MattBrady
11-28-2002, 09:09 AM
<a href="http://classic.newsarama.com/Dynamite/Flagg1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/Dynamite/Flagg1_t.jpg" width="185" height="285" border="0" align="right"></a>In a future where the US government had abandoned earth for Mars; a corporate entertainment conglomerate called Plex-USA controls the US. Basketball is illegal, California is on the bottom of the Pacific, the Plex controls what the people see, hear, and consume, the US police force has been replaced with the Plexus Rangers, anti-government forces have unified to form the American Survivalist Labor Committee, Mananacillin could cure every form of STD (and may have been part of Plex’s plan to sterilize the masses), Bob Violence is the top-rated show, and a cat named Raul has learned how to talk.
Enter Rueben Flagg, out of work actor, idealist, flawed hero and fresh Plexus Ranger recruit.
It was 1983, and Howard Chaykin was off and running with American Flagg, published by First Comics. The series grew quickly to become one of the early ‘80s more acclaimed titles, outselling several Marvel and DC books, thanks to Chaykin’s writing, art, and…ahem, mature take on the future. Chaykin’s series was cool, satirical, and creepily accurate in telling of the future of the USA where corruption, media saturation and constant sexual imagery and stimulation are the way of life. Want a fer example? Dialogue from Flagg -
“I put something behind my ears that drives men wild.”
“What’s that?”
“My legs.”
The future was definitely not for children, but for those older fans who found American Flagg, they knew that they had found something quite unlike the comics were being pumped out back then – or even now, for that matter.
For Chaykin, who’d had smaller success in comics, but had been finding more work outside of comics than in until Flagg, the series was a melting pot, allowing him to bring together all of his interests, mix them with his own leftist/Jewish/satirical point of view, and bake for 27 glorious issues.
“I’d been away from comics for a while, and I had been reading Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates,” Chaykin says. “There was something really huge and world scale about hiss tuff that was the primary influence on the material. I just wanted to do a book that was a kitchen sink of everything that I was interested in, which was the influence of television on culture, a dystopic future that was a lot like America in the 1930s, Italian and German influenced fetish wear, and just nuttiness in a high tech Western. I guess the primary influences would be Terry and the Pirates, Gunsmoke, and Maverick, with of course Phillip K. Dick and the worlds he created as well.
Chaykin’s Chicago of 2031 was then, somewhat dystopian, but now is rather eerie. In the world of Rueben Flagg, 1996 was the year everything went to hell – the USSR collapsed, Germany reunified and attacked England, plagues threaten the population, Iran and Israel have a limited nuclear exchange, national banks collapse, and of course, there was the prime motivator for landing Rueben in his job as a Plexus Ranger – he was replaced by a cgi version of himself.
[Hum the Twilight Zone theme to yourself now]
But no, Chaykin’s middle name isn’t Nostredamus, and he didn’t divine the future in some weird magical ceremony a la Alan Moore. “It was all good guesswork,” Chaykin says. “It all made sense to me. The frustration of course was that the book had a very narrow audience, and it was interestingly influential, but its influence was fairly subtle. I thought it was a good comic book that was of its time.”
Also, the book was, like Chaykin himself, very patriotic in its own way. No – veterans weren’t being honored with parades and mom wasn’t baking apple pies – rather, many incredibly diverse factions and groups still held themselves (sometimes tenuously) together under the red, white and blue as a vigorous, complex nation that forced readers to challenge their own views of the Constitution and what America meant as a concept. This alternative view of patriotism comes straight from Chaykin himself.
“I come out of very leftist background, and I’ve always felt that the great tragedy of the American left was to hand the concept of patriotism over to the right,” Chaykin says. “Leftists have just as much a right to define themselves as patriots as rightists – it’s a different perspective and a different interpretation of the Constitution, and I felt that my patriotism was a leftist/populous/libertarianism patriotism, as confusing as that may sound, that has as much a right to be heard as a cynical ***sucker on the right. Of course, this brought down heat from the rock and roll press who thought it was all adolescent stuff and really boring.”
Along with patriotism, science fiction and social commentary, American Flagg also reveled in the Jewish faith, given that both Rueben and Chaykin are Jewish. This was very much a “kitchen sink” book.
