Howard Chaykin

This is my first issue.

No, I’m mostly writing for others and drawing with others, though I am writing and drawing a project, that has not been announced. I’m finishing up working on Blade. I’m doing an issue of Wolverine and I’m doing this issue of The Punisher, so I’m juggling those three books right now.

They seemed like interesting gigs. I’m having a great time working with [Blade writer Marc] Guggenheim. I’ve never worked with Garth [Ennis] before. Garth’s scripts are terrific and I’ve always wanted to work with him. I’ve always liked drawing the Wolverine and Jason Aarons is a very talented young writer. I’ve 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 can’t quite explain without showing you the script. But it breaks down very efficiently, gently, cleverly and smartly.

In the 90’s 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 didn’t want to go back. I felt it was time to leave television and become a human being again.

I didn’t quit. I was fired.

No, not especially. It was a pleasant experience while it lasted. It wasn’t a pleasant experience at that point. Frankly I was happy to have the job but I wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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.

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 wouldn’t 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. I’ll still do creator-owned material now and then. But I also feel that it’s worth my time and energies to invest myself in mainstream branded material and it has been a lot of fun.

I don’t really know. I don’t pay that much attention to it. I do the work that I do. I see some stuff but I’m not in the center of the business as I was in the 70’s and 80’s. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a marginal figure but I’m certainly not at the center of the business and that’s as it should be. It’s a business that looks after new guys, new talent and good talent and that’s fine because it’s like rock and roll. We tend to like work produced by people whose sensibilities are like our own.

I don’t really know or particularly care. I haven’t seen Richard in years. I ran into him again in Kansas City about a year ago. His work continues to astonish. He’s really talented.

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 I’m 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 Guggenheim’s proposal.

Of course. I’ve 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 can’t 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.

Some.

You tell me.

Yes, it was my first feature back in the early 70’s but it wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 80’s for First Comics. Fafhrd, to me, are crime noir told in the manner of sorcery.

DC had the rights back in the early 70’s when I did it. Marvel published the ones I wrote for Mignola. Dark Horse picked up the license so they’re reprinting those books.

No, they were done as work for hire. They’re adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s stories.

Carl Potts put us together. But I knew Mike when he had hair and was skinny.

I don’t recall. I honestly don’t. 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 didn’t sell well enough. We did most of the other stories so that was pretty satisfying and we had great fun doing it.

Many years ago in the mid 70’s. Michael Moorcock introduced me to Fritz and Philip José Farmer at the same time.

Yeah, it was quite an evening. It was at a science fiction enclave and Asimov was there. All the dead guys in science fiction.

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.

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 don’t 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 Leiber’s 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.

I did a little bit of Kull and Red Sonja. But I look back on that stuff now and it’s okay, nothing very interesting. I didn’t really find what I was interested in writing or drawing until I was in my late 20’s, early 30’s. I stumbled around most of the first ten years of my career. It wasn’t 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 don’t deny the work but I do have a fairly realistic sense of its value and importance and it just wasn’t. So I wouldn’t 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, I’d 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 don’t really care about fantastical stuff very much. I’m not interested in space opera. I can do it, but I don’t read it.

No, the golden age of comics and science fiction may be 12 but I never cared that much. In the mid 1970’s, 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 O’Brien who said that crime fiction is just as fantastical as science fiction, it’s based on observed reality. It’s that observed reality that I began gaining interest in.

It’s a crime book.

What the fuck are you doing?

You people. I tell you, you bitch and moan about comics and then you don’t support them.

Whiner! What are you going to do, eat? You could stand to lose some weight I bet.

I just lost some weight. I bought more comics.

Black Kiss was done at a very dark part of my life. We’re 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.

It will explore Beverly’s early life over the course of the 20th century. It’s an erotic horror story that takes place over 100 years.

Beats the shit out of me. Right now I’m 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.

They don’t want me. They want A list talent and I’m not that guy.

I have no idea.

Not yet. I haven’t heard anything yet. I’m looking forward to it. I’m very excited. I’m very optimistic. I’m very curious to see what somebody can come up with.

I’m not. Basically my feeling is that I optioned them the material. I’ve 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?

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It’s still a great place to find souvlaki and can you still find Cuban Chinese restaurants out there?

When I was in my 20’s Astoria was a great place to get souvlaki and great for Cuban Chinese.

I always liked eating over there. I liked the Cuban sandwiches over there.

Not swearing off, I just don’t care very much about it. I’m not interested in pursuing anything actively and frankly I’m sliding towards the dirt nap. I have a very busy life. I get up in the morning. I’m 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 don’t have time to do spec work. I’m no longer pursuing work in the television business.

No, I’m not the kind of guy that attracts that sort of audience. I really am not. I’m a weird, cult-y figure. I’m the guy that’s done a lot of work that’s fairly influential and this is where the bitterness comes in, I’m frequently only remembered in second thought and that’s okay. I’ve come to terms with that. I’m not particularly uncomfortable with my legacy.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck