Bookends

by Michael Chabon

  5.

  PEOPLE HAVE BEEN IMITATING, SWIPING FROM, AND BUILDING on Chaykin’s experiments in panel arrangement, text-balloon placement, and parallel narration for over two decades now, and the thing still startles and disturbs the eye. It’s like Citizen Kane in that way. Welles and Chaykin may not have invented or pioneered all the stylistic and technical innovations on display in their masterworks, but they were the first to put them all together in a way that changed how their successors thought about what they could and had to, and wanted to, do.

  Citizen Kane remains an acknowledged influence on the movies and the comics that followed it. The debt to American Flagg!, while obvious, has been neglected. Its two great mid-eighties comics successors, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, are hard to imagine without its example; those two books in turn influenced much that followed. Flagg, in both its style and its concepts, fed the literary genre of cyberpunk that has since watered the entire landscape of popular culture, from comics and computer games to movies to television programs. Again, I’m not arguing that Chaykin invented dystopian comics or cyberpunk, only that he articulated a set of tropes and “packaged” them in a way that brought them to durable, ravishing life.

  If American Flagg! were merely influential or innovative, its relative retreat from view in the past two decades would be more understandable; the same goes for its oft-remarked effectiveness as prophecy. Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. So Arthur C. Clarke predicted the global satellite network—so what? He also predicted the widespread use of hovercrafts and the dominance by 2001 of the commercial Earth-Moon space trade by PanAm Airlines (d. 1991). Such prescience, or the obligation to display it is, more than bad writing, the element of a work of sf that most readily dooms it, regardless of whether the predictions turn out to be right or wrong. Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children’s understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make. If American Flagg! successfully predicted certain aspects of the hundred-ply world we live in now—and I think of it every time I see a lurid news headline about a pedophilic pop star crawl under breaking footage of carnage or disaster, while a network meat-puppet intones the latest official spin—than that very success would condemn it to seem, in time, eternally passé.

  It is not, ultimately, the brilliance of its technique, or the aptness of the future it imagined that makes American Flagg! an enduring, necessary, and neglected pleasure, but the impeccable pop artisanship that produced it. So many of the purest pop masterpieces, from Michael Ritchie’s Smile to Emmit Rhodes’s self-titled first solo album, are neglected ones; even an acknowledged pop masterpiece like Pet Sounds has never quite shed its initial air of puzzlement-inducing letdown. American Flagg! has all the modern virtues that would seem to guarantee its place in the pantheon of seminal pop artifacts: irony, attitude, knowingness, cynicism, a familiarity with corruption and existential bad faith, a rapturous, at times hyperbolic sense of style, and that insatiable compulsion, mentioned earlier, to undercut. Its hero, Reuben Flagg, is not just a preening, self-regarding piece of beefcake—he’s a redundant one, having been replaced, in his starring role on Mark Thrust, Sexus Ranger, by a hologram; and a self-conscious one. Nobody is more aware of the irony and implicit satire of his situation than Flagg. On the surface, he ought to be an ideal hero, and American Flagg! an ideal narrative, for our time.

  But for all his cynicism and archness of eyebrow, Howard Chaykin, like so many pop artisans, draws the greatest part of his strength from the source that underlies all true visions of pop perfection: romance. Chaykin is, fundamentally, a romancer, “a storyteller,” as the cliché has it, “in the grand tradition.” Cynical, pompous or jaundiced, self-aware, embittered or corrupted, his heroes remain heroes, and the stories he tells never stray very far from their roots in Sabatini novels, The Shadow and Doc Savage, Chandler, Hammett, the films of Michael Curtiz. True friendship, true love, dying for a belief, self-sacrifice, even American ideals—such things, though he almost hates to admit it, are still possible in Chaykin’s work. It’s the instinct for popular narrative, for everything that Chaykin, in conversation, dismissively and affectionately terms “Pulp,” that guarantees Chaykin’s status as a true pop artisan, neglect and all. But it’s that deep ambivalence toward romance, the need to undercut, that brings a problematic wobble to all of Chaykin’s work. Like Paul Simon, who at once has felt and knows to be illusory the transcendent rapture of a killer hook, Chaykin’s sense of romance and its conventions is always, at the same time, a sense of betrayal by them. In his earliest comics work drawing flashy, somewhat raw adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s (already ironic) sword and sorcery tales, and creating short-lived titles such as Iron Wolf and The Scorpion, romance, the unabashed fabulating impulse of the storyteller, tended to win out. A cool head, quick reflexes, a steadfast purpose, and the love or memory of a good woman—along with that crucial Sabatinian “gift for laughter and a sense that the world was mad”—these were sufficient, or nearly so, to any challenge or evil the hero might encounter. In his recent work—though Chaykin’s technique has attained the kind of effortless polish that, as with all experienced artists, is a synonym for correctly valuing his own strengths and weaknesses—the cynicism, the undercutting, and the mockery, revisionism, and satire have tended to gain the upper hand.