“What I set out to do with American Flagg was to do a book that was everything I was feeling at that point – my own confusions, my own obsessions, and my own self-interests,” Chaykin says. “I had been talking to Gil Kane, and what Gil always insisted was that point of view was everything, so I tried to put point of view into it. What’s happened now is that point of view has been replaced by attitude, and I think attitude is horse****, but that’s just me.”
And yes, there is a difference, gentle reader. Point of view is what creators would bring to a story that makes you feel as if you’re living inside someone else’s skin and experiencing what the character experiences. Attitude is, well…more visible in today’s comics’ scene than point of view is, that’s for sure.
“Attitude is this wearing your hat backwards, and having a point of reference of ‘everything sucks.’ MAD Magazine was one of the most influential elements of my generation, because it created a perspective that nothing had any value or context and eliminated all value by sh***ing all over everything without taking a stand for any one point of view. What’s happened is now, saying ‘He’s got attitude!’ is good. Who gives a sh** about attitude? Attitude is nothing more than a posture, in most cases, based on no knowledge and barely any information. Whereas a point of view, for me at least, comes out of some learned experiences, some lived experiences, and some considered ideas – do I believe this and why? Do I believe this just because it’s going to get me laid? Maybe. But if I stick around a believe it after I get laid, it becomes something of a point of view. It’s all ideas. Knowledge and information are two very different things.”
The series kicked off with the arrival of Reuben Flagg in Chicago, ready for his first tour of duty with the Rangers. Having been raised on Mars by extremely patriotic parents, Rueben had a view of the US and what it could be. It was a dream which pushed Rueben to pull the plug on [i]Bob Violence[i], when he realized that the subliminal messages inserted into the show by the ASLC were what was causing the Gogangs to riot every Saturday night, right after the show ended. A noble effort, but as Flagg realized by the end of issue #1, there’s only one thing worse than a Gogang hyped up on Bob Violence subliminals: a Gogang pissed as hell because Bob Violence wasn’t on the air.
And that was less than half of issue #1.
With Chaykin trying his damndest to get everything and the kitchen sink into the series, American Flagg stood out as, and still remains one of the most information-heavy comic books you’re likely to find. For example, in addition to the complex political scheming and double-crosses that were the norm for the series, the series was complex visually, as Chaykin, infusing as many cinematic elements as he could, would often have a cameo or even a walk-on by a character suddenly become supremely important three issues down the line.
“When I started issue #1, I had structurally laid out everything up through issue #12 with a general notion of where I was going after that,” Chaykin says. “But I also felt that I spent a lot of time on the book - comics had boiled down to six minutes in the crapper, and I wanted more time than that from the reader. I was willing to work a little harder, and I was willing to make you work a little harder too.”
Given Chaykin’s portrayal of women who weren’t afraid to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, American Flagg caused a polarization among female comic fans. “Women seemed to like it, and women seemed to hate it,” Chaykin muses. “I was constantly accused of doing misogynistic burlesque, while at the same time doing hysterically funny takes on men’s inability to accommodate women. Frankly, I don’t really care either way. One of the things I learned a long time ago is that if I take praise seriously, I also have to take blame seriously, so ultimately, I take neither, because it’s just not smart in the long run. I don’t really care one way or the other. I’m glad for the money, I’m glad to have had the opportunity for a career, I’m like when people by the stuff and read it, but ultimately, I don’t really care what they think of it, in the sense that being too accepting of being told how wonderful the work makes it impossible for me to take seriously someone sh***ing all over me, so f*** ‘em both.”
Artistically and production-wise, American Flagg #1 looks like a comic that hit the stands last week, rather than nearly 20 years ago, thanks to Chaykin’s meticulous attention to the art and production quality of the book. Art overlaid text, which overlaid more art. Chaykin’s plots and stories were matched by his art in terms of density of information. “It was a very production-heavy book,” Chaykin says. “Enormous amounts of paste-up, because this was all before computer art. It was endless pasting up. The last weekend of every month was often spent awake, just literally feeding and pasting and filling it, because there was just so much to do.
In Chaykin’s view, all the effort was worth it – and should be repeated more often in comics than it actually is. “Basically, most people take a really easy way out with comics,” Chaykin says. “To a great extent, there aren’t a lot of really good books out there, but the good ones, you know, are the ones that people put some work into. It’s just laziness. I saw a movie this past weekend for example – Bring It On, that cheerleader movie. We saw it because we needed a movie, and that’s what was available when we were there. One of the interesting things about the picture is that it’s smarter and more fun than it needed to be. The audience’s expectations of that material, generally speaking, are usually so low, there’s no reason to be that good, but ultimately, the picture is making a lot of money for a very small investment. So maybe somebody will pick up on the fact that maybe it’s worthwhile if you’re going to do a genre picture like that to be a little smarter, to be a little cleverer. Who knows? It would be nice to see it. I’m not holding my breath, though.”
