Neon Visions

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In the 1980s, Howard Chaykin broke new ground in American comic books with a series of formally innovative, iconoclastic works like American Flagg!, Time2, and Black Kiss, which generated acclaim and often controversy as they challenged expectations of the visual design and subject matter permissible in popular comics. Throughout his long career, Chaykin transformed the medium's traditional action-adventure tales into a space for political engagement and aesthetic experimentation. In Neon Visions, Brannon Costello offers the first book-length evaluation of Chaykin's work and confronts the blind spots in comics scholarship that consign this seminal artist to the margins. He argues that Chaykin's unique contributions are often overlooked because his comics eschew any pretensions to serious literature. Instead, Chaykin's work revels in the cliffhanger thrills of heroic-adventure genres and courts outrage with transgressive depictions of violence and sexuality. Examining Chaykin's career from his early successes to compelling contemporary series such as City of Tomorrow, Dominic Fortune, and the controversial Black Kiss 2, Costello explores how this inventive body of work incisively challenges popular culture's capacity to foster or constrain individual identity and political agency.