Howard Chaykin is a comic book legend. Being the self deprecating cat that he is, Chaykin might disagree with that but it is undoubtedly true. He first appeared on the comic book scene during the 70s boom. He did a lot of work for the big two including drawing the influential Star Wars comic series. But Chaykin truly did not come into his own until his time, generating creator owned works like American Flagg and revamps such as Blackhawk and The Shadow. Over the years Chaykin has also written works for other artists to draw, one of my favorites of this is the 1980s adaptation of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser short stories, created by Fritz Leiber, that Hellboy creator Mike Mignola drew. I got a chance to talk with Chaykin from his home in California.
Buy Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you working on today?
Howard Chaykin: Right now Im penciling Punisher #50.
DRE: How long have you been on that?
HC: This is my first issue.
DRE: Are you writing that too?
HC: No, Im mostly writing for others and drawing with others, though I am writing and drawing a project, that has not been announced. Im finishing up working on Blade. Im doing an issue of Wolverine and Im doing this issue of The Punisher, so Im juggling those three books right now.
DRE: What made you decide to do stuff like Blade and The Punisher?
HC: They seemed like interesting gigs. Im having a great time working with [Blade writer Marc] Guggenheim. Ive never worked with Garth [Ennis] before. Garths scripts are terrific and Ive always wanted to work with him. Ive always liked drawing the Wolverine and Jason Aarons is a very talented young writer. Ive said this more than once in print and it remains true, Marc is an astonishingly artist friendly writer. He really knows how to write scripts for artists. I cant quite explain without showing you the script. But it breaks down very efficiently, gently, cleverly and smartly.
DRE: Did you do such mainstream books in the 90s?
HC: In the 90s I worked in television. I did very little comics. I had a television career that hit the shoals in the early 2000s. I decided I didnt want to go back. I felt it was time to leave television and become a human being again.
DRE: I thought you left Mutant X. Is that not true?
HC: I didnt quit. I was fired.
DRE: Do you want to talk about why?
HC: No, not especially. It was a pleasant experience while it lasted. It wasnt a pleasant experience at that point. Frankly I was happy to have the job but I wasnt all that upset to leave it.
I was fired in June and the way television business works is that jobs become available in May and in November so that even if I wanted to go back to work all I could do was freelance and there wasnt that much freelance. I decided that since I had all those months I might as well do some comics. So I pitched a book at DC Comics on a Friday and they bought it on a Tuesday. I did the book and I decided on the basis of that I wasnt particularly interested in going back to television. I asked my wife how she would feel about it and she was delighted because she felt I had become a sort of unpleasant person and I never went back.
DRE: Was Barnum the book you pitched for DC?
HC: No I did that while I was in television. It was Mighty Love which I wrote and drew. I discovered that taking ten years off was good for me. It made me a bit more improvisational and looser in terms of my approach to the material, much less automatic. I wouldnt recommend it to everybody but a ten year hiatus from drawing served me very well.
After Mighty Love I found I had a good time doing it and that my chops were in pretty good shape. One of the things I learned in the couple of years of being back is that this is a mainstream branded business. Ill still do creator-owned material now and then. But I also feel that its worth my time and energies to invest myself in mainstream branded material and it has been a lot of fun.
DRE: How has doing mainstream comics changed?
HC: I dont really know. I dont pay that much attention to it. I do the work that I do. I see some stuff but Im not in the center of the business as I was in the 70s and 80s. I dont necessarily think of myself as a marginal figure but Im certainly not at the center of the business and thats as it should be. Its a business that looks after new guys, new talent and good talent and thats fine because its like rock and roll. We tend to like work produced by people whose sensibilities are like our own.
DRE: If Richard Corben can become hot again, cant Howard Chaykin?
HC: I dont really know or particularly care. I havent seen Richard in years. I ran into him again in Kansas City about a year ago. His work continues to astonish. Hes really talented.
DRE: Did someone from Marvel actively pursue you?
