Howard Chaykin

Back when I hung out at the Warren Ellis Forum and The Authority was coming out, there was a lot of talk about decompressed storytelling, and widescreen comics. This is the opposite. Sp far the opposite. Crowded, dense, detailed, the characters, the stories, the dialogue, the sound effects, the colours, all so crowded together they're literally tripping over each other all across the pages, with tight focus, like a television screen rather than a cinema. It's also garish and nasty, knowingly show more full of the sex and violence it sends up in its satirical take on the media, so sordid and twisted, a cynical corrupt world full of venality and hatred. It's glorious. A sly bit of fast and furious pop-comics, politically aware, culturally accelerated, socially diseased. Chaykin's a craftsman, and never loses control of the chaotic material he's splurging with exceptional skill and energy all over the page. show less

The prescient sci-fi dystopia of a hyper-violent, hyper-sexualised, media-saturated world after environmental, economic and social collapse jumps through the door of a vehicle and kicks the driver in the face in this grand finale. An artificially generated blizzard paralyses Chicago and floods it with refugees, a secretive militia group prepare for a coup, bringing back an unfamiliar and unwelcome face to run the show, Flagg and co move underground and organise the resistance. It's a world show more where the current US president would feel right at home, which is not a fun thought, but it is a fun book, mad pulpy satirical fun. show less

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

Before reading it, I had thought Ironwolf: Fires of the Revolution would be a retelling of the events of Howard Chaykin's original IronWolf* story in the new context of his Twilight story. It turns out that Fires of the Revolution is largely a sequel to the 1973-74 IronWolf, albeit one that retcons it a little bit to fit it into the future history established by Twilight. The original IronWolf concerned struggles over the show more "Empire Galaktika"; Fires of the Revolution quickly establishes that this is a high-faluting name for a group of three planets. The capital of the Empire Galaktika was Earth; Fires of the Revolution clarifies that early human colonists named a ton of planets "Earth." This does require us to ignore that in the original series, IronWolf visited the Grand Canyon, but it mostly all fits together (except for the Tales of the House of IronWolf back-ups, but they weren't such a big deal anyway).

Well, I say it all fits together, but Fires of the Revolution actually opens with a retelling of an event from the first issue of IronWolf, Weird Worlds #8: Lord Ironwolf's burning down of his family's ancestral forests of anti-gravity wood, to keep them out of the hands of his brother, who's working with the Empress Erika. I complained that in the original, this moment seemed underplayed; here the writers and artists turn it into the big dramatic moment it deserved to be. From there, though, Fires of the Revolution shifts into following up rather than retelling: Ironwolf and Shebaba's fledgling revolution is cut short when one of their own betrays them. The empress is willing to cut a deal with the rebels and form a parliamentary government, but only on the condition of Ironwolf's death, so one of Ironwolf's allies betrays him.

It's a slightly different world than the original IronWolf stories of two decades prior: less sword-and-planet warlord, and more courtly intrigue. Penciller Mike Mignola follows this new approach with visuals that come right out of the French Revolution: his Empress Erika is a highly refined aristocrat, not the sultry seductress of Chaykin's originals. (Though, of course, she is no less venomous underneath.) In the highly repressed world of this Empire Galakitka, Lord Ironwolf is different from the other aristocrats: something primal and barbaric, full of energy, willing to burn the world down if it means progress might result. This resonates with the larger story of Twilight, too (to which this is a sidequel; Homer Glint puts in an appearance, and everyone in this story can live forever because of what happened over there), in that Ironwolf claims that if the Empire Galakitka is integrated into humanity's galactic civilization, it can reverse some of the stagnation that has set in.

On the whole, Fires of the Revolution is kind of pulpy just like the original IronWolf, but in a different way. Lots of fights and betrayals and fires and shadow and plotting, but the universe feels darker and less swashbuckling. But I would partially attribute that to putting the fabulously gloomy Mignola on art. I enjoyed reading it on the whole, and looking at it even more. I still do have one complaint: I get what motivates Ironwolf's personal goals. He is a simple man at heart, and he wants revenge for the various ways he's been wronged. (There's a lot of them by this point-- basically everyone who ever threw in with him was killed.) But what motivates him politically? As an "aristo" what makes him want to rid the Empire Galaktika of aristocratic control and put a democracy in place? This was a weakness in the original IronWolf and continues to be one here.

(This book was originally published as a graphic novel in hardcover in 1992, and released in paperback in 1993. DC finally collected Chaykin's Twilight in 2015; it would be cool if they also released a collection of both Fires of the Revolution and the original IronWolf stories from Weird Worlds. It would make a nice little 150ish-page space epic.)

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* As always, it's hard to tell how comic book character names ought to be capitalized. While the text pieces in the 1986 reprint special used "IronWolf," Walt Simonson's introduction to this volume goes with "Ironwolf," so I am capitalizing that way in the context of this volume. show less

Howard Chaykin writes and illustrates a roman à clef graphic novel of the comic book industry from the 1940s to 2015 with a Mad Men gloss, telling truths, tall tales and urban legends about lightly disguised figures like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and more. There's corporate malfeasance and personal foibles galore -- so much infidelity! -- as well all the racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and sexism one would expect of the times involved.

I've enjoyed Chaykin's work in show more the past, but this one just sort of bored and occasionally lost me as it repeatedly jumped through back and forth through many decades in short, choppy scenes with its large, mostly unlikable or barely sketched cast. It didn't help that I had already heard most of the stories and gossip through my many years of reading about the comic book industry.

There's a second volume available in this series, but the only reason I might read it is to play a game of picking out all the real people and characters Chaykin is satirizing. I'm on the fence right now. show less