Along with Chaykin’s art, the series’ lettering by Ken Bruzenak still stands out in the minds of fans. “Bruzenak is a god,” Chaykin says. “The weirdest thing is – I’m writing the introduction to the second trade paperback of 100 Bullets, which is one of my favorite comics, and one of the things that I’m saying in the introduction is that one of the most wonderful things about the book is that it looks like the work of one man – it looks like one man is writing and drawing it. To a certain extent, it looked like Bruzenak and I were working at lateral drawing tables. The fact is, over the run of the series, we saw each other, maybe three times. This was pre-e-mail days. We communicated on the phone quite a bit, but he was in Reading, Pennsylvania, I was in New York, and neither one of us did much traveling, and we basically were just on the same wavelength. Being on the same wavelength meant that I got out of him exactly what I was looking for. I never had to explain myself twice – he knew precisely what I was looking for. I don’t know exactly how we did it, but it all made sense.”
Ultimately, Chaykin had to step down from writing and drawing the regular series. For the reason why, remember what he said about putting the book together. “I ran out of steam,” Chaykin says. “I burned out. It was a production-heavy book, and it was eating my life and eating my relationship.”
Chaykin stepped down with issue #27, but the series continued, losing more and more steam until issue #50. Chaykin came back to Flagg in 1988 with Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg #1. It was too little, too late however. Only 12 issues made it out before the series was put to rest. “There really wasn’t much that could be done,” Chaykin says. “I thought the guys that we got together, Mike Vosburg, John Moore and the other guys really kicked some ass. We had a great time, and I felt that in the last few issues, we had some really fun shit going on. The Soviet Union stuff was a lot of fun, and there was some really fun work when we did the history of communism as a monopoly game – there was some really fun stuff in there. We took advantage of the medium in ways that people weren’t bothering with.”
And then, the future ended for Rueben Flagg.
But maybe not forever. Chaykin still own the rights to American Flagg and says that a return may not be out of the question. While Chaykin’s earlier storylines were collected in three now out of print First graphic novels, a future trade collection may be coming.
“We’re talking,” Chaykin says. “There might be a future for Flagg yet. You never know.”
Enter Rueben Flagg, out of work actor, idealist, flawed hero and fresh Plexus Ranger recruit.
It was 1983, and Howard Chaykin was off and running with American Flagg, published by First Comics. The series grew quickly to become one of the early ‘80s more acclaimed titles, outselling several Marvel and DC books, thanks to Chaykin’s writing, art, and…ahem, mature take on the future. Chaykin’s series was cool, satirical, and creepily accurate in telling of the future of the USA where corruption, media saturation and constant sexual imagery and stimulation are the way of life. Want a fer example? Dialogue from Flagg -
“I put something behind my ears that drives men wild.”
“What’s that?”
“My legs.”
The future was definitely not for children, but for those older fans who found American Flagg, they knew that they had found something quite unlike the comics were being pumped out back then – or even now, for that matter.
For Chaykin, who’d had smaller success in comics, but had been finding more work outside of comics than in until Flagg, the series was a melting pot, allowing him to bring together all of his interests, mix them with his own leftist/Jewish/satirical point of view, and bake for 27 glorious issues.
“I’d been away from comics for a while, and I had been reading Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates,” Chaykin says. “There was something really huge and world scale about hiss tuff that was the primary influence on the material. I just wanted to do a book that was a kitchen sink of everything that I was interested in, which was the influence of television on culture, a dystopic future that was a lot like America in the 1930s, Italian and German influenced fetish wear, and just nuttiness in a high tech Western. I guess the primary influences would be Terry and the Pirates, Gunsmoke, and Maverick, with of course Phillip K. Dick and the worlds he created as well.
Chaykin’s Chicago of 2031 was then, somewhat dystopian, but now is rather eerie. In the world of Rueben Flagg, 1996 was the year everything went to hell – the USSR collapsed, Germany reunified and attacked England, plagues threaten the population, Iran and Israel have a limited nuclear exchange, national banks collapse, and of course, there was the prime motivator for landing Rueben in his job as a Plexus Ranger – he was replaced by a cgi version of himself.
