Newsarama 2002: Howard Chaykin
HOWARD CHAYKIN ON BLADE, GUGGENHEIM, AND CRAFT
by Matt Brady
It's pretty clear Howard Chaykin is having the time of his life.
After coming back to monthly comics with Hawkgirl at DC, the acclaimed creator has recently moved to Marvel for the monthly Blade series, written by Marc Guggenheim.
We caught up with him to talk about his comics, his plans, his collaborator, and his craft.
Newsarama: With your move from Hawkgirl to Blade, is it safe to assume that you're now working mostly with Marvel?
Howard Chaykin: No - I'm still at both companies. My monthly book right now is coming out from Marvel, but I'm waiting to hear from DC on a project that they've already agreed to, but the details are being hammered out, but I'm here and there.
NRAMA: Your return to monthly work started at DC, and one of your first Marvel projects was New Avengers #21 with Brian Bendis. Was he responsible for opening the door for you over there?
HC: Actually, I had been talking to Joe Quesada for some time, and when the Blade project came up, I jumped at it. I'm having a really good time on it, too.
NRAMA: I think you caught a lot of people off guard by doing that - of all the things that you could've picked at Marvel, Blade just seemed…not what you'd go for.
HC: I was surprised myself.
NRAMA: So what attracted you to it, then?
HC: Guggenheim's proposal. Everything that proposal promised me has panned out. In fact, right now, I'm in the process of downloading and printing out preliminary reference for issue #4. I delivered issue #3 last week [this interview was conducted 9/20], and thumbnailed/broke down issue #4 yesterday, and today is reference day. And like I said, every single thing that was promised to me in that proposal has come to fruition. I'm having a phenomenal time, and a lot of that good time comes out of the fact that Marc is a terrific writer, and beyond his capacity as a writer, which is formidable, he's also one of the most artist friendly writers that I've ever worked with. He knows how to get exactly what he wants from me, in the best possible way. Drawing his stuff is a treat.
We all say, "I'm having a great time doing this job!" but well - this time, I am having a great time on this job. The indication of that is that I feel the art on this book gets better and better. I'm as self-critical as anybody, so if I'm saying that, I ain't kidding. I'm just having a great time, and they seem pretty damn happy. I've got a couple of other things in the pipeline that I want to get working on with Marc - I'm having a great time working with him.
NRAMA: Looking at the first issue, it seems to really appear to all of your tastes, given that, as Marc said, he's looking to tell two stories per issue, one, in present day, and the other a flashback. Issue #1's, for instance - a period piece from England, which got you drawing in a quasi-Victorian setting…
HC: Oh, but wait - there's more. The second issue has more of that, and more. Every issue has been different so far, and the one I'm working on right now is a complete hoot.
And again, everything breaks down so effectively, so perfectly in terms of image to action. I know I'm getting a little esoteric, I know. Comic book readers wants a good read, but when I look at a script, I want to see how it breaks down, how the pictures work, the scale of the action compared to the scale of the panel itself. Marc's stuff is just perfect. Again, I had a great time doing the first one, a better time on the second, and the third…just wait until you see the stuff we have coming up.
NRAMA: Something that I wondered about in taking this book up - you've got a lead and major cast members that have an abnormality in regards to their mouths with the fangs. Were they tricky in any way in regards to making them look real and work within the face?
HC: Oh yeah. My approach was that I decided where they went, and put them there. The whole vampire mythos is so filled with personal interpretation - you do what you can with what you're given. You find a way. For me, I looked at wolves and orangutans, and you can see the way the mandibles work.
NRAMA: Going back to what you said about Marc's writing, the scene in the book where the point of view flips from Blade talking to the SHIELD agent to the literal mirror image which shows the agent apparently talking to himself…that was a level of subtle complexity you rarely see in mainstream books anymore…
HC: That was the most difficult thing in the job to do - clearly. It was a mater of staging, it's a matter of getting it right and making it work. That was simply breaking it down mechanically. I took his idea, and figured out that it was best served by horizontal imagery.
NRAMA: You can pull that out, from reading a script?
HC: Oh, of course. I don't know if it's because he writes in a cinematic fashion or what, but I find that there's a predominance of horizontal ideas in Marc's imagery, which I find fascinating, because I've always been a vertical guy. He gives me the horizontal images that I can work in really well, and then gives me diagonals and verticals that can work against it with.
Anyway, on that sequence, once we figured out how to do it, it was a matter of breaking up the pieces, and getting them all to work. And then, when Edgar colored it, we had to make sure that he got the look of the smoked glass of the reflection and everything else. And finally, the balloons.
NRAMA: What about them?
HC: They had to be floating. They couldn't be tailed to the people, because they weren't the people - they were reflections. All that stuff - it was a mater of putting it all together and getting it to work.
And then, in issue #2, he gives me a different kind of problem like that to solve. Qualitatively similar in level of difficultly, but again - they're very sensible problems and are not self-indulgently wacky. They're interesting and smart, and they serve the material.
NRAMA: And the pairing seems to work, as I said…that single scene…it takes a minute or two to figure it out, rather than just assume that you forgot to draw Blade in the scene. It seems rare that the writer or artist asks a reader to take their time and figure something out because it's presented in a manner that's more complex than the simplest "show and tell."
