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SIMONSON AND CHAYKIN TALK HISTORY AND HAWKGIRL
by Newsarama
They’re a new team, but old, old friends. Walter Simonson and Howard Chaykin, the new team on DC’s Hawkman, er Hawkgirl, beginning with issue #50 have known each other for decades, yet the new assignment marks one of their very few collaborations, and their first ongoing work together ever.
For those of you who don’t know the names, think of it as your first chance to get to know two legends of comics. For those of you who do know them, think of it as the vets coming back in to show the young kids how it’s supposed to be done. All in all, seeing the two land an ongoing gig on Hawkgirl ain’t too bad for an industry where ageism is the supposed norm.
We caught up with the two for a chat about their friendship over the years, as well as their new gig.
Newsarama: Before we get into the meat and bones of Hawkgirl, let’s head back in time to when you two first met – how did the two of you wind up in the same studio?
Walter Simonson: I met Howard at a convention in Washington, D.C. about a year before I started working in comics professionally. I don’t know if you were working professionally, Howard…
Howard Chaykin: Either I was, or I was just on the cusp…
WS: Right. And that would’ve made it about ’71. I came to New York in ’72, and literally, the day I walked into the offices at DC, I walked into the coffee room, and Howard, Bernie Wrightson and Mike Kaulta were all sitting at a table.
HC: That was because we were all slackers and layabouts, and the way you got work in those days was to hang around the coffee room at DC.
WS: …and just make a general nuisance of yourself until the editors would give you a job and send you away.
HC: This is not a joke – that’s the God’s honest truth. It was like Manpower – you were in there waiting for a pickup any time an editor walked in. It sounds funny, but it was more true than anything else. Very often, you could get work because someone would need a three-pager done over the weekend.
WS: This was a time before FedEx and the Internet. None of that stuff was around. If you wanted tow work in comics, and adventure comics, which meant Marvel or DC, you pretty much had to live in New York, and go into the offices every day. They had to know who you were – when you we’re just starting out, that was the way you got over that hump – you went to the offices and hung out. You got to see people, and they got to know you. Mostly, they fed you backup stories, because back then, there were backup stories. These days, independent comics and some of the smaller companies kind of serve that same role and are a place for people to break in. But back then, there were back up stories for all the different genres. You were able to get those short stories usually, and you ended up learning your craft, while being paid just enough to make a living and pay your rent somewhere cheap, which was possible back then. As you got better, you moved up, and maybe didn’t have to hang out in the offices as much, because there would be editors who knew you by your work, and would want you specifically, rather than whoever was in the coffee room.
HC: It really was kind of a farm system back then.
WM: And then, in the late’70s, four of us, Howard, myself, Val Mayerik, and Jim Starlin decided that we would like to share a studio space…
HC: Because basically our wives wanted us out of our houses…
WS: [laughs] And we could split the rent in some place, and have it end up being cheaper than if we did it individually. So, the four of us found some space on West 29th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. We called ourselves “Upstart Associates,” and we had that space for years. The membership changed over time though – Val was the first to leave, and he moved back to Ohio. Jim Sherman moved in and took his space, and then Jim Starlin moved upstate, and Frank Miller came in and took his place. That was a pretty stable group for several years. Then, Frank moved out to his own place, and shortly after that, Howard moved out to the west coast, and finally, in the late ‘80s, I moved out.
NRAMA: Even though you were in the same space, you didn’t really work on much together, did you?
WS: We really worked on very little together. We hung out a lot, and lived close to each other, but I think the first thing I ever did with Howard was lettering an issue of Ironwolf in ’73 or so. I created the Ironwolf logo too, as a matter of fact.
HC: Right. People tend to forget that Walter is the go-to guy for lettering and type for cartoonists.
WS: In the old days, at least [laughs]
HC: Oh come on. Look at Manhunter. You can look at that today, and still see that it was a real turning point for the use of lettering and type, and Walter worked to make it part of the art. To a great extent, Manhunter contained a lot of the material that became the mainstays of American comics in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
WS: And dammit, I still haven’t been able to retire off of that strip [laughs]. I can’t believe it.
HC: I think that Walter and I actually collaborated – Archie Goodwin wrote a six page story called “A Study in Art” in Unknown Soldier in ’77. We penciled it, Dick [Giordano] was supposed to ink it, and I think Al Milgrom ended up inking some of it it too…
WS: That’s right! It came out like seven years after we started it. It was a long, long time for one story.
HC: Of course, the idea of taking such time now for a backup story is just unheard of for the two of us, as we’re profoundly professional.