[Hum the Twilight Zone theme to yourself now]
But no, Chaykin’s middle name isn’t Nostredamus, and he didn’t divine the future in some weird magical ceremony a la Alan Moore. “It was all good guesswork,” Chaykin says. “It all made sense to me. The frustration of course was that the book had a very narrow audience, and it was interestingly influential, but its influence was fairly subtle. I thought it was a good comic book that was of its time.”
Also, the book was, like Chaykin himself, very patriotic in its own way. No – veterans weren’t being honored with parades and mom wasn’t baking apple pies – rather, many incredibly diverse factions and groups still held themselves (sometimes tenuously) together under the red, white and blue as a vigorous, complex nation that forced readers to challenge their own views of the Constitution and what America meant as a concept. This alternative view of patriotism comes straight from Chaykin himself.
“I come out of very leftist background, and I’ve always felt that the great tragedy of the American left was to hand the concept of patriotism over to the right,” Chaykin says. “Leftists have just as much a right to define themselves as patriots as rightists – it’s a different perspective and a different interpretation of the Constitution, and I felt that my patriotism was a leftist/populous/libertarianism patriotism, as confusing as that may sound, that has as much a right to be heard as a cynical ***sucker on the right. Of course, this brought down heat from the rock and roll press who thought it was all adolescent stuff and really boring.”
Along with patriotism, science fiction and social commentary, American Flagg also reveled in the Jewish faith, given that both Rueben and Chaykin are Jewish. This was very much a “kitchen sink” book.
“What I set out to do with American Flagg was to do a book that was everything I was feeling at that point – my own confusions, my own obsessions, and my own self-interests,” Chaykin says. “I had been talking to Gil Kane, and what Gil always insisted was that point of view was everything, so I tried to put point of view into it. What’s happened now is that point of view has been replaced by attitude, and I think attitude is horse****, but that’s just me.”
And yes, there is a difference, gentle reader. Point of view is what creators would bring to a story that makes you feel as if you’re living inside someone else’s skin and experiencing what the character experiences. Attitude is, well…more visible in today’s comics’ scene than point of view is, that’s for sure.
“Attitude is this wearing your hat backwards, and having a point of reference of ‘everything sucks.’ MAD Magazine was one of the most influential elements of my generation, because it created a perspective that nothing had any value or context and eliminated all value by sh***ing all over everything without taking a stand for any one point of view. What’s happened is now, saying ‘He’s got attitude!’ is good. Who gives a sh** about attitude? Attitude is nothing more than a posture, in most cases, based on no knowledge and barely any information. Whereas a point of view, for me at least, comes out of some learned experiences, some lived experiences, and some considered ideas – do I believe this and why? Do I believe this just because it’s going to get me laid? Maybe. But if I stick around a believe it after I get laid, it becomes something of a point of view. It’s all ideas. Knowledge and information are two very different things.”
The series kicked off with the arrival of Reuben Flagg in Chicago, ready for his first tour of duty with the Rangers. Having been raised on Mars by extremely patriotic parents, Rueben had a view of the US and what it could be. It was a dream which pushed Rueben to pull the plug on [i]Bob Violence[i], when he realized that the subliminal messages inserted into the show by the ASLC were what was causing the Gogangs to riot every Saturday night, right after the show ended. A noble effort, but as Flagg realized by the end of issue #1, there’s only one thing worse than a Gogang hyped up on Bob Violence subliminals: a Gogang pissed as hell because Bob Violence wasn’t on the air.
And that was less than half of issue #1.
With Chaykin trying his damndest to get everything and the kitchen sink into the series, American Flagg stood out as, and still remains one of the most information-heavy comic books you’re likely to find. For example, in addition to the complex political scheming and double-crosses that were the norm for the series, the series was complex visually, as Chaykin, infusing as many cinematic elements as he could, would often have a cameo or even a walk-on by a character suddenly become supremely important three issues down the line.
“When I started issue #1, I had structurally laid out everything up through issue #12 with a general notion of where I was going after that,” Chaykin says. “But I also felt that I spent a lot of time on the book - comics had boiled down to six minutes in the crapper, and I wanted more time than that from the reader. I was willing to work a little harder, and I was willing to make you work a little harder too.”
