Authors: Michael Chabon
What Chaykin uniquely intuited, perhaps through the process of adapting Bester in the early graphic novel
The Stars My Destination
(1979), was that with its fundamental liability to fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the layering of text and images; with its multiple margins into which ever denser images and subtexts
and submargins could be crammed; with its ability to hyperjump a million light-years out to the edge of the galaxy in the space of a quarter-inch gap between panels; with its mongrel vocabulary, its clandestine heritage of sex and violence, its nature as corporate-owned media outlet and mass-produced object; and above all with its accumulated history of stale, outmoded, and rotting bright futures, the comic book was perfectly suited not merely to adapting but in some measure to embodying the hybridized, trashy, garish future of simulacra and ad copy that comics had been hinting at over the past decade. Other comics creators had written or drawn the American dystopia; Howard Chaykin went and built one.
4.
I fear I have made reading
American Flagg!
sound like a grim, possibly even dreadful task. In fact from the first panel the strip, almost twenty-five years later, remains completely exhilarating. Part of the reason for this is the virtuoso display Chaykin puts on, with a certain vandalistic Brooklyn-boy glee, of how utterly to scramble the standard deck of page layouts that comic-book artists had been shuffling and reshuffling for years. Chaykin played, dazzlingly, with the effect you could get from just a handful of dull square subpanels arranged across a big single-panel page on which, in that one big panel, something violent and wild was taking place. All that gorgeous Caniffian line, putting the flutter into a lacy cuff, setting a gleam on the visor of a leather hat, flinging a spray of blood into the air, all that lavish, nonchalant beauty plastered over with Jewish gags, neon signs, talking-head nattering, tough-guy commentary, scientific annotation! If Chaykin’s work comes squarely out of the tradition of comics art that likes to stand back and notice how pretty it is—a tradition that
includes greats such as Alex Raymond, Mac Raboy, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Neal Adams—it is perhaps unique in that it also derives, less obviously, from another grand comics tradition from E. Segar to Al Capp to Kurtzman and the
Mad
men to Kyle Baker: the tradition of mocking wordplay, snide commentary, caricature, and the irrepressible, compulsive, sometimes perilous need to undercut more or less everything but especially comics art that likes to stand back and notice how pretty it is.
The characteristic Chaykin facial expression is the raised eyebrow—of irony, skepticism, puckishness, a satirist’s rage. In his work, on his characters’ faces, the raised eyebrow takes on an iconic power. It’s a combination of punctuation mark, the line that indicates a flexing muscle, and the kind of ripple or wave that cartoonists use to suggest motion, explosion, velocity, shock. I have never seen a published photo of Chaykin in which he fails to sport one himself.
5.
People have been imitating, swiping from, and building on Chaykin’s experiments in panel arrangement, text-balloon placement, and parallel narration for over two decades now and the thing still startles and disturbs the eye. It’s like
Citizen Kane
in that way. 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.
Citizen Kane
remains an acknowledged influence on the movies and the comics that followed it. The debt to
American Flagg!,
while obvious, has been neglected. Its two great mid-’80s comics
successors, Frank Miller’s
The Dark Knight Returns
and
Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, are hard to imagine without its example; those two books in turn influenced much that followed.
American Flagg!,
in both its style and its concepts, fed the literary genre of cyberpunk that has since watered the entire landscape of popular culture, from comics and computer games to movies and television programs. Again, I’m not arguing that Chaykin invented dystopian comics or cyberpunk, only that he articulated a set of tropes and “packaged” them in a way that brought them to durable, ravishing life.
If
American Flagg!
were merely influential or innovative, its relative retreat from view in the past two decades would be more understandable; the same goes for its oft-remarked effectiveness as prophecy. Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. So Arthur C. Clarke predicted the global satellite network—so what? He also predicted the widespread use of hovercrafts and the dominance by 2001 of the commercial Earth-Moon space trade by Pan-Am Airlines (d. 1991). Such prescience or the obligation to display it is, more than bad writing, the element of a work of sf that most readily dooms it—regardless of whether the predictions turn out to be right or wrong. Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children’s understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make. If
American Flagg!
successfully predicted certain aspects of the hundred-ply world we live in now—and I think of it every time I see a lurid news headline about a pedophilic pop-star crawl under breaking footage of carnage or disaster, while a network meat-puppet intones the latest official spin—then that very success would condemn it to seem, in time, eternally passé.
It is not, ultimately, the brilliance of its technique or the aptness of the future it imagined that makes
American Flagg!
an enduring, necessary, and neglected pleasure, but the impeccable pop artisanship that produced it. So many of the purest pop masterpieces, from Michael Ritchie’s
Smile
to Emmit Rhodes’s self-titled first solo album, are neglected ones; even an acknowledged pop masterpiece like
Pet Sounds
has never quite shed its initial air of puzzlement-inducing letdown.
American Flagg!
has all the modern virtues that would seem to guarantee its place in the pantheon of seminal pop artifacts: irony, attitude, knowingness, cynicism, a familiarity with corruption and existential bad faith, a rapturous, at times hyperbolic sense of style, and that insatiable compulsion, mentioned earlier, to undercut. Its hero, Reuben Flagg, is not just a preening, self-regarding piece of beefcake—he’s a redundant one, having been replaced, in his starring role on
Mark Thrust, Sexus Ranger,
by a hologram; and a self-conscious one. Nobody is more aware of the irony and implicit satire of his situation than Flagg. On the surface, he ought to be an ideal hero, and
American Flagg!
an ideal
narrative, for our time.
