Howard Chaykin Wants Dominic Fortune To Fight In The Spanish Civil War

Posted in: Comics, Fantagraphics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Dominic Fortune, howard chaykin

Howard Chaykin wants Dominic Fortune to fight in the Spanish Civil War… will Marvel Comics let him?

Dominic Fortune was created by Howard Chaykin in 1975 and was based on his other character, Scorpion, for Atlas/Seaboard Comics company as a 1930s costumed, fortune-seeking adventurer and originally part of Marvel’s Comics Code-free black-and-white magazine line. An elderly version of the character then appeared in the regular Marvel Universe in the present day, beginning with Marvel Team-Up in 1982 and a number of comics afterwards, not written or drawn by Chaykin. He got his own series in 2006 and a digital comic in 2009. This was rapidly followed by Chaykin returning to Dominic Fortuine for a series under Marvel’s mature MAX imprint, set in the 30s. He would again appear in a number of Avengers-related comics, and then in 2015 in S.H.I.E.L.D. #11 in a story drawn by Chaykin. Recently, the character appeared alongside Silver Sable in Venom War, and in the pilot for the planned ABC Marvel TV Series Most Wanted, which would have spun off from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Now, as part of Fantagraphics’ collaboration with Marvel Comics, in republishing notable material that Marvel Comics has no interest in republishing themselves, they will be publishing, in August, Lost Marvels No. 2: Howard Chaykin Vol. 1: Dominic Fortune, Monark Starstalker, and Phantom Eagle. Including all his Dominic Fortune work and more.

“Collected as part of our new Lost Marvels series, collaboratively produced with Marvel Comics, this new Howard Chaykin-centered volume of smartly imaginative scripts and beautifully designed art features Dominic Fortune, Monark Starstalker, and Phantom Eagle! When Howard Chaykin broke into comics in the 1970s, there was nothing quite like him. His original characters Dominic Fortune and Monark Starstalker took classic pulp heroes and ran them through a postmodern blender. This new volume contains retro-science-fiction bounty hunter Monark Starstalker’s debut appearance and all Chaykin’s color-comic-book Dominic Fortune stories, including the character’s unexpurgated Max series, published a generation later. Completing the package is the collision between pulp heroism and the devastating, bloody realities of World War I in Chaykin’s 111-page collaboration with The Boys writer Garth Ennis on War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle. The collection is introduced by author and comics scholar Brannon Costello. This second title in Fantagraphics’ Lost Marvels series collects some of the most exciting, sought-after work by Howard Chaykin from 1975 to 2008. Full-color illustrations throughout.”

Not that they seem to have informed Howard Chaykin of its contents when he was writing his foreword for the comic book in question. In August, he posted it on Substack, saying it had been rejected. Then this week again, saying he never really expected them to. Including his memories of the creation of the character and of what came next…

“As I write this, I have no idea which, what or how much of the material featuring Dominic Fortune is included in the book you have purchased, bought for reasons which I have to presume are mostly of an obsessive completist nature. That said, I have little or no recollection of the process that went into the earlier material featuring this character. I do recall that I was once again a willing conscript in making writers’ lives easier in an unfortunately considerable number of cases, providing complete stories of a character I had functionally created for a number of writers to invoice for scripts, with none of that cash accruing to me. It’s been too long a time since those years, with a lot of drugs and alcohol in the intervening decades, to recall how I felt about this sh-tlaced situation at the time, but, in retrospect, there’s a certain frisson of bitterness in the memory. It’s worth noting, and perhaps with irony, that that bitterness has never reached the consideration of my foolishness at creating a character which immediately became the property of the publisher. This was, from my perspective, par for the course. And if I wanted to work on material that gave me some personal satisfaction, creating a character to fit that bill seemed like the only way to achieve this goal…. The character has now, of course, been absorbed into the Marvel Universe. Dominic Fortune is, also of course, so minor a presence in that vast swathe of super stuff as to be invisible and irrelevant—and, at the very least, plastic and open for interpretation. He’s over a hundred years old, for f-ck’s sake, but still an occasional walk on in some backwater comic book or another. In that regard, in a television pilot that never made it to series, he was cast and played by the wonderful actor Delroy Lindo…  I might also add here that I hate the way Dominic Fortune is drawn and written by anyone but me. I don’t flatter easily, and the general treatment of the character doesn’t flatter me in the least. My penultimate relationship with the character was a MARVEL MAX series I did ages ago, that was wildly satisfying. I have to assume it’s not published in this volume*—it might just be too damned dirty. In sum, Dominic Fortune is a minor and forgettable part of my career of more than half century of labor in the comic book world, but it is the first character I created that, crudely and tentatively yes, but genuinely too, pointed at the mindset and point of view that would become an imperative part of my brand for that over fifty year span of work.”

“*To my shock, the MAX miniseries is included in the published volume. Now if only they’d greenlit my follow up pitch, about Fortune’s adventures in the Spanish Civil War…”

The Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939, between classes, religions, dictatorship and democracy, fascism and communism, revolution and counterrevolution, one might see the appeal. Especially right now. Might Marvel? No need to ask him to write a foreword for that… Lost Marvels No. 2: Howard Chaykin Vol. 1: Dominic Fortune, Monark Starstalker, and Phantom Eagle is published in August 2026 from Fantagraphics.

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!