WS: Well, Howard’s profoundly professional – I’m still a large goof off [laughs]. Howard would come into the studio, sit down at the board, grab a cigarette, and was off and running at full speed. I’d come in, sat down, read a novel, and got around to working sometime later in the day.
HC: Yeah, and I was always first in the office, because I always liked to have the place to myself, because once everyone would get in there, things would slow down radically, because the ________ session would begin.
WS: Yeah, when we were in that studio, Howard was working on American Flagg!, Frank was working on Daredevil and then Ronin just before he moved out, and I was working on Thor. Jim Sherman wasn’t doing a lot of comics; he was more commercial work – movie posters, animation, and advertising stuff. For the time, it was a really great place to be. It was a great place to be inspired by your pals.
HC: We were all a lot younger, and no smarter…
WS: [laughs]
HC: …and it was a great time to be working in comics.
WS: It really was. It was a very cool time – the mid to late ‘80s was a time where things were changing monthly, and you could smell the bigger things coming.
HC: Frank and I would compare death threats from our various fanbases, and overall, it was a great time to be working. I ended up moving to Southern California because I thought it would be a nice sea change, I wasn’t planning on spending the rest of my life in New York, so when the time came for me to move on, I went.
NRAMA: So, even after you left Howard, the two of you remained good friends over the years. So when this came up – I’d imagine there was little resistance to the idea of the two of you working together? Who came on to the book first?
HC: My understanding is that Walter was brought on board a day or two before I was…right?
WS: Right. Mike Carlin is the editor on the book, and he had called me up to see if I was interested in writing some Hawkman – back when there were still some Hawkman stuff going on. It was a little unclear how it was all going to out – this was a while back, and DC was still getting the Infinite Crisis stuff squared away. Within a day or two, Mike asked how I felt about Howard drawing the book. I told him I’d love it if Howard would draw the book, and from there, I presume Mike talked to Howard…
HC: Right, it was brought to me, and I had the same reaction that Walter did. We’ve known each other for years, and have never really worked together on anything ongoing.
WS: The only thing that Howard and I really did together like this was a backup story in Orion that I plotted and Howard drew it and scripted it. And that was about it for writing and drawing on a project of the same time.
HC: And also, I hadn’t worked for DC in such a long time when I did that story that I didn’t realize the proportions on the paper had changed. It bugged the hell out of me until I figured out what was going on. I couldn’t figure out why my art for that story had these weird crops.
WS: [laughs]. So that’s what happened…
NRAMA: Walter, as you said, your last mainstream DC work was for Orion, but Howard - this is pretty much a first for you, right – an ongoing superhero book for DC?
HC: Right. I haven’t done anything with DC’s superheroes with any regularity. And the really weird thing is that I’m doing two mainstream projects with them now – this book and two 48 page books that are a single story staring Guy Gardner called Collateral Damage. They’re both very mainstream DC books, but kind of on the fringes at the same time. They’re not the big three, but at the same time, they’re in the DCU.
The weird thing is, I wrote a JLA six-parter couple of years back which will eventually be coming out in the next couple of years. That was what actually gave me my taste for the mainstream DCU again. But Walter’s had more experience with it…
WS: True, I was writing, penciling and inking Orion for about two years – Bob Wiacek inked some of it, too, and that was a lot of work. But that was in 2001-2002, and I haven’t been doing much monthly work since then, although I’ve been working pretty much only with DC for about the last eight or nine years. I did the Michael Moorcock Multiverse story, and some other stuff, and have some more projects lined up – I still am working with Michael on the last of Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer, and then after that, I have a n issue of Solo lined up, and some other stuff as well.
HC: It also should be pointed out that we’re living in a very branded time in the business. The branding of various characters within the context of a universe is a very positive thing for the business, and I think it’s become imperative for talent to participate in that branding – to work with branded products from time to time. There’s a lot to be said for the successful re-branding of the characters of a company, to make them valid and vital again in the larger picture. When Walter and I came into the business, that wasn’t the case, but it is now. To a very large part, I laud Dan DiDio for successfully doing that to an incredible degree at DC. I’m delighted to participate in the exercise of working with branded material.
I sound so corporate [laughs].
NRAMA: For both of you, a lot of coming on to this book was the appeal of working with the other, but starting with Walter, what was the appeal of the character that made you say yes?