But for all his cynicism and archness of eyebrow, Howard Chaykin, like so many pop artisans, draws the greatest part of his strength from the source that underlies all true visions of pop perfection: romance. Chaykin is, fundamentally, a romancer; “a storyteller,” as the cliché has it, “in the grand tradition.” Cynical, pompous or jaundiced, self-aware, embittered or corrupted, his heroes remain heroes, and the stories he tells never stray very far from their roots in Sabatini novels,
The Shadow
and
Doc Savage,
Chandler, Hammett, the films of Michael Curtiz. True friendship, true love, dying for a belief, self-sacrifice, even American ideals—such things, though he almost hates to admit it, are still possible in Chaykin’s work. It’s the instinct for popular narrative, for everything that Chaykin, in conversation, dismissively and affectionately terms “pulp,” that guarantees Chaykin’s status as a true pop artisan, neglect and all. But it’s that deep ambivalence toward romance, the need to undercut, that brings a problematic wobble to all Chaykin’s work. Like Paul Simon, who at once has felt and knows to be illusory the transcendent rapture of a killer hook, Chaykin’s sense of romance and its conventions is always, at the same time, a sense of betrayal by them. In his earliest comics, drawing flashy, somewhat raw adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s (already ironic) sword and sorcery tales, and creating short-lived titles such as
Iron Wolf
and
The Scorpion,
romance, the unabashed fabulating impulse of the storyteller, tended to win out. A cool head, quick reflexes, a steadfast purpose, and the love or memory of a good woman—along with that crucial Sabatinian “gift for laughter and a sense that the world was mad”—these were sufficient, or nearly so, to any challenge or evil the hero might encounter. In his recent work, although Chaykin’s technique has attained the kind of effortless polish that, as with all experienced artists, is a synonym for correctly valuing his own strengths and weaknesses, the cynicism, the undercutting, the mockery, revisionism, and satire have tended to gain the upper hand.
American Flagg!
stands at the glorious midpoint, at that difficult fulcrum between innocence and experience, romance and disillusion, adventure and satire, the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic, between the stoned, rangy funkiness of the seventies and the digitized cool of the present day, between a time when outrage was a moral position and a time when it has become a way of life. Such balancing acts have always been the greatest feats of American popular art.
1.
C
HARLTON
H
ESTON AND A
savagely coiffed vixen, wrapped in animal skins, riding horseback along a desolate seashore, confronted by the spike-crowned ruin of the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand: everyone knows how the world ends. First radiation, plague, an asteroid, or some other cataclysm kills most of humankind. The remnants mutate, lapse into feudalism, or revert to prehistoric brutality. Old cults are revived with their knives and brutal gods, while tiny noble bands cling to the tatters of the lost civilization, preserving knowledge of machinery, agriculture, and the missionary position against some future renascence, and confronting their ancestors’ legacy of greatness and destruction.
Ambivalence toward technology is the underlying theme, and thus we are accustomed to thinking of stories that depict the end of the world and its aftermath as essentially science fiction. These stories feel like science fiction too, because typically they deal
with the changed nature of society in the wake of cataclysm, the strange new priesthoods, the caste systems of the genetically stable, the worshipers of techno-death, the rigid pastoral theocracies in which mutants and machinery are taboo, etc.; for inevitably these new societies mirror and comment upon our own. Science fiction has always been a powerful instrument of satire, and thus it is often the satirist’s finger that pushes the button or releases the killer bug.
This may help to explain why the post-apocalyptic mode has long attracted writers not generally considered part of the science-fiction tradition. It’s one of the few subgenres of science fiction, along with stories of the near future (also friendly to satirists), that may be safely attempted by a mainstream writer without incurring too much damage to his or her credentials for seriousness. The anti–science fiction prejudice among some readers and writers is so strong that in reviewing a work of science fiction by a mainstream author a charitable critic will often turn to words such as “parable” or “fable” to warm the author’s bathwater a little, and it is an established fact that a preponderance of religious imagery or an avowed religious intent can go a long way toward mitigating the science-fictional taint, which also helps explain the appeal to mainstream writers such as Walker Percy of the post-apocalyptic story, whose themes of annihilation and re-creation are so easily indexed both to the last book of the New Testament and the first book of the Old. It’s hard to imagine the author of
Love in the Ruins
writing a space opera.
There is also a strong current of conventional hard-edged naturalism at work in much post-apocalyptic science fiction that may further serve to draw and to reassure the mainstream writer. If the destruction is sufficiently great, life and its appurtenances are reduced to a finite set, mitigating the demand for baroque
inventiveness imposed by other kinds of science fiction, while the extreme state of the natural world—global ice, global goo, global ocean—serves to reflect the extremes of human psychology, of grace under the ultimate pressure. The great British tradition of the post-disaster novel pioneered by M. P. Shiel’s
The Purple Cloud
and John Collier’s forgotten masterpiece
Tom’s A-Cold,
retooled in the fifties by John Wyndham and John Christopher and brought to a kind of bleak perfection by J. G. Ballard in the early sixties, is very much a mainstream naturalist tradition, cold-eyed and unadorned, and novels like Christopher’s
No Blade of Grass
and Wyndham’s
The Day of the Triffids
were popular successes that found a wide readership. For the post-apocalyptic is also a mode into which mainstream readers may venture without risking the stain of geekdom.
The status of relative legitimacy enjoyed by the literature of global disaster may in part result from the fig leaf that a satiric or religious purpose provides, and from the congeniality to conventional realism of a world without supercomputers, starships, or eight-foot feline warriors from the planet Kzin. But perhaps it is mostly a measure of the growing sense in the minds of readers and writers alike, since the mid-twentieth century, of the plausibility, even the imminence, of the end of the world. Instantaneous global pandemics, melting ice caps, and transgenic eco-calamity have joined large-scale nuclear exchange as stalwarts of the front page of the daily newspaper. Meanwhile the old retro apocalypse is selling better than ever these days, reformulated in science-fictional packaging as the Left Behind novels.