HC: Brian Bendis called me and asked me if I wanted to draw an issue of the New Avengers which I was glad to do because Captain America is one of my favorite characters in Marvel. Brian is a huge talent and Im a big fan of Powers. It was an opportunity to do something completely out of left field. His storytelling and mine are very different. We approach stories very differently, but we found a happy medium. [Marvel editor] Aubrey Sitterson called me and asked me to do Blade expecting me to say no. I was very hesitant at first until I read Marc Guggenheims proposal.
DRE: Are you inking yourself?
HC: Of course. Ive never been able to have inkers. I always look in awe at guys like [Jim] Starlin and [Neal] Adams who can do these tightly rendered pencils. I cant do that. My pencils are schematics. I do a polish and finish in ink. It is a multistage process because after I ink I re-ink and then I ink again. An average page crosses my desk four or five times before I deliver it.
DRE: Do you use any computers for the artwork?
HC: Some.
DRE: [laughs] Would it be things we would notice?
HC: You tell me.
DRE: I read that one of your earliest assignments was drawing Fafhrd.
HC: Yes, it was my first feature back in the early 70s but it wasnt very good. It was a time when Conan seemed to be doing well for Marvel and DC was looking for various properties to do as a comic book. I did four or five issues. Frankly I was the least talented and least skilled or gifted of my generation so I did the best I could with what I had, which wasnt much. When the opportunity came to do the scripts for Fafhrd, I jumped at it. I love the material. Leiber was profoundly influential on me as a writer. I always felt that the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were a profound influence on the types of graphic novels I did back in the 80s for First Comics. Fafhrd, to me, are crime noir told in the manner of sorcery.
DRE: Was Fafhrd published by DC?
HC: DC had the rights back in the early 70s when I did it. Marvel published the ones I wrote for Mignola. Dark Horse picked up the license so theyre reprinting those books.
DRE: So you dont own the creator rights to the comics that you did with Mignola?
HC: No, they were done as work for hire. Theyre adaptations of Fritz Leibers stories.
DRE: Was it your idea to work with Mike?
HC: Carl Potts put us together. But I knew Mike when he had hair and was skinny.
DRE: [laughs] Did you select the stories to adapt or was that not one of the options?
HC: I dont recall. I honestly dont. The one thing that we both wanted to do and never got to, was the adaptation of the only Fafhrd novel, Swords of Lankhmar. Both of us wanted to do that but the material didnt sell well enough. We did most of the other stories so that was pretty satisfying and we had great fun doing it.
DRE: Did you ever get the chance to meet Fritz Leiber?
HC: Many years ago in the mid 70s. Michael Moorcock introduced me to Fritz and Philip Jos Farmer at the same time.
DRE: Oh wow.
HC: Yeah, it was quite an evening. It was at a science fiction enclave and Asimov was there. All the dead guys in science fiction.
DRE: I read that one of the things that attracted you to the Fafhrd stories was that you felt Leiber put in some autobiographical elements.
HC: Leiber definitely did that. There are different ideas about who the Mouser was based on. I always thought it was Stanley G. Weinbaum. I loved the material, as I said in the introduction of the book, Lankhmar is New York City as seen through the scrim of the sword and sorcery world.
DRE: Im not sure if it was Mikes art or your script but the comic adaptation seems joyous.
HC: The thing that separates Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from other sword and sorcery books is that there is an enormous amount of comedy and humor. Very few sword and sorcery scripts had that because they were so deadly serious. You dont see a lot of comedy in the work of H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. His father was a very successful Broadway character actor. If you want to see what Leiber looked like, go see a movie called The Sea Hawk. Fritz Leibers dad, Fritz Sr., plays one of the judges. Leiber was a very sophisticated, smart guy, very urbane and that showed in the work to a profound degree.
DRE: Im always discovering work of yours Ive never seen. Have you done much sword and sorcery work?
HC: I did a little bit of Kull and Red Sonja. But I look back on that stuff now and its okay, nothing very interesting. I didnt really find what I was interested in writing or drawing until I was in my late 20s, early 30s. I stumbled around most of the first ten years of my career. It wasnt until I did a series of graphic novels for the late Byron Preiss that I discovered where I really wanted to go with my stuff. That was with American Flagg followed by Time2 followed by Black Kiss. I found my voice. I dont deny the work but I do have a fairly realistic sense of its value and importance and it just wasnt. So I wouldnt have the interest in drawing that sort of stuff now.
