Art of Howard Chaykin intro By Brian Michael Bendis
Howard Chaykin! I literally could write this entire book about my feelings about Howard but I only have about 500 words or so to say what I came here to say so I’m going to be brief and to the point. Howard Chaykin is my hero. Howard is my Jewish Messiah.
Howard is not the inventor of the graphic novel but that’s like saying Orson Welles didn’t invent movies. But just like it’s hard to imagine movies without Orson Welles to me it’s impossible to imagine graphic novels without Howard Chaykin.
I know all of this is subjective but I feel that if you picked up this book, at least on some level you agree with me. On some level you feel what I feel about this man and his work.
But…
For me, if you take away the fact that starting with American Flagg and Times Squared his writing was literally decades ahead of its time, if you take away the fact that it’s hard to think of another person who brought more groundbreaking graphic design sensibility and typography genius to each and every page of his work, if you take away the fact that he is and was a singular outstanding voice in what was often a sea of average… if you take all that away he still is my personal Jesus because he created numerous fictional universes were Jewish men frequently received blow jobs.
This idea alone makes him one of the great literary fantasy writers in the history of modern fiction. This idea of a Jewish man getting a blow job over and over and over again is a sexual fantasia of a world so different from our own that to me it ranks up there with the complete works of J.R.R. Tolkien and CS Lewis.
Now I admire Howard on almost every conceivable level. And now that I have been gifted the opportunity to actually work with him I almost freeze in panic as I try to write something for him worth his time and talent. But I find myself often quite angry with him. And I had to think of why. But I get it now. I was a relatively young man when I first was introduced to his work. I was still in high school when American Flagg first debuted. So the idea that a Jewish man may get a blowjob was inspirational to me. It gave me hope.
But that hope was false.
That fantasy never became reality. Sometimes I feel that it was just plain criminal to plant the seed into my head the heads of thousands of Jewish men all over the world.
Then I became a writer and came to realize you don’t write the world the way it is you write the world the way you want it to be. Just like Woody Allen said. By the time American Flagg was finished I realized that the idea of the Jewish hero getting a blowjob was fictitious as a talking cat. But then it happened again in his Blackhawk series and again my hope was renewed.
But then I read black kiss. And I didn’t want anything sexually from anyone for quite some time. So… problem solved.
As I write this Howard and I are right in the middle of our latest collaboration. It is a story that Howard came to me about Nick fury in the late 1950s on a secret mission. Every few days Howard hands in pages and many of us are struck by the fact that they are perfect Howard pages. At a time where many of his peers have either retired or seem to have lost their mojo, Howard, all of a sudden, seems to be at the top of his game. It seems that Howard is on the verge of creating his next masterpiece and for fans of his, like me, nothing could be more exciting.
Howard, I have said it privately but I’m going to say publicly: thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for paving the way for this generation of creators. Thank you for making it that much more easier for us to create.
But most importantly thank you for planting the blowjob seed in my head. I did end up getting one back in 1997 (from a non Jewish girl) and I vaguely remember it being pretty great.
Bendis!
Portland, Oregon 2011
Ps. After rereading it I realize that this intro is almost identical to the one Gore Vidal wrote for the collected stories of Tennessee Williams. My bad.