Neon Visions - by Brannon Costello (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the 1980s, Howard Chaykin broke new ground in American comic books with a series of formally innovative, iconoclastic works that turned the traditional action-adventure tales of mainstream comics into a platform for personal expression, political engagement, and aesthetic experimentation. His original creations American Flagg!, Time², and the notorious Black Kiss, along with his reshaping of familiar titles like The Shadow and Blackhawk, generated acclaim and often controversy as they challenged expectations of the visual design and subject matter permissible in popular comics. Today, Chaykin remains a vital and prolific artist, but despite the original and influential nature of his work, he receives scant critical attention.

In Neon Visions, Brannon Costello offers the first book-length critical evaluation of Chaykin's work and confronts the blind spots in comics scholarship that consign this seminal artist to the margins. He argues that Chaykin's contributions are often overlooked because his comics eschew any pretensions to serious literature. Instead, Chaykin's work revels in the cliffhanger thrills of heroic-adventure genres and courts outrage with transgressive depictions of violence and sexuality. Examining Chaykin's career from his early successes to compelling contemporary series such as City of Tomorrow, Dominic Fortune, and the controversial Black Kiss 2, Costello explores how this inventive body of work, through its evolving treatment of the theme of authenticity, incisively investigates popular culture's capacity to foster or constrain individual identity and political agency.

Challenging prevailing assumptions about the types of comics deemed worthy of scholarly attention, Costello reveals that the work of an artist as distinctive as Howard Chaykin demands a nuanced reading--one that confronts his unique approach to the comics medium, his blending of autobiographical themes and genre trademarks, and his engagement with comic books as artifacts of consumer culture.

Review Quotes

Costello fearlessly fills a gap in comics criticism, examining a neglected artist--innovator, satirist, provocateur--who doesn't neatly fit into any category but whose work is all the more important for that. A smart, challenging analysis of smart, challenging, even transgressive comics, Neon Visions tackles hard questions of postmodernity, artifice, and style while opening new horizons for comics studies.--Charles Hatfield, author of Alternative Comics and Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby

Howard Chaykin's comic-book oeuvre challenges us in its aesthetic range--from conventional and disposable to groundbreaking and essential--and in its content, which can be scathingly satirical, joyously pulpy, narratively complex, shamelessly sentimental, and aggressively pornographic, sometimes all at once. It takes a brave and intelligent critic to take him on, but he's found an ideal reader in Brannon Costello. Well written, nuanced, and insightful, this superb book not only helps us to understand the nature of Chaykin's achievement, but to see his disparate body of work as parts of a whole.--Ben Saunders, coeditor of Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby

This fine work places Howard Chaykin and his boundary-breaking and controversial canon of work where it belongs--at the heart of serious analysis and study.--Matt Fraction, writer of Hawkeye and Sex Criminals

About the Author

Brannon Costello, associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, is the editor of Howard Chaykin: Conversations and Conversations with Michael Chabon; and, with Qiana J. Whitted, coeditor of Comics and the U.S. South.