And with a glorious cover by the great Bill Sienkiewicz!
AGENTS OF CHAOS: THOMAS KING FORÇADE, HIGH TIMES, AND THE PARANOID END OF THE 1970s is the (almost unbelievable) story of Tom Forcade—political radical, marijuana smuggler, champion of journalist rights, and founder of High Times.
You can read more about it—and pre-order, if you like—here:
(Above: Lisa Lyon, bodybuilder and Frank Miller’s visual inspiration for Elektra)
Daredevil had evolved, in the words of editor Denny O’Neil, “from a weak-tea Spider-Man to a shooting star.” Miller started contributing more to the plots, and when he and writer Roger McKenzie began to disagree on the comic’s direction, the editor didn’t hesitate to let Miller take charge. “I decided it was probably the art more than writing that was getting attention,” O’Neil said. “So I chose Frank.”
“Everybody liked Frank’s artwork on Daredevil,” said Jo Duffy, “but when he was working with Roger, I don’t think anybody realized they were seeing a phenomenon. People didn’t go, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s come down from the mountain, we’re saved!’ until he’d been writing for two months.”
Miller worked up a tale about a character he called Indigo. She was Matt Murdock’s long-lost college girlfriend, the daughter of a Greek diplomat. She’d left Murdock—and the United States—when her father was assassinated; her innocence gone, she’d trained to become a high-paid mercenary. Now she was back, and Matt Murdock, as Daredevil, had to stop the woman he’d loved. Indigo was based largely on an old femme fatale from Will Eisner’s Spirit, the international spy Sand Saref, but Miller’s emerging fascination with Japanese martial arts—Indigo wielded a pair of sai, which resembled mini pitchforks—instantly gave the story a new, visually striking, twist. Then he decided to play up the mythic potential of the story by changing Indigo’s name to Elektra. Daredevil #168—the debut of Frank Miller, auteur—was an instant hit. The whole industry finally sat up and took notice of the young Vermonter.
“Who was Tom Forçade? A revolutionary guru? A hippie con man? An undercover cop? In Sean Howe’s brilliant book, he’s a weird one-man secret history of seventies America, a mystery man who keeps showing up everywhere from the early underground press to the punk-rock explosion. Agents of Chaos turns this bizarre tale into an obsessively fascinating and addictive epic, like a countercultural thriller.” —Rob Sheffield (Dreaming the Beatles)
“A fascinating, anecdote-packed tale of drugs, guns, and magazine publishing.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Rollicking history … captures the freewheeling spirit of the counterculture’s troubled march through the 1970s.” —Publishers Weekly
“A cautionary tale from the countercultural past, full of revolutionary glory and ugly criminality.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Like an obsessed detective hunting a man without a face, Sean Howe has turned the life of Tom Forçade into a detailed metaphor explaining why the seventies were sublime, why the seventies failed, and how those two things are inextricably connected.” —Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties)
“Richly drawn, deadly serious, utterly comical, this book gave me a contact high.” —Joe Hagan (Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine)
“A gob-smacking roller coaster ride.” —Tom O'Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties)
I’m absolutely thrilled to say that you can read an exclusive excerpt from my new book in ROLLING STONE!
Please let me know what you think—this has been a long time coming. (And if you like it, please repost!) AGENTS OF CHAOS will be in bookstores on Tuesday.
“Who was Tom Forçade? A revolutionary guru? A hippie con man? An undercover cop?
“In Sean Howe’s brilliant book, he’s a weird one-man secret history of seventies America, a mystery man who keeps showing up everywhere from the early underground press to the punk-rock explosion. Agents of Chaos turns this bizarre tale into an obsessively fascinating and addictive epic, like a countercultural thriller. This book is a brilliant jigsaw puzzle that also turns out to be a mirror.”
—ROB SHEFFIELD, author of Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
Agents of Chaos is available now for pre-order; publication date is August 29.
ALAN MOORE’S FIVE TIPS FOR WOULD-BE COMICS WRITERS
1. Don’t.
2. No, really don’t.
3. DEFINITELY don't—I mean it.
4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.
5. OK, if you’re going to anyway, if you’re going to be a writer of any quality, you will have to commit yourself to writing— which is something that, when you’re young and idealistic, sounds incredibly easy to do, but you should commit yourself to writing almost as if you were some ancient Greek or Egyptian committing yourself to a god.