HC: For me at least, it's important to take advantage of the visual nature of the material. Duh. Marc does not overwrite. I overwrite, but Marc has a very short, clipped approach to his dialogue. I'll tell you what I told him - I've seen other jobs that he's done with other artists, and I can see, without text, the shots he's called, and I can categorically disagree with the way those artists interpreted the way those shots were called. That's just me being picky, the stage manager of the universe, and the editor for God, of course, but I can see it.
NRAMA: Going back to something what you said earlier…that Marc tends to write horizontally. What do you mean by that?
HC: There's a sense of panorama to his stuff. As I speak, I'm looking at the breakdown to issue three…let me pick it up…this is the real esoteric stuff now, Brady…there isn't a single page without a major horizontal element, with the exception of two full pages. Of those, eight o the remaining twenty pages have vertical imagery in tandem with the horizontal, so you're talking 12 pages that are predominately horizontal. Cinema-esque, like a movie screen.
I know, I know, most readers don't are or think about this stuff at all, but for me, it's what the material is served by. Again, I don't consciously think, "I'm going to do this horizontally today" - it just seems to me that the shots that Marc calls for tend to be served best by (and there are still eight pages with plenty of verticals) horizontal shapes. Like I said, I've been a vertical guy for most of my days. I used to get grief from an editor at Marvel for doing what he called "keyhole panels" - vertical panels that he felt made it look like readers were peering through keyholes.
He gave me grief about it, but I took that as a point of reference and thought - the function of peering through a keyhole is to see something that you're not supposed to see. How do you make that work? So what started as a criticism was something that I incorporated into my own work as a choice.
NRAMA: Back to the series…
HC: Right…okay, #3 and #4 don't have those reversal shots, just because they weren't called for, although I think he's trying to find some for me just to try and make me miserable. But still - it doesn't make my life miserable at all - it keeps me awake and keeps me green. For me, because it's always in the service of the story, it's never self-indulgent.
NRAMA: Not "I'm doing this because I can…"
HC: Right - it's never a circle jerk. God knows, there's a lot of that "technique for the sake of technique" out there. I've always said that I spent the first half of my career pissing all over technique, and the second half of my career doing everything I possibly could to learn as much technique as I could. And by technique, I don't necessarily only mean rendering - I also mean storytelling, choices of shots, framing of shots, and selling of shot. These are important things to me. The story is everything.
NRAMA: Taking what we've said then, let's look at #2…he's headed to Latveria and Doom…
HC: Or something Doom-like, yes…
NRAMA: Fair enough, something Doom-like. What kind of research, for example does setting the story in Latveria call for, then?
HC: Castle interiors, castle keeps, the labs that are a combination of Frankenstein's with the DNA molecule. Things like that. Lots of stuff.
NRAMA: You pull it yourself?
HC: I make a list and pass it off to my assistant. One of the things I was doing at five o'clock this morning was, having read the script and highlighted where reference was needed, I had a pages 1-22 list of what things I needed as reference. That's the world. I need an upscale executive suite with the Washington, D.C. skyline visible through the window. We're not going to get an office that will have all of that, but we'll get an office, and we'll get the D.C. skyline, and we'll do the work.
Suits. Hats. What a five year old girl wears at Christmas in a small town when she's on Santa's lap.
Issue #1, for example - the kids. First off, notice that in that inset shot of Blade's sunglasses, you can't see any of the vampire kids, but you can see the teacher lying on the table.
NRAMA: Hadn't caught that.
HC: Okay, that was me - that wasn't in the script, but was my little addition to the game. Now, look at the kids - not generic, right? Pan-ethnic, right? All dressed like kids do dress today in an upscale private school, right? No fakery. Not generic. It's a real school lunchroom, and that's what's important to me, no matter whether the comic book reader cares or not.
Years ago, there were those books that were published in the '50s about being a cartoonist, a comic book artist, and all this other stuff. In there, Milton Caniff always talked about faking a luger and getting endless grief from readers. These days, readers don't both, but I took what Caniff said to heart, and I try not to fake it.
Gil Kane was my mentor. Gil had a lot of failings, but I always felt that his most profound failing that he came form an era that the only quality of real merit was speed. He was always good in speed, but his work always was generic. He never learned how to use reference. He never learned how to do a specific suit, a specific car, or a real city. If you look at a Gil Kane city, it looks like a Gil Kane city. It was Anywhere, USA. There was never a sense of genuine texture that told you where this neighborhood was. That's important to me - and it's important to a lot of guys in my generation and afterward. There's a specificity of detail that is mostly self-serving.
NRAMA: How so?
HC: I don't think that the audience is that concerned, but it's important to me.
NRAMA: Wrapping things up then, this is where people can find you monthly for the foreseeable future?
HC: Hey, I've started #4, and we're moving along. There's other work in the pipeline too - and doing the monthly gives me wiggle room to do a bit of other stuff as well, and there are other things to be done, and I'm getting to do some real satisfying stuff.
I want to do more with Marc. I definitely want to work with Mark Millar. I want to work with Bendis again - he and I have been talking about a revival of a classic Marvel title that I'm ready to jump all over and kill for. And I'm also working on something else for Marvel right now that I can't discuss.
I'm writing some stuff for myself, I'm writing for other guys, and drawing from other guys' scripts. So I'm changing it up and keeping it young.
And I'm having a ball while I'm doing it.
© Newsarama
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