Graphic Novels That You Would Like If You Weren't Too Chicken To Read Them - American Flagg!

Far be it from me to believe that I could offer more eloquent praise than Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon, let me instead quote from his introduction to the first hardcover volume of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!:

“ … in 1982… the idea of a science-fiction comic book set in a dystopian American future was not a new one; and most of the fundamental elements of the world Chaykin depicts – earth abandoned by its corporate rulers in favor of off-world colonies, marauding gangs of armed motorcycle freaks, the city as a kind of vast television or information screen that irradiates or medicates its denizens with psychotropic sitcoms, could be traced back to novels by the writers of the New Wave and their successors… But no one had ever crammed those elements all together before, in quite the way that Chaykin did here: the post-nuclear, post-global-collapse, post-Cold War, corporate-controlled, media-overloaded, sex-driven, space-traveling… freak-o-rama that was to be life in 2031.”



“What Chaykin uniquely intuited [was that]… 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… Chaykin played, dazzingly, with the effect you could get from just a handful of dull square sub-panels arranged across a big single-panel page on which, in that one big panel, something violent and wild was taking place.”

“The characteristic Chaykin facial expression is the raised eyebrow – of irony, scepticism, puckishness, a satirist’s rage… 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.”



“Cynical, pompous, or jaundiced, self-aware, embittered, or corrupted, his heroes remain heroes… American Flagg! stands at the glorious mid-point, at that difficult fulcrum poised between innocence and experience… 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.”

I’ll just add this: the first hardcover volume, which collects the first twelve issues (almost universally considered the best of the series, with Chaykin writing and drawing all of them), is one of the most gorgeous artefacts in my collection. The colour, the design, the weight, the smell, the thin red satin ribbon bookmark … it all started a hardcover graphic novel fetish that has (despite the accompanying enlargement in expenses) proved difficult to let go. Come on, how pretty does it look on my bookshelf (along with its hardcover cousins)?



The last word: if you loved ‘Watchmen’ and you loved ‘Dark Knight Returns’ (the real versions!), then there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll love this.