1984 Journey to US

Excerpt from An impossibly rich celebrity's guide, a piece written by Moore chronicling his journey to New York in 1984. Published in Escape n. 6, 1985.

31st August, Friday
In the morning I meet Frank Miller and we call up at the Marvel offices, a curious place. The people seem friendly enough, but the atmosphere is very different to the informal cheeriness of DC. The centre of the floor is given over to drawing boards and labouring artisans, while the offices leading off from the main area are apparently the kind that you knock and wait at the door of, before entering. This is probably simple company bias on my part, but with Marvel I did get the impression of a company who make the trains run on time. I don't seem to have an awful lot to say to Marvel and they don't seem to have much to say to me.
Afterwards, me and Frank call in at a bar and down some sandwiches and beer. Talking to him, I feel a strong affinity of approach; he tells me about his forthcoming Batman series for DC, his face contorting into the different emotions of his characters as he describes them. This is something I do myself, and it comes from a near-unbalanced degree of involvement. Frank tells me that Howard Chaykin's approach is totally different. Howard is very cool and calculating in his construction, or at least that's how it looks to me. Frank, on the other hand, has a more personal and idiosyncratic touch. Out in the street, I notice a smouldering manhole cover reminiscent of those which populate the New York of Miller's Daredevil. I point it out to Frank and tell him I thought he'd made them up. We say goodbye and I head back to the hotel to meet Karen and the Limo to take me back to Kennedy airport. We stand outside for half an hour but it doesn't arrive. Eventually, Karen has to flag down one of the killer yellow cabs. The driver is a young Hispanic guy with dripping black ringlets in the style of Michael Jackson. He says 'I'll have him at the airport twenty five minutes guaranteed, I like to move, I don't wanna wait around, you know what I mean?' SLAM! The cab takes off on two wheels and I'm splattered against its rear upholstery by the sudden G-force. Outside, the New York landscape flashes by at an oddly tilted angle. Twenty-five minutes later we screech to a halt outside the British Airways terminal. 'Course my best time is twenty minutes!'
I catch my plane. Later I look out of the window, down upon New York and it looks like either a gigantic bird-eating spider fashioned in fairy lights or a luminous man with antlers. Dinner is served. I drink a Scotch and half a bottle of wine and then fall asleep. I awake hours later, just as we approach Heathrow. We land and I make my way through customs and find Jamie Delano waiting to take me home. He asks what America was like and all I can think to tell him about is a bumper sticker that Steve Bissette saw bearing the legend 'I swerve for hallucinations'. I am utterly blank. I've left my heart in San Francisco, my tie pin in the hotel and my brains all over the back seat of a yellow cab at Kennedy airport. As of this writing, my heart has turned up in the mail and I think I can buy a tie pin just like the old one. Why are there no major comic companies in Bali? 

The complete article can be read HERE.

Howard Chaykin on Moore and... Kurtzman

Page from American Flagg! n. 21. Pencils by Larry Stroman, inks by Don Lomax.

Simply put, Alan Moore is the best writer American comic books have had since Harvey Kurtzman—and since, in my opinion, Harvey was the best writer comics have ever seen, that’s high praise. --- Howard Chaykin

Above, Chaykin's contribution to the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (2003, Abiogenesis Press), page 77.

In 1985, Moore wrote The Kansas saga, a sequence of short stories that appeared in appendix to Chaykin's acclaimed American Flagg! series (issues n. 21-27).

I love Howard Chaykin!

Warren Ellis, Howard Chaykin and... Big Numbers

Big Numbers N. 2 cover by Bill Sienkiewicz.

Excerpt from Warren Ellis' "[ORBITAL OPERATIONS] 31jan16" newsletter.

"[...] And Alan Moore had a famous "big piece of paper" for BIG NUMBERS. Here's a curiosity - in the early 80s, Alan visited New York, and wrote about meeting Howard Chaykin and learning that Chaykin painstakingly worked out AMERICAN FLAGG's structure in advance. There were no more details than that, but at the end of that decade Alan was structuring a book on a vast graph (Gene Ha has a photo) [...]"

Howard Chaykin talks about comics process and... Watchmen

Page from Watchmen. Art by Dave Gibbons.

Howard Chaykin talks about the importance of artists in the comics creative process. And in Watchmen. 

[...] I recently heard an anecdote about one of my colleagues, a comic book writer, who apparently believes that the artist has absolutely nothing to do with the creative process in comics. If the artist is drawing realistic people in realistic situations, he is simply doing a job of work rather than participating in the creation of the material. I am of the belief that the artist does 50% of the “writing” in comic books. I think the guy is plum crazy. It staggered me in its limited understanding of what comic books are about. 

For example Watchmen is always being referred to as Alan Moore’s Watchmen as if Dave Gibbons had nothing to do with it. But the sensibility of that book would have been an entirely different experience if someone besides Dave had drawn it, and I don’t think that Dave gets near the credit and props he deserves. I think that it is important to acknowledge the fact that comics is a visual narrative medium in which much of the “writing” is provided by the artist who visualizes the material. 

Read the full interview with Chaykin here.