Recently referred to as 'the Jewish rick god of comics' by Brian Michael Bendis, Howard Chaykin is one of the modern masters of the medium. From American Flagg to Blade to the Shadow and Black Kiss, he has dipped his pen into various genres, but retained that distinctive style each time. When Bendis and Chaykin teamed up to present readers with an alternate Avengers team assembled by Nick Fury in 1959, readers were confused but excited nonetheless. It was unclear how the flashback story fit into modern continuity, but damn if it wasn't fun!
This October Chaykin will deliver the goods once again as he turns back the clock to a different era before the Avengers formed at Stark Mansion and instead operated as a covert ops team consisting of the unlikeliest of characters.
Marvel Comics fans know the original "Avengers" line-up first assembled on a day unlike any other. Readers of "New Avengers" know that fateful day may have come much earlier than anyone originally believed. In the series' recently completed "Infinity" arc writer Brian Michael Bendis told a story set in the present with the book's present day members illustrated by Mike Deodato, and a story set in the past featuring art by Howard Chaykin. The story set in the past took place in 1959, and in it the U.S. President tasked war hero Nick Fury with creating a special "Avengers Initiative," a team of highly skilled and super powered operatives that would take on secret missions. Over the course of the five-issue storyline, Fury assembled his team and led them on their first assignment, to shut down a secret Nazi cabal attempting to create their own Captain America.
This fall, Fury and his team return for another action-packed, top-secret mission in the five-issue "Avengers 1959" miniseries written and drawn by Chaykin. CBR News spoke with him about the project beginning in October.
"Infinity" originally came about because Chaykin approached Bendis with the idea of doing a Nick Fury story in a context similar to the AMC television series "Mad Men." The idea grew and eventually became part of a "New Avengers" arc, but Chaykin felt the story worked out beautifully. It featured a large cast of interesting characters, and Nick Fury was still front and center for all the action. That suited Chaykin just fine because the writer/artist is a longtime fan of the character. His past Nick Fury stories include books like 1976's "Marvel Spotlight" #31 where Chaykin teamed with writer Jim Starlin to tell a story that introduced the concept of the Infinity Formula, the secret chemical concoction that keeps Fury young. There is also 1989's "Wolverine/Nick Fury," an original graphic novel by Chaykin and writer Archie Goodwin that brought Fury face to face with Mikel, the son he never knew he had.
It comes as no surprise that Chaykin is very excited to be writing Nick Fury again, especially the 1959 incarnation of the character. "I was born in 1950. My older relatives were all vets of either the Second World War and or Korea. It really did inform the life we lived. I was nine years old in 1959 and aware and reading comics. So to a certain extent I've kind of become the go-to guy in comics in general for period material because I seem to have a pretty good handle on conveying visually and textually a sensibility that's markedly different from contemporary senses," Chaykin told CBR News. "What it is about Fury that I like, is that he really is a guy who is old enough to have genuinely experienced the horror of the Second World War and young enough to still be active and vital at this point. And for me it wasn't just because he looked like him, but my backstory in my head for Fury, because of where he was born and raised, is that in another universe he would have been Burt Lancaster.
"Lancaster was a guy who was born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who became an acrobat in a circus and ultimately moved from that into heroic movie roles and then became a great character actor. Fury is a guy who is a product of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He's a Yancy Street guy in the most basic way. I really like that aspect of this guy. He's a New Yorker born and bred whose seen the world and has a world view that's both global and local," Chaykin continued. "The story that Brian and I told took place before Fury became a super spy. In that story, and in this one as well, you're seeing Nick Fury stepping up to the plate to become the guy we know he's going to become."
Nick Fury isn't the only member of the 1959 Avengers with a special place in Chaykin's heart. Chaykin created Dominic Fortune and introduced him in in the pages of the black and white Marvel Magazine "Marvel Preview" #2 in 1975. Before his most recent return to the character with "Infinity," Chaykin wrote and drew a four-issue "Dominic Fortune" miniseries for Marvel's MAX imprint.
"I always figured that Fortune was a couple years older than Fury. In my head, Fortune served in the Spanish Civil War. If I ever get a chance to do another Fortune miniseries I'd love to show his experiences during that conflict," Chaykin remarked. " And again, like Fury, he's a New Yorker. Unlike Fury though, he fled New York and built a new life and identity for himself in California. So by the time we meet him again in '59 he's a bit more weathered, a bit more cautious than he would have been in the '30s and '40s, and has a more sanguine view of life. Perhaps he's more fatalistic."
In "Infinity" Fortune was the second person Nick Fury recruited for his Avengers team. His first was Wolverine's savage arch-enemy, Sabretooth, and Sabretooth wouldn't be the only recruit with a primal edge. The team also included Spider-Man's foe Kraven the Hunter and his girlfriend at the time, Namora of the "Agents of Atlas." In "Avengers 1959" Chaykin will explore the dynamic between these three fierce characters.
"These were the characters that were handed to me, and in that first story we hinted at some bad blood between Kraven and Sabretooth. As we speak I'm working on the panel break downs for issue #4. I did a sequence that directly addresses some of that," Chaykin explained. "It was one of those moments where I'm flying by the seat of my pants and wondering how I'm going to solve this problem and it was like 'O'Brien to Ryan to Goldberg.' It's like a triple play. It started with this, goes here, and then boom! The tag line is sort of Namora's dismissive, 'Whatever, he'll get over it.' So there is that. You've got those three characters who are barely contained by civilization."
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"Avengers 1959" picks up a few weeks after the end of the "Infinity" arc in "New Avengers" and finds the titular team pursuing a different target. "They're not after the Red Skull this time. Basically they're up against that nascent network of post-World War II fascist villains that's slowly coming together," Chaykin said. "There's also a third party, which I will not go into, that is instrumental in stirring up a storm between our heroes and those villains. That sort of complicates things radically."
Chaykin ultimately wants "Avengers 1959" to be a project where the story and art combine to deliver an epic, action-packed, character-driven, tale. "For me it's basically punching, killing, and explosions. People always assume I'm a huge pulp fan and I'm really not. My familiarity with pulp stuff is actually limited. I have to do research on that as much as anything else," the writer/artist remarked. "I'd certainly say there's no dearth of action. If you found that atmosphere from the 'New Avengers' story appealing, there's plenty of that too because this is what I like to do; character moments and action. What could be better?"
(full article at CBR.com)