  American Flagg! stands at the glorious midpoint, at that difficult fulcrum poised between innocence and experience, romance and disillusion, adventure and satire, the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic, 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. Such balancing acts have always been the greatest feats of American popular art; I hope these new editions of American Flagg! go a long way to establishing Howard Chaykin’s place on the highest high wire. (2008)

  D’Aulaires’ Norse Myths, Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire

  I WAS IN THE THIRD GRADE WHEN I FIRST READ THIS BOOK, and already suffering the changes, the horns, wings, and tusks that grow on your imagination when you thrive on a steady diet of myths and fairy tales. I had read its predecessor, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths (1961), and I knew my Old Testament pretty well, from the Creation more or less down to Ruth. There was rape and murder in those other books, revenge, cannibalism, folly, madness, incest, and deceit. And I thought all that was great stuff. (Maybe that says something about me, or about eight-year-old boys generally. I don’t really care either way.) Joseph’s brothers, enslaving him to some Ishmaelites and then soaking his florid coat in animal blood to horrify their father: great stuff. Orpheus’s head, torn off by a raving pack of women, continuing to sing as it floats down the Hebrus river to the sea: that was great stuff, too. Every splendor in those tales had its shadow, every blessing its curse. In those shadows and curses I first encountered the primal darkness of the world, in some of our earliest attempts to explain and understand it.

  For whatever reason—call it the depravity natural to the young of our species—I was drawn to, and repelled by, that darkness. But even within the context of the stories, I knew that I was supposed to be only repelled by the darkness and also, somehow, to blame myself for it. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment, the imperative to work and sweat and struggle and flee the Furies, these had entered the world with humankind: we brought them on ourselves. In the Bible it had all started out with a felicitous couple in the Garden of Eden; in the Greek myths, after a brief aeon of divine patricide and child-devouring and a couple of wars in Heaven, there came a long and peaceful Golden Age. In both cases, we were meant to understand, the world had begun with light and been spoiled. Thousands of years of moralizers, preceptors, dramatists, hypocrites, and scolds had been at work on this m
aterial, with their dogma, and their hang-ups, and their refined sense of tragedy. The original darkness was still there in the stories, and it was still very dark indeed. But it had been engineered, like a fetid swamp by the Army Corps, rationalized, bricked up, rechanneled, given a dazzling white coat of cement. It had been turned to the advantage of people trying to make a point to recalcitrant listeners. What remained was a darkness that, while you recognized it in your own heart, obliged you at the same time to recognize its disadvantage, its impoliteness, its unacceptability, its being wrong, particularly for eight-year-old boys.

  When Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire presented their version of the Greek myths for young readers, they kept the cannibalism, murder, revenge, folly, and deceit (soft-pedaling the rape, incest, and zoophilia), but, ever-faithful to their sources, they also kept (soft-pedaling, bless them) the moralizing, the fine calculus of punishment and retribution, the fundamental view that what I’m calling darkness—the tendency of our world toward calamity, violence, and ruin—arose with us, and is kept alive through our own untiring efforts at vanity and sin.

  In the world of the Northmen, it was a different story.

  As the D’Aulaires told it, in this follow-up volume to their Book of Greek Myths (originally titled Norse Gods and Giants), there was something in Scandinavian mythology that went beyond the universal appeal to an eight-year-old boy of violence, monstrosity, feats of arms, sibling rivalry, and ripping yarns. Here the darkness was not solely the fault of humans, the inevitable product of their unfitness, their inherent inferiority to the God or gods who—quite cruelly, under the circumstances—had created them.

  The world of Norse gods and men and giants, which the D’Aulaires depicted, in a stunning series of lithographs, with such loving and whimsical and brutal delicacy, begins in darkness, and ends in darkness, and is veined like a fire with darkness that forks and branches. It is a world conjured against darkness, in its lee, so to speak; around a fire, in a camp at the edges of a continent-sized forest, under a sky black with snow clouds, with nothing to the north but nothingness and flickering ice. It assumes darkness, and its only conclusion is darkness (apart from a transparently tacked-on post-Christian postlude). Those veins of calamity and violence and ruin that structure it, like the forking of a fire or of the plot of a story, serve to make more vivid the magical glint of goodness that light and color represent. (Everything that is beautiful, in the Norse world, is something that glints: sparks from ringing hammers, stars, gold and gems, the Aurora borealis, tooled swords and helmets and armbands, fire, a woman’s hair, wine and mead in a golden cup.) Here the gods themselves are no better nor worse, in the moral sense, than humans. They have the glint of courage, of truthfulness, loyalty, wit, and in them maybe it shines a little brighter, as their darkness throws deeper shadows. The morality encoded in these stories is a fundamental one of hospitality and revenge, gift giving and life taking, oaths sworn, dooms pronounced, cruel and unforgettable pranks. Moreover (and to my eight-year-old imagination this more than anything endeared them to me) the Norse gods are mortal. Sure, you probably knew that already, but think about it again for a minute or two. Mortal gods. Gods whose flaws of character—pride, unfaithfulness, cruelty, deception, seduction—while no worse than those of Jehovah or the Olympians, will one day, and they know this, prove their undoing.

