things like this.

He's right.

- I mean-- when you look at someone like John Bissema who's doing three or four books a month, the stories are always dynamic.

And you-- you talked about the-- the penciller being part of the storytelling.

So, I mean, I guess the Marvel method is something that isn't used anymore.

But the idea that the artist would be responsible for creating the story beats, the page turns, the-- the conflict is going to unfold the way the-- the storyteller, the visual storyteller, is looking at the-- the maybe the page and a half breakdown of what the issue is about is just-- I guess that's sort of a dying art form because when you go to the bookstore, it's-- - No, because I-- I won't work with anyone who doesn't do a full script.

I refuse to work without a full script.

I mean, I've worked-- I've collaborated with other people.

I will not work Marvel style because it's lazy and cheap.

And it-- it-- it-- it's-- it's another version of the-- of a writer asking an artist, what do you feel like drawing?

When a writer asks an artist, what do you feel like drawing, it indicates that he's not serious about the work that he's doing.

And comics is a frivolous and pointless medium that are difficult to do well.

And at least bring a serious game to a frivolous medium.

That's-- that's my job.

You know, respect the material for what it is.

You know, it's a hack business.

You know, the-- the real talent in comics are the most part of the artists.

But for the most part, their-- their talent is-- is a-- a primitive understanding of sensationalism.

And they don't like drawing the quiet parts.

They like the dirty parts, the big parts, you know, the monster parts.

Because that makes for a saleable piece of artwork.

And I like it all.

You know, I-- I just-- it's all of a piece.

And when I-- and it took me years to learn that it was all of a piece.

Because my work really sucked until I learned that.

And I learned that in the early '80s.

And I began to get a sense of the value of quiet moments.

And a lot of that was learning to read deeper.

And, you know, to-- to out-- to get away from sensationalist pulp fiction and find, you know, more-- less sensational than lurid.

Lurid-- lurid has quiet moments.

And there's-- you can learn a great deal from that.

- And, you know, you-- you mentioned research before.

And we talked a little bit about this when we met at a convention this past summer, that you have a physical, I guess, research file-- many files of images and whatnot.

I'm thinking back to one of the promo images that was put in the crowdfunding for Fargo.

There's a scene of a train going over a large Western bridge.

And I'm just amazed that this is something that, you know, not only you have to sit there and draw, but you-- you got every detail right.

- I mean, secrets of the comics, thank you CGI models.

You can now build models from that.

I mean, I'm-- I'm about-- every day I get up in the morning, I see those filing cabinets, I say, "Is today the day I'm going to bring them out to the dumpster?"

You know, because they're not really there anymore.

You don't need-- you don't need more files anymore.

You have the internet.

Internet is always there, everything you need.

And I haven't looked at-- I haven't gone to my physical swipe files in years.

You know, a lot of it is-- you know, a lot of it is that I can, you know, between you and me, I can make a lot of it up with a pretty clear understanding of how things work.

I mean, one of the things that meant to my generation, those afterwards don't know how to do, is how do hats fit on men's heads?

You know, years ago, my wife and I saw a truly dreadful musical that should have been great called "War Paint."

Two great leads in a story about the war between Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein for the-- for the cosmetics trade.

And it took place between 1935 and 1965.

And it was produced by people whose work previously we'd liked a great deal, but we hated the show.

It was just terrible.

And we're walking out, and I said-- she said, what do you think?

I said, well, I now know that, given a moment's notice, I can fake a woman's dress from 1935 to 1965 without looking at anything.

And the same is true of men's clothes.

You know what I mean?

I mean, I-- you know, the-- the basic suit that a man's-- man wears, the-- the proportions have changed, but they've remained constant for well over 150 years.

You know?

Women's clothes change more.

But I love research.

I truly do.

It's just one of my favorite things in the world.

I mean, I'm-- I'm drawing a-- a new American flag story right now for the American flag omnibus, which will collect everything, 1,100 pages of stuff for next autumn.

