EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 12 © 2015 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

54 ABOVE LEFT: Set in the early 1950s, Satellite Sam presented a dark corner of television's Golden Age in atmospheric black and white. ABOVE RIGHT: Chaykin’s epic Century West imagined the 20th century world arriving with a bang in a remote Texas town. FACING PAGE: Forthright sex and crisp banter were hallmarks of the storytelling in American Flagg! reasons, the wildly-ahead-of-its-time American Flagg! , and the dirtily-so Black Kiss . Those titles are bookends to a period in his four-decade-plus career that is emblematic of his artistic accomplishments, and who he is to the audience. In the early 1980s, Chaykin was out of comics, and scarcely missed. He had small tastes of success throughout the preceding decade, but had not produced a signature work. Some of his jobs would live on–not least the comic adaptation of the most successful film franchise in history–but Chaykin was a minor industry figure. Following a fight on Good Friday 1981 with Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Chaykin found himself essentially banished from comics, and moved on to other illustration work, notably paperback book covers. Looking back, Chaykin is clear on one thing: he didn’t believe he had graduated to a higher professional tier. He says, “I’m 35 years away from that mindset, with little memory of how I regarded myself, but I was smart enough to realise I was never going to be at the apex of American illustration. I didn’t have the chops. I was doing OK financially with magazine stuff, but I just wasn’t that good. My work wasn’t ironic enough, nor good enough in its lack of irony to justify being in the slicks. When I went to an agency, their message was that I needed to do likenesses–or food.” He was treading water professionally, with nothing of real promise on the horizon. That made the events of 1983 exceedingly unlikely. Approached by editor Mike Gold to contribute to startup publisher First Comics, Chaykin pitched a post- apocalyptic book that was funny, sexy, and altogether unlike anything seen in comics before. From its first issue, American Flagg! was a breakout success in the then-nascent direct market comics distribution