Empire by Samuel Delaney & Howard Chaykin

After Jonathan Lethem compared FREE PLANET to it in his incredibly generous blurb for Jed Dougherty and my geopolitical space opera, I knew I had to track down this early graphic novel from 1978. For those keeping track, that’s the same year as Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, commonly referred to as the first graphic novel.

The positioning of the book is fascinating. Decades before traditional publishing’s turn to (a few very specific types) of think, square-bound comics, this European album-sized and -shaped volume doesn’t refer to itself as a graphic novel, but rather just the newest work from sci-fi novelist Samuel Delaney and my uncle Howard, who, according to Byron Preiss’ foreward, was chipping away at Empire even prior to his then-recent run on Marvel’s Star Wars.

Preiss is an interesting, complex figure with fingerprints all over comics history of the era; in Empire’s foreward, he claims responsibility for the layout scheme utilized by the book. Normally, I’d roll my eyes at a publisher/editor/producer (his exact title/role is unclear) taking credit for a comic’s layout, especially when working with Howard, for whom page design is such a crucial part of his approach. However, in Empire, Preiss’ big idea – each spread comprising the same layout on both pages, switching with the page turn – is clearly visible and, frankly, I can’t imagine my Uncle Howard deciding on that approach himself.

Reason being is that it makes for a stilted, mechanical, even plodding pace, especially once married with Delany’s dense prose, which reads more like excerpts of an existing novel than something written to work in concert with the art. The shackles put in place by Preiss become even more evident once Howard casts them off in the book’s final sequences, which consist of gorgeous, expressive spreads in which it’s easy to see the seeds of his 1980s graphic approach to the medium.

Throughout, the art itself is stunning; beautiful draftsmanship, compelling in-panel composition, and jawdroppingly gorgeous painted interiors. All in all though, it suffers by comparison to The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell, which came out the following year. Like Empire, it was another fully painted collaboration with a popular novelist, Elric creator Michael Moorcock, but, significantly, Howard wrote the volume himself from a story by Moorcock, without being kneecapped by any top-downed, unilateral layout schemes.