And it takes place at an amusement park.

And one of our characters-- our heroes, our-- our-- our principals are dressed in uniforms.

One of our guest cast, our regular guest cast, is dressed for a weekend in a-- in a hot summer climate in an amusement park.

And I couldn't figure out what to do with his shoes.

And I-- and I-- you know, I finally did.

And it was like, OK, that-- that works.

That-- that's kind of cool.

And another character should be wearing Crocs.

I'm not going to fake them.

I'm going to go up and I'll get those pictures.

I need to draw pictures of Crocs, you know, because custom is character.

You know, so that-- that's how that plays out.

- You know, you do mention fashion.

And I was reading through Century West a few days back.

And again, this is a turn of the century, early days of film.

You get all these details right about Edison and his cameras.

But the fashion-- I'm just looking at all of this work that you've done to create the dresses and the suits and-- and the coats and everything.

And again, I'm-- I'm just wondering, you know, you are-- I guess if we take a look at your work in the '80s, you have this-- this ability to do clothing that most artists try to avoid.

Most people love the-- the spandex.

- They're cowards.

No, because-- because they-- all they really care about-- I mean, all they care about is the-- the played figure.

You know, I mean, comically, a couple years ago, a young and very earnest female superhero cartoonist was offering a tutorial on how to desexualize female superheroes, as if male superheroes weren't sexual icons for-- for homosexuals and bromosexuals back to the year one.

You know, you know, please.

I mean, there's-- they're naked running around with their booties hanging out.

The only-- they're wearing a cup.

That's all there is, you know.

I-- I mean, the guys whose work-- I mean, I was really liberated and freed up in this when I read a book called "On the Art of Drawing" by Robert Fawcett.

Fawcett was one of the famous artist school-- famous artists-- who was an artist's artist.

He never achieved the kind of, you know, instant fame that people like, you know, Rockwell or Leyendecker did.

He was not a cover guy.

But he had a really strong narrative sense.

And "On the Art of Drawing" is not about drawing.

It's-- it's-- it's thinking about drawing.

And it's a-- it's a very rambling, didactic rumination.

And he-- he completely contradicts so much of what people like-- like Cor-- like Hogarth did, or even like George Bridgman did.

And he doesn't-- he doesn't care what the leg looks like under a pair of trousers.

He's concerned with what the pair of trousers look like.

It was incredibly liberating and freeing because he-- he was a guy who drew realistically, but had a real understanding and-- and-- and appreciation for the abstract.

You look at Fawcett's work very often, if you isolate portions of it, it just-- just-- it's just this blurry mess.

But he managed to make that blurry mess congeal.

And looking at Fawcett, the way he did drapery, it's very abstract.

It's not realistic.

And I don't really care about realistic.

Now, I'm impressed by it, but I can't do it.

I'm not that good at it.

I'm too-- I haven't got the patience.

You know, so it's-- so I-- I will find a way to convey the idea of cloth on a figure.

about the figure underneath the clothing was incredibly freeing and liberating.

And-- and that-- that's been true since the early '80s.

It really is.

And it's true today.

It's what I'm doing right now.

You know?

- So, you know, in the minute or so that we have left in our conversation, you mentioned a 3D model.

So are you embracing the modern tools of the current age?

- Unequivocally.

Yes, everything but the figure.

I will not use those-- that figure stuff.

It's just-- that-- that's just-- that makes no sense to me.

But, you know, automobiles, environments, absolutely.

No question.

Because it's-- you know, I'm-- I'm not-- I don't want to be an LP record in an MP4 world.

OK?

- That's perfect.

- I have nothing to prove.

- It's-- it's amazing because you do blend this very well.

I mean, in your work, it doesn't seem like you are doing one or the other.

And it-- it-- it works very well.

And-- and Howard, I do want to thank you so much for putting up with the long wait that I made you take before we started our interview today.

It's been a fun half hour.

- Thank-- Terence, thanks so much for having me.

And hope to see you soon on campus.

- And I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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