When I was a kid there used to be a TV series called Science Fiction Theater with Truman Bradley, whoever Truman Bradley was. It was a low budget science fiction series and all the stories took place in modern times. I was interested in space opera. I was interested in space ships and ray guns and giant monsters and shit like that. By the time Star Wars came along, Id lost all interest in that kind of science fiction and became interested in crime fiction. The science fiction I read today is more crime fiction with an element of sf, if I read any of it at all. So I dont really care about fantastical stuff very much. Im not interested in space opera. I can do it, but I dont read it.
DRE: Not even the stuff you liked when you were younger?
HC: No, the golden age of comics and science fiction may be 12 but I never cared that much. In the mid 1970s, Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson turned me onto the American detective story, until then my entertainment reading had been science fiction and porn. When I discovered the crime novel, particularly Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and to a lesser extent Rex Stout, my interest in the science fiction novel went away. I think it was Jeffrey OBrien who said that crime fiction is just as fantastical as science fiction, its based on observed reality. Its that observed reality that I began gaining interest in.
DRE: So what is Blade then?
HC: Its a crime book.
DRE: I havent read it yet sorry.
HC: What the fuck are you doing?
DRE: [laughs] Im waiting for the trade.
HC: You people. I tell you, you bitch and moan about comics and then you dont support them.
DRE: Theyre $3 apiece! [laughs]
HC: Whiner! What are you going to do, eat? You could stand to lose some weight I bet.
DRE: I could.
HC: I just lost some weight. I bought more comics.
DRE: With Black Kiss, it sounds like you took your two loves, porn and crime fiction, and put them together.
HC: Black Kiss was done at a very dark part of my life. Were still talking about the serious possibility of doing a sequel. An extended prequel; and sequel that will happen both before and after the actual events of the original year.
DRE: What will they be about?
HC: It will explore Beverlys early life over the course of the 20th century. Its an erotic horror story that takes place over 100 years.
DRE: Do you know when you might get to it?
HC: Beats the shit out of me. Right now Im pretty busy and I take my commitments very seriously. Unlike a lot of my colleagues, when I commit to a job, I actually do it.
DRE: I know that Dark Horse wants to do a Fafhrd movie. Would you be involved?
HC: They dont want me. They want A list talent and Im not that guy.
DRE: Hows the Power and Glory movie going?
HC: I have no idea.
DRE: Is there a screenplay yet?
HC: Not yet. I havent heard anything yet. Im looking forward to it. Im very excited. Im very optimistic. Im very curious to see what somebody can come up with.
DRE: How much do you want to be involved?
HC: Im not. Basically my feeling is that I optioned them the material. Ive basically taken the Elmore Leonard route. I am sitting here hoping they make a good movie. I moved out of Los Angeles five years ago. I no longer live in Hollywood. I live an hour north of Los Angeles. Where are you?
DRE: Im in Queens, Astoria.
HC: Oh, Jesus Christ.
DRE: Yeah, I know. [laughs]
HC: Its still a great place to find souvlaki and can you still find Cuban Chinese restaurants out there?
DRE: Not as many Cuban Chinese restaurants. There are a lot of the crappy Chinese restaurants. There are a lot of crappy restaurants in general.
HC: When I was in my 20s Astoria was a great place to get souvlaki and great for Cuban Chinese.
DRE: Now its a lot of Spanish restaurants and still so much Greek food.
HC: I always liked eating over there. I liked the Cuban sandwiches over there.
DRE: It sounds like youre swearing off of Hollywood.
HC: Not swearing off, I just dont care very much about it. Im not interested in pursuing anything actively and frankly Im sliding towards the dirt nap. I have a very busy life. I get up in the morning. Im working in the office as we speak, which is downstairs in my palatial estate. I work until five and then I go to the gym. I dont have time to do spec work. Im no longer pursuing work in the television business.
DRE: Have you ever seen a Howard Chaykin tattoo on anybody?
HC: No, Im not the kind of guy that attracts that sort of audience. I really am not. Im a weird, cult-y figure. Im the guy thats done a lot of work thats fairly influential and this is where the bitterness comes in, Im frequently only remembered in second thought and thats okay. Ive come to terms with that. Im not particularly uncomfortable with my legacy.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you working on today?
