Mighty Love [Paperback]

Howard Chaykin (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

All of veteran cartoonist Chaykin's comics, from American Flagg! to Blackhawk, have been marked by crisp graphic inventiveness, a touch of sexual perversity, snappy dialogue, the look of 1940s film noir and a hero who looks a bit like the cartoonist himself. In a way, Chaykin is as reliable as Woody Allen. This work, then, is his Everyone Says I Love You: a slight but enjoyable, opposites-attract romance in the trappings of another genre-in this case, a superhero adventure. He's a defense lawyer who moonlights as a scum-bashing hero called the Iron Angel; she's a tough-as-nails cop who moonlights as a police-corruption-fighting heroine called Skylark. Readers don't need a Ph.D. to tell that the story's going to center on the romantic tension between these two characters, and Chaykin pushes the idea that their lives are exactly parallel a little too hard. Accept this work as a genre exercise, though (of course the charismatic fund-raiser turns out to be a bad guy; of course the heroes squabble while staring straight into one another's eyes), and its charms become much more apparent. Chaykin's still a remarkable, quirky artist, fascinated by patterns in fabric and in buildings, detailing carefully rendered facial expressions with sharp, zigzagging lines. And his heroes have the kind of William Powell and Myrna Loy chemistry that demands a sequel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Writer-artist Chaykin was one of the biggest names in 1980s comics, largely because of his irreverent sf title, American Flagg. Since then, he has concentrated more on scripting comics, as in his recent American Century series, and TV. He returns to the drawing board for a graphic novel that mixes The Shop around the Corner with Law and Order, spandex, and secret identities. By day, Lincoln Reinhart is a wealthy liberal attorney who defends criminal lowlifes, and Delaney Pope is a straight-arrow detective in a corrupt police department. After hours they don spandex as the Iron Angel and Skylark and pursue the justice they're unable to extract from the legal system. Although bitter adversaries in their day jobs, they are romantically attracted by one another's costumed personas. The plot here is unnecessarily convoluted, and Chaykin's lighthearted approach doesn't dig into the potentially interesting issue of a lawyer and a cop resorting to vigilantism. The main appeal, besides the smart-ass dialogue, lies in Chaykin's distinctive artwork, which shows that his drawing skills remain formidable. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: DC Comics (February 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563899310
• ISBN-13: 978-1563899317
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,835,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Chapter 1, October 19, 2004

By 

Peter Tupper (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mighty Love (Hardcover)

I'm a fan of Chaykin's graphic style, and this is an interesting idea: combining superhero comics with a dual-identity romance (an plotline used many times before.)

As a superhero comic, it's a little uninspired. Neither the villains, nor their counterfeiting scheme, are compelling. Chaykin himself admits he cribbed their scheme from some old move. Why not something that directly endangers the people of the city these heroes protect?

The two heroes aren't noteworthy either. You have to have some pretty deep psychosexual weirdness to put on a costume and go out every night and fight people, but the encounter between them reads more like people who meet over coffee. These are highly aggressive thrill junkies bent on forcing the world to meet their expectations. They're not going to be sexually coy with one another.

Also, just a pet peeve: The female crimefighter wears a fishnet mask over her mouth, yet she apparently eats without taking it off. Maybe she can put french fries through the holes one at a time, but a burger?

There's also no good reason that this was sold as hardcover, which just tacks a few more dollars onto the price.

Mighty Love could work if this is only chapter one of the relationship between the two heroes, and the later installments have them in conflict. If they become enemies, that's when we'll see some real sparks.