WS: A regular paycheck [laughs]
HC: I love that Norwegian pragmatism. They don’t call Walter the Viking Prince for nothing. [laughs]
WS: [laughing] Well then, if not that, I thought it would be fun. And I thought working with Howard would be fun. There are a lot of projects I would work on with Howard if I was given the chance. We’ve been taking for years about working together on something…
HC: Walter and I have been talking for twenty years now about doing a Captain America story, because both of us are very left/liberal patriots, and it would be fun to re-instill the concept of left liberal patriotism into a lag-waving character. That isn’t in the cards right now, so we’re working on this, and this is loads of fun. The stories that are coming from Walter are a great challenge, and I love that – I love being faced with the idea of drawing something that I wouldn’t write for myself to draw.
WS: I love jumping back and forth from writing to drawing – writing and drawing, writing stuff that other people have written, and writing stuff for other people to draw. I like to do that in mainstream comics so I don’t get burned out on doing one thing for to long, and by changing the combination every so often, it keeps me fresh. In writing Hawkgirl, for instance, I get stuff back from Howard that I would never have drawn, and it’s refreshing.
NRAMA: Are you writing full scripts for Howard?
WS: No – we’re working the Marvel Method, so I sent plots to Howard and he goes from there…
HC: It’s a very secret fact of comics that Walter Simonson has never written a full script in his life.
NRAMA: Never?
HC: I was shocked and my jaw agape when I learned it [chuckles].
WS: Never. I hope to be able to say that at the end of my life as well. I enjoy the tightrope aspect of doing it Marvel style. I like just starting with a plot, partly because I think it bring a certain life to the work that I enjoy the most as a comics reader. There’s a freedom in working that style. It’s a lot of fun – it keeps a certain amount of life in my material, which I really like to see.
But back to the appeal of Hawkgirl, I was really anxious to do something mainstream, largely due to he fact that I hadn’t done a mainstream book in a long time. Also, I’ve known Mike Carlin for years and years. He was the assistant editor on Thor a million or so years ago. Before that, he was an intern at DC when I was doing Manhunter with Archie Goodwin, and remembers Xeroxing pages of of that. So having Mike on it was another big plus as far as I saw it.
HC: Mike was my editor on the JLA story I wrote too, which has been drawn, I should add, by Killian Plunkett. It’s absolutely astonishing. It’s an odd take on the JLA base don an idea that came out of the office.
Like Walter, I wanted to do a mainstream book, and also, with all of the Infinite Crisis stuff coming out, I thought it would be fun to do a follow-up to that type of material. I also should add that I have very clear memories of getting that issue of The Brave and the Bold with the very first Hawkman in it that Joe Kubert drew. It was one of those books that changed my life. Joe is one of the seminal figures for me.
I know that Kirby had much more of an influence on Walter than he did on me, but Kubert’s stuff gutted me like a fish. I never was a war comics guy, so I ate up his Western stuff and anything else I could find, and those six issues of The Brave and the Bold that he did were absolutely seminal. They were the greatest comics of my boyhood. I put them in the same class as his Enemy Ace, [Alex] Toth’s Hot Wheels, Gil [Kane] drawing Green Lantern and The Atom, Carmine [Infantino] drawing Flash, [Nick] Cardy’s Bat Lash, and Bob Oksner on Angel and the Ape. I may pull out the weird stuff, but they were great comics.
NRAMA: So are you pulling on Kubert’s version of the “Hawk” character for your take on Hawkgirl?
HC: Well, the fact is, Hawkman and Hawkgirl present a real graphic problem with the character, and that’s figuring out how the wings work. I’m still evolving in my way of making the wings work. Birds with wings work fine. Human beings…putting wings on them and making them work…that’s a lot tougher.
NRAMA: The Hawks’ wings seem to be the place where an artist is either made or broken with the characters. Either they can put their own touch on it – not necessarily make it believable, but make it “work,” or you can get the feeling they were the last things drawn, dashed off just before the pages were due, because the artist couldn’t figure them out…
HC: It calls for a lot of thinking about it. I’m using the first couple of issues to experiment – seeing what works here, seeing what works there…
WS: And then going back and swiping Kubert [laughs]
HC: That’s true, but the thing about Joe, it looks so spontaneous and loose. You can tell that when he draws Hawkman, he does it fast, and loose, but has a control and mastery over it that’s astonishing. If I tried to draw as loose as Joe does, my pencils would look like mud. So I’m working on it.
NRAMA: Howard – this is your first monthly ongoing in a while. Any worries about scheduling and keeping up?