Given Chaykin’s portrayal of women who weren’t afraid to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, American Flagg caused a polarization among female comic fans. “Women seemed to like it, and women seemed to hate it,” Chaykin muses. “I was constantly accused of doing misogynistic burlesque, while at the same time doing hysterically funny takes on men’s inability to accommodate women. Frankly, I don’t really care either way. One of the things I learned a long time ago is that if I take praise seriously, I also have to take blame seriously, so ultimately, I take neither, because it’s just not smart in the long run. I don’t really care one way or the other. I’m glad for the money, I’m glad to have had the opportunity for a career, I’m like when people by the stuff and read it, but ultimately, I don’t really care what they think of it, in the sense that being too accepting of being told how wonderful the work makes it impossible for me to take seriously someone sh***ing all over me, so f*** ‘em both.”
Artistically and production-wise, American Flagg #1 looks like a comic that hit the stands last week, rather than nearly 20 years ago, thanks to Chaykin’s meticulous attention to the art and production quality of the book. Art overlaid text, which overlaid more art. Chaykin’s plots and stories were matched by his art in terms of density of information. “It was a very production-heavy book,” Chaykin says. “Enormous amounts of paste-up, because this was all before computer art. It was endless pasting up. The last weekend of every month was often spent awake, just literally feeding and pasting and filling it, because there was just so much to do.
In Chaykin’s view, all the effort was worth it – and should be repeated more often in comics than it actually is. “Basically, most people take a really easy way out with comics,” Chaykin says. “To a great extent, there aren’t a lot of really good books out there, but the good ones, you know, are the ones that people put some work into. It’s just laziness. I saw a movie this past weekend for example – Bring It On, that cheerleader movie. We saw it because we needed a movie, and that’s what was available when we were there. One of the interesting things about the picture is that it’s smarter and more fun than it needed to be. The audience’s expectations of that material, generally speaking, are usually so low, there’s no reason to be that good, but ultimately, the picture is making a lot of money for a very small investment. So maybe somebody will pick up on the fact that maybe it’s worthwhile if you’re going to do a genre picture like that to be a little smarter, to be a little cleverer. Who knows? It would be nice to see it. I’m not holding my breath, though.”
Along with Chaykin’s art, the series’ lettering by Ken Bruzenak still stands out in the minds of fans. “Bruzenak is a god,” Chaykin says. “The weirdest thing is – I’m writing the introduction to the second trade paperback of 100 Bullets, which is one of my favorite comics, and one of the things that I’m saying in the introduction is that one of the most wonderful things about the book is that it looks like the work of one man – it looks like one man is writing and drawing it. To a certain extent, it looked like Bruzenak and I were working at lateral drawing tables. The fact is, over the run of the series, we saw each other, maybe three times. This was pre-e-mail days. We communicated on the phone quite a bit, but he was in Reading, Pennsylvania, I was in New York, and neither one of us did much traveling, and we basically were just on the same wavelength. Being on the same wavelength meant that I got out of him exactly what I was looking for. I never had to explain myself twice – he knew precisely what I was looking for. I don’t know exactly how we did it, but it all made sense.”
Ultimately, Chaykin had to step down from writing and drawing the regular series. For the reason why, remember what he said about putting the book together. “I ran out of steam,” Chaykin says. “I burned out. It was a production-heavy book, and it was eating my life and eating my relationship.”
Chaykin stepped down with issue #27, but the series continued, losing more and more steam until issue #50. Chaykin came back to Flagg in 1988 with Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg #1. It was too little, too late however. Only 12 issues made it out before the series was put to rest. “There really wasn’t much that could be done,” Chaykin says. “I thought the guys that we got together, Mike Vosburg, John Moore and the other guys really kicked some ass. We had a great time, and I felt that in the last few issues, we had some really fun shit going on. The Soviet Union stuff was a lot of fun, and there was some really fun work when we did the history of communism as a monopoly game – there was some really fun stuff in there. We took advantage of the medium in ways that people weren’t bothering with.”
And then, the future ended for Rueben Flagg.
But maybe not forever. Chaykin still own the rights to American Flagg and says that a return may not be out of the question. While Chaykin’s earlier storylines were collected in three now out of print First graphic novels, a future trade collection may be coming.
“We’re talking,” Chaykin says. “There might be a future for Flagg yet. You never know.”