If you do right by the god, then the god may, at some point in the future, reward you. But if you slack off and don’t do right by your talent or your god, then you are heading for a world of immense and unimaginable pain. If you have a gift that you choose to pursue, then you have to pursue it seriously. Don’t be half-assed about it, but realize what that commitment means.
Committing yourself to writing will mean, to a certain extent, your writing will become the most important part of your life—and that’s a big thing to say. It can have a distancing effect upon other relationships. It can be sometimes quite a solitary life. If you’re committed to your writing, you’re going to spend most of your life indoors in a silent, empty room, concentrating on a pen and a piece of paper or their equivalent. Be prepared to take it seriously and be prepared to follow where it takes you, even if that takes you to some very strange places.
This is by no means the most glamorous profession.
Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.
(published in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1349, September 24, 1999)
“Who was Tom Forçade? A revolutionary guru? A hippie con man? An undercover cop?
“In Sean Howe’s brilliant book, he’s a weird one-man secret history of seventies America, a mystery man who keeps showing up everywhere from the early underground press to the punk-rock explosion. Agents of Chaos turns this bizarre tale into an obsessively fascinating and addictive epic, like a countercultural thriller. This book is a brilliant jigsaw puzzle that also turns out to be a mirror.”
—ROB SHEFFIELD, author of Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
Agents of Chaos is available now for pre-order; publication date is August 29.
Superman #400 contributors, June 1984: Will Eisner, Joe Orlando, Jerry Robinson, Terry Austin, Leonard Starr, Sal Amendola, Walter Simonson, Dick Giordano, Julius Schwartz, Howard Chaykin, Frank Miller, and John Byrne.
August, 1969: Daniel Ellsberg attends a War Resister’s League conference at Haverford College, and hears a speech by draft resister Randy Kehler, who’s about to go to prison.
“I hadn’t known that he was about to be
sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock,
because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my
country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It
wasn’t what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the
example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed
that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very
deliberate choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There
was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust
war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men
were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s
room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The
only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.”
A month later, Ellsberg would begin copying the Pentagon Papers.
Two years ago, Jack Kirby’s granddaughter Jillian launched Kirby4Heroes, a campaign to raise funds for the Hero Initiative, which helps comic artists in need. On the Kirby4Heroes Facebook page, Jillian posted several vintage pictures of her grandfather.
I thought it would be illuminating to provide a guide to what Kirby was working on at the time of each photo. Sometimes we forget that personal and professional lives don’t exist in vacuums.
(1) July 1941: Only months after the introduction of Captain America, Kirby and Joe Simon would soon leave Timely Comics. Jack and Roz Kirby spent a day at Brighton Beach.
(2) May 1961: Fantastic Four #1 was in development. It would hit newsstands on August 8. Bar Mitzvah for Neal Kirby.
(3) December 1963. Avengers #4, featuring the return of Captain America, was on newsstands. Tales of Suspense #52, featuring the first appearance of Black Widow, was at the printers. The growing Kirby family celebrated Hanukkah.
(4) July 1965: The debuts of the Inhumans (in Fantastic Four) and the Sentinels (in X-Men) were in production.
(5) June 1966: The fully-Kirby-scripted S.H.I.E.L.D. story in Strange Tales #148 hit newsstands (along with all of these). “I [did] a little editing later, but it was [Jack’s] story.” Lee said in an interview. Neal Kirby graduated.
On July 12, after Joe Simon began efforts to claim sole ownership of Captain America, Martin Goodman persuaded Jack Kirby to sign a deposition stating that Captain America, and all the work he’d done for Timely in the early 40s, was done with the understanding that it “belonged to Timely.”
And with a glorious cover by the great Bill Sienkiewicz!
AGENTS OF CHAOS: THOMAS KING FORÇADE, HIGH TIMES, AND THE PARANOID END OF THE 1970s is the (almost unbelievable) story of Tom Forcade—political radical, marijuana smuggler, champion of journalist rights, and founder of High Times.
My publisher is giving away 50 galley copies of AGENTS OF CHAOS, now through June 15. (I’m pretty sure these are randomly chosen, contest-style)