HC: Worries no, concerns, yes. I do 20 to 25 pages a month. It’s a matter of laying out the time. Right now, I’m working on making my wiggle room by working ahead, knowing that I will eventually lose some of it.
WS: I will say that Howard has always been one of the most regular producers of work I’ve ever known in the business. He may have concerns about it, but I’m losing absolutely no sleep about him meeting his deadlines and getting the stuff in.
HC: That’s awfully kind.
WS: It’s also true.
HC: The Norwegian Prince, ladies and gentlemen. But seriously, I have a life to live. I never understood guys who thought they were getting away with something by not delivering on time. I’m mortgage free, but I have a lifestyle to support. This is my career, this is my calling, and this is my job. One of the ways to maintain the job is to deliver the material in a timely fashion.
Harlan Ellison has a line of “Do you want it brilliant, or do you want it Thursday?” My job is to make sure it’s brilliant, and it’s there by Thursday. Long story short, I don’t have a problem with it. I can do that many pages a month anyway, so why not make it monthly?
When I came back to comics a few years ago with Mighty Love, I delivered the whole book before the deadline, and I don’t think they were prepared for that – this business is designed for people who don’t meet deadlines.
WS: There’s some phrase that always comes out about this - that there are three options when you’re getting work from someone – you can get it fast, you can get it good, or you can get it cheap. The deal is that you can get two of those three, but not all three. All I can say is that DC is not getting this stuff from Howard and me cheap, but they are getting it good and fast.
HC: [laughs] Right. I think the deadline for our first issue was December 15th, and the first issue is already done. I want to maintain that wiggle room as long as we can.
WS: Howard’s on the second issue now, and I’ll be plotting out the third issue after Thanksgiving. I’ve already gridded out the next eight to ten issues. It’s not hard and fast, but I know where things are going at any given point.
But I’ve got to say, when I’m working with Howard, I’m always dying to see what he’s done with what I give him – like seeing Hawkgirl throwing an iron bar through a dead guy’s head. I can’t wait to see how he does it.
HC: I’m doing it the Simonson method – three horizontal panels.
WS: [laughs]
HC: Walter’s plots break down very easily for me, though. There are some changes when I pull the pages up to full size, but the thumbnails just flow right out of the plot for me. There are some points where I do slow down, but like I said, those are usually when I’m finishing the pages – like finding a reference for a street scene in St. Roch.
WS: And one of the things that we want to do is really make St. Roch a place – a fictional New Orleans. The atmosphere and miasma of it will almost be a character in the story, that will really give it a sense of place.
HC: And I love the whole idea of basing a fictional city on a real…it really allows you to make it familiar, and a character, but enhance it in slight ways that make it more real to your story. That’s something that I strive for in my work and the novels I read, and something that Walter and I have talked about since day one.
Another thing I might add is that Walter suggested adding an element of genuine horror to the book, which was a challenge to me because I’m not a horror guy - I’m more the pretty guy. It’s exciting for me, because I like the idea of having my hand forced to do the creeping dread stuff. It’s a great mood for the book, and a challenge that I have to step up to.
NRAMA: Wrapping things up – Walter, I know there’s not much that can be said, since the series is part of he One Year Later, but this is Kendra we’re talking about?
WS: Yes, this is Kendra. I’m not retconing stuff. It’s not like it’s a year later, and everything’s different. It is a year later, and…things are different, but I’m not throwing the bathwater out with the baby. I went back and re-read all the stuff that has been written about Kendra, and am using the continuity in the new stories. For example, one of the things that was established in the early course of the book and throughout was that Carter and Kendra had a prickly relationship. That’s something that I’ve kept, even though a year later she’s still really not clear on what that all meant when Carter was around…
HC: And also, with all of that, she’s very young.
WS: Right – she’s very young. Maybe 21 or 22. She’s been though a lot, and I’m not talking about just in the book. She had a child as a very young woman. My feeling is that’s something that maybe we should go back and explore in detail. Kendra is full of potential, and I’m hoping to get into that as much as we can.
NRAMA: Finally, both of you on for the long run?
WS: Until they boot us off.
HC: We’re not going anywhere. I’m not a dilettante. I like the work; I like to do the work. As long as they want me, I’m there.
WS: When they hired me to write Wonder Woman a few years back, I was hired to write six issues, to bridge Phil Jimenez’s run and Greg Rucka’s. That was clear from the start, come in, write six issues. In the case of Hawkgirl, I’m here to write the book, period. Policies might change, editors might change, and who knows what else may come down the line, but as we know for now, and for the future as we know it, we’re it on this book.
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