DOMINIC FORTUNE

Howard Chaykin is back, triumphant: Dominic Fortune No. 1, revives the Chaykin rake from the mid-1970s in an orgy of nonstop tasteless, sexist and racist action set in the Depression years of yore. The festivities begin in the air over Paraguay’s capital city where Fortune, a pulp-style “brigand for hire,” and a female adventuress named Delatriz Betancourt (a typical Chaykin exotic name choice) are flying in separate aircraft in a dogfight with Bolivian aviators. Fortune is shot down, but he parachutes onto the rooftop garden of Asuncion’s poshest hotel where Hazel Fontaine is standing, stark naked, next to the pool around which she and some friends are conducting a party. Back in Los Angeles, our lascivious rogue is subsequently hired by Hazel’s husband, Irwin Oppenheim, to serve as a bodyguard for several movie personages, who are still engaged in a seven-year-long drunken party. While escorting a trio of these well-dressed louts through the lobby of a hotel, Fortune is assaulted by a man he quickly knocks out, leaving Fortune to ponder where he has seen the man’s mysterious lapel pin before. The book then ends with Delatriz discussing Fortune’s impending murder at the hands of minions hired by Malcolm Shaw, an anti-Semite.

By way of keeping us interested while ramping up the suspense, Chaykin manages at least three distinct episodes, self-contained mini-adventures — the end of the dogfight, the fist fight in the lobby, and Oppenheim’s hiring of Fortune — and leaves us wondering why Delatriz is in league with an avowed anti-Semite to kill Fortune, a man of the “Hebraic persuasion” who she was ostensibly palling around with in the air war between Bolivia and Paraguay in the opening pages of the book.

The book is full of Chaykin tics and tropes — tall, statuesque people, voice-over transitions between scenes, and characters with insatiable appetites for sex.

Chaykin, who has described himself as “a Jew from the future,” also revels in the current secular fashion of acknowledging Jewishness — a fashion, in comic books, that is often these days more frequently indulged now that so many of the creators of the medium have been revealed as Jews. Chaykin rejoices in this cultural advance, telling Gary Groth during an interview: “I’m no longer afraid, ashamed, or uninterested enough in my personal background to keep it out of the work. I’m no longer a Jew masquerading as a gentile through comics.” He is, instead, eager to put Jews into his work.

Reuben Flagg, the protagonist of the 1980s series American Flagg, was a Jew, overtly but not blatantly. In the current run of Dominic Fortune, however, our hero is defiantly a Jew, and anti-Semites are patently the villains. Fortune’s laissez-faire attitude toward women as orifices to exploit for casual sex may not be particularly admirable in this age of feminist enlightenment, but in most other aspects of his outlaw personality, he is heroic enough to be a role model.

As always, Chaykin’s drawing is bravura, his page layouts dramatic, his pacing headlong, and his dialogue urbane and witty, sarcastic and satiric. The title is a revel in our often not very refined natures and an outrageous assault on political correctness and genteel posturing, so over-the-top as to be vastly amusing in its in-your-face audaciousness.