Once you’ve finished reading Christian Moerk‘s debut novel, Darling Jim, and checked out the acknowledgments, you’ll find this closing expression of gratitude: “I’m indebted to Howard Chaykin for graciously agreeing to lend Niall his talent and his quiver of pencils,” Moerk writes. “The poor kid would’ve never got it right, otherwise. Thanks, pal.”
Now, we’ve been Howard Chaykin fans for nearly a quarter-century, ever since we ventured into our first comic book shop and came out with a copy of American Flagg! (which may or may not be turned into a movie some day). So we flipped through the pages of Darling Jim again, but we didn’t see any artwork, let alone anything in Chaykin’s distinctive style. So we emailed Moerk, and it turns out he’s been a fan about as long as we have—he even had a letter in one issue, back when comics had reader mail columns—and he explained that when the book came out in Denmark two years ago, he asked Chaykin to create a drawing that is described in the novel’s closing paragraphs. “I thought it was a really cool addition that would drive home the point of the book,” Moerk explained.
But that artwork didn’t make it into the American edition of Darling Jim, so we asked if we could publish it here. Moerk and Chaykin both gave their consent—but here’s the deal: If you’ve read the novel, the illustration fits perfectly, but if you haven’t, we would have to tell you more about the novel’s ending than you might want to hear. So we’ve cropped a small section, maybe about one-fourth of the total drawing, and published it above. You can also look at a larger cropping (in a pop-up window) that gives you a fuller sense of Chaykin’s vision, OR the complete illustration (another pop-up window). (Both those windows are big, one large enough to require scrolling; we tried reducing the artwork, but this is as small as we felt we could get it and still do right by the artist.)
And if you really want to know what the illustration is all about, you can keep reading. Or you could just bookmark this page, go out and buy the novel, and come back to us when you reach the end. However you want to play it is okay by us.
Excerpted from Christian Moerk’s Darling Jim:
An image came to him, stronger than the others.
It was a wolf, fully matured from its frail human existence into a feral predator. He would capture its expression, mid-lunge, at the exact moment when it nearly grabbed hold of a woman as she tried desperately to flee into the forest. Because that was the entire story, right there, wasn’t it?
Would he love her or kill her?