THE WORLD'S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE

Man-about-graphics Bolt Upright lends us the benefit of his expertise:

My father used to buy me comic books. The reward for enduring a monthly scalping at the hands of the ex-Nazis who ran the local barbershop -- Heinz and Willy, the barbers of Belsen. It wasn't a fair trade. Dad got a son with a burr, and I got the world's greatest comic magazine; and more. I mean, yeah, OK, astronauts are astronauts if you're a kid and have a hero jones, but here's what I really needed: this guy Reed Richards, a mad scientist in the worst way, takes his girlfriend (Tuesday Weld in MY movie version), her kid brother, and a possibly deranged test pilot for a joyride in an experimental rocket. Not only do they get away with it, they end up with these incredible super powers.

Ben Grimm's incessant whining used to really chap my ass. Who was he kidding? I would have gladly taken lumpy orange skin, cartoon mouse hand and foot digit allotment, and who-knows-what-kind of genitalia for the ability to crush cheap essential scenery like papier-mache.

And, not to neglect the world's second greatest comic magazine, I watched spiders constantly for that tell-tale glow of radioactivity.

When I was a child, I read comic books as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things, and bought the first six issues of AMERICAN FLAGG!, the world's greatest comic magazine.

Steranko's NICK FURY, AGENT OF SHIELD was the first comic that made me see the form as form, and the artist as auteur; MR. A, written and drawn by Steve Ditko, as bizarre and didactic as anything could possibly be, suggested nonetheless that fairly sophisticated ideological material might work in the comic book format; and more recently, the Frank Miller DAREDEVIL series with its fine balance of strong scripting, excellent art, well-developed characters, and the staples of entertainment, sex and violence, set a new high standard in the field.

The field, represetned by Howard Chaykin and First Comics, responded immediately, and with such an amazing product that, after having read and re-read -- (when was the last time you wanted to re-read a comic book?) -- the first three issues of AMERICAN FLAGG!, I had the peculiar feeling that this was the first real comic book I had ever owned. There are terrific characters (the protagonist is an ex-vidporn star), impeccable art (every issue has a suitable for framing, right-in-your-goddamn-face cover), a multi-layered, conspiracy-ridden, paranoid, balls-out story line, got politics if you want it, lettering you won't believe (by Ken Bruzenak), and whatever sex and violence you require, but never tawdry or gratuitous.

In addition to all that stuff, AMERICAN FLAGG! is science fiction of a caliber that is almost impossible to find in comics and pretty scarce anywhere else. Yeah, there's hardware. Plenty of hardware. There's an adventure guy and his adventure girls, even talking animals with mechanical hands, but here's my point: good SF is a literature of ideas. The best science fiction builds a place for them to live. It's hard to imagine a denser, more intricate, cohesive creation that the world Chaykin constructs and populates in AMERICAN FLAGG. I used to ask myself, as the simplest way of judging a fictional creation, a future-world particularly, "Could it happen? Is this projected future reasonable?" I was on the wrong track. The question is, "DOES it happen?" In AMERICAN FLAGG, it happens.