NYCC: Past era gives Chaykin's latest a sci-fi 'Soul'

Howard Chaykin enjoys the middle of the 20th century so much that one universe of it isn't enough.

Announced today at New York Comic Con, Chaykin's upcoming Image Comics series Midnight of the Soul takes one of his favorite eras in American history and puts a sci-fi noir spin on it. He describes it as "a dark adventure in a real world that's slipped through the cracks."

Joel Breakstone has just come home from World War II with a Purple Heart, a German Luger and a strong penchant for booze. He has enormous potential who's crashed and burned, yet on what happens to be the worst day of his life, Joel finds a much-needed shot at redemption.

Chaykin's hero is "a dead soul — a guy who's decided life is over — and he's just going to go through the motions until true death catches up with him," the writer/artist says. "Then something happens."

He's keeping exactly how he's using parallel universes a secret for now, but there will be flashbacks to Joel's wartime experiences that drive the narrative and show what happened to put Joel in this dark place.

Chaykin's works have spanned a vast array of decades, but the post-war era of the late 1940s and '50s — which he's explored in American Century and Avengers 1959 — is one of his favorites.

"The music I listen to — jazz, pop, country — is frequently a product of this period," says Chaykin, 62. "I love the art, and the necessity of subtext to conceal the context of all too many social attitudes. I also believe that the period between 1945 and 1950 was golden — and it's just before we went astray."

Men and women's clothing of the era is "a gas to draw," he adds, the visual world is informed by industrial designers Raymond Loewy and Russel Wright, architect Philip Johnson and the building and furniture designs of Charles and Rae Eames.

The quest story structure of Midnight of the Soul is very loosely influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 thriller Saboteur, which itself functions as a sketch for the director's North by Northwest in 1959.

"An innocent hero is sucked into a nightmare not of his own devising, in which each step gets him deeper into trouble, culminating with a climax on a national monument," Chaykin says. "I figured the pedigree had legs.

"For the record, I'm pretty sure I'm not going the national-monument route for my climax."

There are villains and, like his other antagonists, "are all the heroes of their own movie," Chaykins says, "so the mustache twirling and maniacal laughter will be limited to a very bare minimum."

One character that plays an integral role is Dierdre, a bohemian girl Joel meets and falls for one fateful New York night.

She also is a product of the past — Chaykin sees her as "the distillation of every Frank Loesser, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart song."

"I'm a guy who's been ruined by a lifetime of movies, television, fiction, comics and, most importantly, the American popular songbook," he adds. "It's taken me decades to get over my innate belief in the rightness and inevitability of romance promised by that catalog of astonishingly, brilliantly crafted paeans to eternal love."

While Chaykin used to think the best sci-fi and fantasy used elements of history and historical fiction to create convincing futuristic societies and worlds, he says he now believes the reverse is true.

"To create convincing historical visual narratives, it's an imperative to treat this lost landscape as a brand-new created universe, a window into a world less forgotten than entirely unknown."