Howard Chaykin: Right now Im penciling Punisher #50.
DRE: How long have you been on that?
HC: This is my first issue.
DRE: Are you writing that too?
HC: No, Im mostly writing for others and drawing with others, though I am writing and drawing a project, that has not been announced. Im finishing up working on Blade. Im doing an issue of Wolverine and Im doing this issue of The Punisher, so Im juggling those three books right now.
DRE: What made you decide to do stuff like Blade and The Punisher?
HC: They seemed like interesting gigs. Im having a great time working with [Blade writer Marc] Guggenheim. Ive never worked with Garth [Ennis] before. Garths scripts are terrific and Ive always wanted to work with him. Ive always liked drawing the Wolverine and Jason Aarons is a very talented young writer. Ive said this more than once in print and it remains true, Marc is an astonishingly artist friendly writer. He really knows how to write scripts for artists. I cant quite explain without showing you the script. But it breaks down very efficiently, gently, cleverly and smartly.
DRE: Did you do such mainstream books in the 90s?
HC: In the 90s I worked in television. I did very little comics. I had a television career that hit the shoals in the early 2000s. I decided I didnt want to go back. I felt it was time to leave television and become a human being again.
DRE: I thought you left Mutant X. Is that not true?
HC: I didnt quit. I was fired.
DRE: Do you want to talk about why?
HC: No, not especially. It was a pleasant experience while it lasted. It wasnt a pleasant experience at that point. Frankly I was happy to have the job but I wasnt all that upset to leave it.
I was fired in June and the way television business works is that jobs become available in May and in November so that even if I wanted to go back to work all I could do was freelance and there wasnt that much freelance. I decided that since I had all those months I might as well do some comics. So I pitched a book at DC Comics on a Friday and they bought it on a Tuesday. I did the book and I decided on the basis of that I wasnt particularly interested in going back to television. I asked my wife how she would feel about it and she was delighted because she felt I had become a sort of unpleasant person and I never went back.
DRE: Was Barnum the book you pitched for DC?
HC: No I did that while I was in television. It was Mighty Love which I wrote and drew. I discovered that taking ten years off was good for me. It made me a bit more improvisational and looser in terms of my approach to the material, much less automatic. I wouldnt recommend it to everybody but a ten year hiatus from drawing served me very well.
After Mighty Love I found I had a good time doing it and that my chops were in pretty good shape. One of the things I learned in the couple of years of being back is that this is a mainstream branded business. Ill still do creator-owned material now and then. But I also feel that its worth my time and energies to invest myself in mainstream branded material and it has been a lot of fun.
DRE: How has doing mainstream comics changed?
HC: I dont really know. I dont pay that much attention to it. I do the work that I do. I see some stuff but Im not in the center of the business as I was in the 70s and 80s. I dont necessarily think of myself as a marginal figure but Im certainly not at the center of the business and thats as it should be. Its a business that looks after new guys, new talent and good talent and thats fine because its like rock and roll. We tend to like work produced by people whose sensibilities are like our own.
DRE: If Richard Corben can become hot again, cant Howard Chaykin?
HC: I dont really know or particularly care. I havent seen Richard in years. I ran into him again in Kansas City about a year ago. His work continues to astonish. Hes really talented.
DRE: Did someone from Marvel actively pursue you?
HC: Brian Bendis called me and asked me if I wanted to draw an issue of the New Avengers which I was glad to do because Captain America is one of my favorite characters in Marvel. Brian is a huge talent and Im a big fan of Powers. It was an opportunity to do something completely out of left field. His storytelling and mine are very different. We approach stories very differently, but we found a happy medium. [Marvel editor] Aubrey Sitterson called me and asked me to do Blade expecting me to say no. I was very hesitant at first until I read Marc Guggenheims proposal.
DRE: Are you inking yourself?
HC: Of course. Ive never been able to have inkers. I always look in awe at guys like [Jim] Starlin and [Neal] Adams who can do these tightly rendered pencils. I cant do that. My pencils are schematics. I do a polish and finish in ink. It is a multistage process because after I ink I re-ink and then I ink again. An average page crosses my desk four or five times before I deliver it.