  Great stuff. Start anywhere; start with Odin. First he murders the gigantic, hideous monster who whelped his father, and slaughters him to make the universe. Then he plucks out his own right eyeball and trades it to an ice giant for a sip—a sip!—of water from the well of secret knowledge. Next he hangs himself, from a tree, for nine days and nine nights, and in a trance of divine asphyxia devises the runes. Then he opens a vein in his arm and lets his blood commingle with that of the worst (and most appealing) creature who ever lived, thus setting in motion the chain of events that will lead to the extinction of himself, everyone he loves, and all the nine worlds (beautifully mapped on the book’s endpapers) that he himself once shaped from the skull, lungs, heart, bones, teeth, and blood of his grandfather.

  The D’Aulaires captured all of this, reporting it in a straightforward, fustian-free, magical-realist prose that never stops to shake its head or gape at marvels and freaks and disasters, making them seem somehow all the stranger, and more believable. Their spectacular and quirky illustrations (a pair of adjectives appropriate to few illustrators that I can think of offhand) never found a more appropriate subject than the Norse world with its odd blend of gorgeousness and violence, its wild prodigies and grim humor. What makes the book such a powerful feat of visual storytelling is the way in which the prose and the pictures (reflecting, perhaps, the marriage and lifelong partnership of the authors) complement each other, advance each other’s agenda. Every page that is not taken up by a giant bursting lithograph of stars and monsters is ornamented with a smaller drawing, or with one of the curious, cryptic, twisted little margin-men, those human curlicues of fire, that so disquieted me as a kid and continue, to this day, to freak out and delight my own kids. Through this intricate gallery of marvels and filigree the text walks with calm assurance, gazing calmly into every abyss, letting the art do the work of bedazzlement while seeing to it that the remarkable facts—the powers and shortcomings of Mjölnir the mighty hammer, the strange parentage of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed—are laid bare. This simultaneous effect of wonderment and acceptance, this doubled strength, allows the D’Aulaires to balance their re-creation of the Norse world exactly on its point of greatest intensity: the figure of Loki.

  Ally and enemy, genius and failure, delightful and despicable, ridiculous and deadly, beautiful and hideous, hilarious and bitter, clever and foolish—Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous World Itself. It was in reading this book that I first felt the power of that ambiguity. Children start out with a morality that is the equivalent of scribbling, and in being taught to color inside the lines are rarely presented with literary characters who elude and evade those lines, falling at once within and without them. One never encountered Loki among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About. Loki was the god of the sloppily colored lineaments of my own childish mind, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them. And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.

  I grew up in a time of mortal gods who knew, like Odin, that the world of marvels they had created was on the verge, through their own faithlessness and might, of Ragnarok, a time when the best impulses of men and the worst were laid bare in Mississippi and Vietnam, when the suburban Midgard where I grew up was threatened—or so we were told—by frost-giants and fire-giants sworn to destroy it. And I guess I saw all of that reflected in this book. But if those parallels were there, then so was Loki, and not merely in his treachery and his urge to scheme and spoil. Loki was funny—he made the other gods laugh. In his fickleness and his fertile imagination he even brought pleasure to Odin, who with all his well sipping and auto-asphyxiation knew too much ever to be otherwise amused. This was, in fact, the reason why Odin had taken the great, foredoomed step of making Loki his blood brother—for the pleasure, pure and simple, of his company. Loki was the god of the irresistible gag, the gratuitous punch line, the improvised, half-baked solution—the God of the Eight-Year-Old Boy—and like all great jokers and improvisers, as often the butt and the perpetrator of his greatest stunts. In the end, it was not the familiar darkness of the universe and of my human heart that bound me forever to this book and the Nine Worlds it contained. It was the bright thread of silliness, of mockery and self-mockery, of gods forced (repeatedly) to dress as women, and
submit to the amorous attentions of stallions, and wrestle old ladies. The D’Aulaires’ heterogeneous drawings caught hold precisely of that thread: they were pre-Raphaelite friezes as cartooned by Popeye’s Elzie Segar, at once grandiose and goofy, in a way that reflected both the Norse universe—which begins, after all, with a cow, a great world-sized heifer, patiently, obsessively licking at a salty patch in the primal stew—and my own.

  We all grew up—all of us, from the beginning—in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, it seemed a little more true than usual. (2005)

  “The Rocket Man,” Ray Bradbury

  THE MOST IMPORTANT SHORT STORY IN MY LIFE AS A WRITER is Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man.” I read it for the first time when I was ten. I was making my way, with pleasure, through a collection of Bradbury’s stories called R Is for Rocket. I had been an avid reader for about five years, and at first the pleasure I felt was the familiar pleasure I derived from the flights of an author’s fancy, and from the anticipation and surprise of plot. Then I came to “The Rocket Man.” It’s the narrative of the young son of a rocket pilot whose father is to him at once an ordinary, ordinarily absent father, puttering around the house on his days off, and a terrible, mysterious demigod whose kingdom is the stars. The danger of the father’s profession, the imminence and immanence of death, lie upon the family like the dust of stars that the narrator lovingly collects from his father’s flight suit every time the Rocket Man comes home. During one of the father’s leaves, the family travels to Mexico by car. One evening they stop along a rural road to rest, and in the last light of the day the son notices bright butterflies, dozens of them, trapped and dying in the grille of the car.