Word: chaykin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...until the 1980s did the hard-boiled crime genre reappear anywhere near the comics mainstream. Howard Chaykin was one of the guys paddling the boat. His new series, "American Century," published by the "adult" Vertigo imprint of the very mainstream D.C. Comics, may well be his best work...
...American Century," ($2.50 each), a monthly, has just reached the third issue. Co-written by David Tischman and drawn by Marc Laming, Chaykin and company have already packed in enough for several other lesser titles. The first page of issue one starts us off in 1949 and sets the tone. As a man and woman reach climax inside a pretty, white, suburban house, we see the woman's husband, former WWII pilot Harry Block, popping pills and imagining pointing his commercial jetliner into a nosedive...
...When in issue two, Harry inexplicably shows up in Guatemala, Chaykin folds political intrigue into the story. Apparently the U.S. makes a show of supporting the current dictator, while secretly preparing to put a hand-picked puppet in his place. Simultaneously the communists (secretly in cahoots with the dictator's amazonian wife) plan their own insurgency. Meanwhile, Harry has become a pilot smuggling arms to the communists, not for political reasons, but just for the thrill. Throw in some homosexual ex-pats, a whore named Carlita, a transvestite named Pinky, Russian secret agents and a sleazy representative...
...psychopath in a bowler hat, comically eager to rub out anyone who crosses his path, whether he deserves it or not. He's a scene stealer, but so is everyone else Easy encounters: the nervously sexyBeals, a brutal-funny fixer with ambiguous loyalties (Tom Sizemore), an epicene politician (Maury Chaykin). But Washington, like the character he plays, knows how to roll with their punches. Reserved but agile, wary but thrusting when he needs to be, he gracefully reanimates a lost American archetype, the lonely lower-class male absorbing more cigarette smoke, bourbon whiskey and nasty beatings than is entirely healthy...
...this movie's title--come in. They live behind multilocked doors, surrounded by tons of old newspapers, in a downtown slum. Danny (Michael Richards of Seinfeld) is a wild-eyed, left-wing paranoid, certain that every knock on the door heralds the arrival of the FBI; Arthur (Maury Chaykin) is a soft-spoken collector of wedding-cake figures, snow domes and rubber balls that he teaches Steven to listen to, convinced the voices of the children who once bounced them still echo faintly inside...