DRE: Do you use any computers for the artwork?
HC: Some.
DRE: [laughs] Would it be things we would notice?
HC: You tell me.
DRE: I read that one of your earliest assignments was drawing Fafhrd.
HC: Yes, it was my first feature back in the early 70s but it wasnt very good. It was a time when Conan seemed to be doing well for Marvel and DC was looking for various properties to do as a comic book. I did four or five issues. Frankly I was the least talented and least skilled or gifted of my generation so I did the best I could with what I had, which wasnt much. When the opportunity came to do the scripts for Fafhrd, I jumped at it. I love the material. Leiber was profoundly influential on me as a writer. I always felt that the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were a profound influence on the types of graphic novels I did back in the 80s for First Comics. Fafhrd, to me, are crime noir told in the manner of sorcery.
DRE: Was Fafhrd published by DC?
HC: DC had the rights back in the early 70s when I did it. Marvel published the ones I wrote for Mignola. Dark Horse picked up the license so theyre reprinting those books.
DRE: So you dont own the creator rights to the comics that you did with Mignola?
HC: No, they were done as work for hire. Theyre adaptations of Fritz Leibers stories.
DRE: Was it your idea to work with Mike?
HC: Carl Potts put us together. But I knew Mike when he had hair and was skinny.
DRE: [laughs] Did you select the stories to adapt or was that not one of the options?
HC: I dont recall. I honestly dont. The one thing that we both wanted to do and never got to, was the adaptation of the only Fafhrd novel, Swords of Lankhmar. Both of us wanted to do that but the material didnt sell well enough. We did most of the other stories so that was pretty satisfying and we had great fun doing it.
DRE: Did you ever get the chance to meet Fritz Leiber?
HC: Many years ago in the mid 70s. Michael Moorcock introduced me to Fritz and Philip Jos Farmer at the same time.
DRE: Oh wow.
HC: Yeah, it was quite an evening. It was at a science fiction enclave and Asimov was there. All the dead guys in science fiction.
DRE: I read that one of the things that attracted you to the Fafhrd stories was that you felt Leiber put in some autobiographical elements.
HC: Leiber definitely did that. There are different ideas about who the Mouser was based on. I always thought it was Stanley G. Weinbaum. I loved the material, as I said in the introduction of the book, Lankhmar is New York City as seen through the scrim of the sword and sorcery world.
DRE: Im not sure if it was Mikes art or your script but the comic adaptation seems joyous.
HC: The thing that separates Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from other sword and sorcery books is that there is an enormous amount of comedy and humor. Very few sword and sorcery scripts had that because they were so deadly serious. You dont see a lot of comedy in the work of H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. His father was a very successful Broadway character actor. If you want to see what Leiber looked like, go see a movie called The Sea Hawk. Fritz Leibers dad, Fritz Sr., plays one of the judges. Leiber was a very sophisticated, smart guy, very urbane and that showed in the work to a profound degree.
DRE: Im always discovering work of yours Ive never seen. Have you done much sword and sorcery work?
HC: I did a little bit of Kull and Red Sonja. But I look back on that stuff now and its okay, nothing very interesting. I didnt really find what I was interested in writing or drawing until I was in my late 20s, early 30s. I stumbled around most of the first ten years of my career. It wasnt until I did a series of graphic novels for the late Byron Preiss that I discovered where I really wanted to go with my stuff. That was with American Flagg followed by Time2 followed by Black Kiss. I found my voice. I dont deny the work but I do have a fairly realistic sense of its value and importance and it just wasnt. So I wouldnt have the interest in drawing that sort of stuff now.
When I was a kid there used to be a TV series called Science Fiction Theater with Truman Bradley, whoever Truman Bradley was. It was a low budget science fiction series and all the stories took place in modern times. I was interested in space opera. I was interested in space ships and ray guns and giant monsters and shit like that. By the time Star Wars came along, Id lost all interest in that kind of science fiction and became interested in crime fiction. The science fiction I read today is more crime fiction with an element of sf, if I read any of it at all. So I dont really care about fantastical stuff very much. Im not interested in space opera. I can do it, but I dont read it.
