Somehow, when I had a deep fever for smart and independent adventure comics from the 1980s, and was obsessively hoovering up as much of Matt Wagner’s Grendel and Scott McCloud’s Zot and Paul Chadwick’s Concrete as I could get my hands on, I managed to completely miss out on any of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg.
I never bought a single issue of Flagg.
They were surprisingly hard to find and the few issues I did see looked busy
and confusing, and I didn’t know where to start. I couldn’t even quite grasp
what the basic concept was.
So while I went on to follow everything
Wagner, McCloud and Chadwick have done since the eighties, I never had the same
compulsion to follow Chaykin, because I never read his most applauded work.
I’ve sorted that out now.
I picked up the big 2008 hardcover
collection of the first 14 American Flagg comics over the past weekend, at the
hideously crowded Armageddon geek convention in Hamilton (where it
was being held for the first time).
It was so crowded that it took me a while
to find the only two booths that were selling comics, and I might have gone a
bit overboard. I went with my mate Kyle, and while he was happy with his Doctor Who
autographs and insanely cheap recent X-Men comics, I loaded up on everything
from Lobo to Brilliant to Doktor Sleepless to Sock Monkey. I bought far more
Mark Millar comics than is healthy, got most of Ennis’ Jennifer Blood for a
buck each and overdosed on a small mountain of Hellboy comics.
I also got some sweet book deals – the
first two Age of Bronze collections, two X-Men First Class books, a Groo
paperback and some Jonah Hex for five bucks each. But the best deal was that
American Flagg book, which I got on special for $35.
Considering it cost more than $100 when it first came out, this was a blinder of a deal, and it seemed like a good way to finally give Chaykin a chance.
This first impression of American Flagg,
and the wider world of Chaykin, is pretty positive. It’s funnier, and more
tasteful, and more adventurous than I expected. It’s just as complex as I
always feared, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It is a comic that is nearly thirty years
old, and there has been some inevitable dating, with jokes about Crystal Gale
(a name I literally hadn’t heard in years until I read this comic yesterday, leaving
that joke a little flat), as well as a particularly eighties obsession with
things like pirate television channels and subliminal programming.
American Flagg can be over-thought and
overwrought, and there are some awful, awful haircuts on display, but there is
also a lot to love about the comic.
There are some terrific action scenes which
are brief and full of impact. Chaykin had got the hang of decent action body
language during his years in the trenches for corporate comics, and used Flagg
to find his own voice.
Over the first dozen issues of Flagg, you
can see Chaykin nailing down that chunky/fuzzy art style that is now instantly
familiar. The artist was still not quite there, and sometimes his influences
are a bit too obvious, but they are also all over the place – one bit will be
pure Gil Kane, and then there will be a sudden Drew Friedman moment.
The design of the comic is unmistakably
something from the 1980s, but all those sharp lines and busy pages are still
effective, and there are some endlessly entertaining sound effects that
compliment the entire look of the book, while still inspiring the odd chuckle.
American Flagg was a comic that was full of
humour, thanks largely to Raul the talking cat and the robotic Luther
Ironheart, but also because of the absurd society that Rueben Flagg and his
friends & enemies lived in – a world that had become used to casual
carnage, but still had a lot of the old world’s hang-ups.
And yet, the comic’s attitude towards sex
is also refreshing. While it’s impossible to be unaware of Chaykin’s fondness
for erotic comics, Flagg is far more tasteful than I expected.
It’s still full of crazy sex scenes, but
they are treated so matter-of-factly, without really dwelling on them. It’s a
surprisingly mature way of dealing things (real mature, not Lobo mature) –
there is no adolescent giggling. Sometimes people have sex, and they probably
enjoy themselves, but while many of American Flagg’s contemporary comics were
so determined to show what they can do that they somehow made sex boring, it’s
just another part of life in 2031 America.
Even after reading several hundred pages in
the past few days, I’m still a bit baffled by large parts of American Flagg. I
still don’t understand a lot of what’s going on, and I don’t even know how to
explain the core concept to somebody else – “He’s a law enforcement officer for
some weird post-collapse post-government society, who also moonlights as a
pirate TV broadcaster” is about the best I can do
But while the work can still be confusing
and obtuse, the work is deliberately disorientating, just like all glimpses of
the future should be. There can be a dozen different things clamouring for the
reader’s attention on a single page, and it can take a long time to figure out
what is actually the important bit. There should be some kind of information
overload when you're dealing with the culture shock of the future, and there is plenty of that here.
Comics that require that kind of effort are
invariably rewarding, and American Flagg ends up offering all sorts of
narrative riches. There is no grand unifying theme, but loads of smaller ones,
from issue to issue. American Flagg is about holding authority figures to
account, and it’s about adjusting to a fast paced world that is in danger of
utter stagnation, and it’s about showing compassion to the weak and defending
them from bullies.
It’s about America,
and it’s about a man named Flagg.
The second best deal I got at Armageddon
Hamilton, after American Flagg, was a copy of Chaykin’s Time². Everything was
suddenly coming up Howard.
I’ll give it a while before I get to that
book, because there is real danger of a Chaykin overload, and there are all
those Hellboy and Sock Monkey comics for a change of pace.
But I am looking forward to getting my
teeth into Time², and I will be more open to more of his comics in the future,
however strange it gets.
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