I wrote another piece for the great hilobrow.com website, and it’s about Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
I’m one of 25 authors writing about “science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema).” Other participants include Deb Chachra on The Hyperion Cantos, Adam McGovern on Kid Eternity, Jessamyn West on the Mars Trilogy, and Peggy Nelson on Virtual Light. I initially wrote a draft of something about Challengers of the Unknown (specifically the first team-up of writer Jeph Loeb and the late artist Tim Sale), but then I decided it wasn’t science fiction enough a topic. Here’s how my piece on American Flagg! begins:
It’s 2031. America is a fractured nation ruled by behemoth corporations, terrorized by militarized cults, and hypnotized by messages piped subliminally into always-on televisuals. The planet is scarred by climate change. The government is an absentee landlord, having retreated to Mars. Only one man can save the day: a former TV star named Reuben Flagg. Rendered professionally redundant by CGI actors, Flagg instead fights crime when he’s not shacking up with one femme fatale after another (or maybe the other way around). He’s been conscripted by a private police force called the Plexus Rangers, the military wing of the sort of mega-corporation that doubles as atmospheric bogeyman in dystopian fiction. This is the world of the comic book American Flagg! (indeed, the exclamation point is part of the title).
Actually, it’s 2024 as I type this, and… well, things are somewhat familiar …
Read the full article at hilobrow.com. I have another piece there (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a movie from 1978) due out by the end of the year, and another one after that already in the works (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a TV series that debuted in 1991).