DRE: Not even the stuff you liked when you were younger?
HC: No, the golden age of comics and science fiction may be 12 but I never cared that much. In the mid 1970s, Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson turned me onto the American detective story, until then my entertainment reading had been science fiction and porn. When I discovered the crime novel, particularly Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and to a lesser extent Rex Stout, my interest in the science fiction novel went away. I think it was Jeffrey OBrien who said that crime fiction is just as fantastical as science fiction, its based on observed reality. Its that observed reality that I began gaining interest in.
DRE: So what is Blade then?
HC: Its a crime book.
DRE: I havent read it yet sorry.
HC: What the fuck are you doing?
DRE: [laughs] Im waiting for the trade.
HC: You people. I tell you, you bitch and moan about comics and then you dont support them.
DRE: Theyre $3 apiece! [laughs]
HC: Whiner! What are you going to do, eat? You could stand to lose some weight I bet.
DRE: I could.
HC: I just lost some weight. I bought more comics.
DRE: With Black Kiss, it sounds like you took your two loves, porn and crime fiction, and put them together.
HC: Black Kiss was done at a very dark part of my life. Were still talking about the serious possibility of doing a sequel. An extended prequel; and sequel that will happen both before and after the actual events of the original year.
DRE: What will they be about?
HC: It will explore Beverlys early life over the course of the 20th century. Its an erotic horror story that takes place over 100 years.
DRE: Do you know when you might get to it?
HC: Beats the shit out of me. Right now Im pretty busy and I take my commitments very seriously. Unlike a lot of my colleagues, when I commit to a job, I actually do it.
DRE: I know that Dark Horse wants to do a Fafhrd movie. Would you be involved?
HC: They dont want me. They want A list talent and Im not that guy.
DRE: Hows the Power and Glory movie going?
HC: I have no idea.
DRE: Is there a screenplay yet?
HC: Not yet. I havent heard anything yet. Im looking forward to it. Im very excited. Im very optimistic. Im very curious to see what somebody can come up with.
DRE: How much do you want to be involved?
HC: Im not. Basically my feeling is that I optioned them the material. Ive basically taken the Elmore Leonard route. I am sitting here hoping they make a good movie. I moved out of Los Angeles five years ago. I no longer live in Hollywood. I live an hour north of Los Angeles. Where are you?
DRE: Im in Queens, Astoria.
HC: Oh, Jesus Christ.
DRE: Yeah, I know. [laughs]
HC: Its still a great place to find souvlaki and can you still find Cuban Chinese restaurants out there?
DRE: Not as many Cuban Chinese restaurants. There are a lot of the crappy Chinese restaurants. There are a lot of crappy restaurants in general.
HC: When I was in my 20s Astoria was a great place to get souvlaki and great for Cuban Chinese.
DRE: Now its a lot of Spanish restaurants and still so much Greek food.
HC: I always liked eating over there. I liked the Cuban sandwiches over there.
DRE: It sounds like youre swearing off of Hollywood.
HC: Not swearing off, I just dont care very much about it. Im not interested in pursuing anything actively and frankly Im sliding towards the dirt nap. I have a very busy life. I get up in the morning. Im working in the office as we speak, which is downstairs in my palatial estate. I work until five and then I go to the gym. I dont have time to do spec work. Im no longer pursuing work in the television business.
DRE: Have you ever seen a Howard Chaykin tattoo on anybody?
HC: No, Im not the kind of guy that attracts that sort of audience. I really am not. Im a weird, cult-y figure. Im the guy thats done a lot of work thats fairly influential and this is where the bitterness comes in, Im frequently only remembered in second thought and thats okay. Ive come to terms with that. Im not particularly uncomfortable with my legacy.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
zoetica:
Howard Chaykin is a comic book legend. Being the self deprecating cat that he is, Chaykin might disagree with that but it is undoubtedly true. He first appeared on the comic book scene during the 70s boom. He did a lot of work for the big two including drawing the influential Star Wars comic series....
thejuanupsman:
No comments? Sad. Chaykin truly is a legend. And he's such a cranky bastard you just gotta love him.