Howard Chaykin from BICS2009

Shaggy's tortured tumble of hipster hair is much like himself - lacking any sort of direction.

Not that he has been dragged through a hedge, backwards. Shaggy IS the hedge others are dragged through, backwards.

And those aren't bags under his eyes. They are trunks, like the ones used by Victorian gentlemen setting out on the grand tour of Europe.

The half-and-half guy also has half a mind to heckle his hero of many years standing.

He has come all the way from London to Birmingham to meet comic book author Howard Chaykin.

Shaggy has been standing in the book-signing queue for 45 minutes, fidgeting and fretting behind a bunch of dweebs, and still he's nowhere near meeting the man.

"Ah, s***t!" he blurts. "Gorra traina catch. F*** it! 'M jus' gonna go up there."

Shaggy staggers to the front of the queue, raises aloft his bottle of half-slugged suds, then hails his hero with all the subtle sophistication of a man hailing a New York cab. "Cheers, Howard! Cheers! You're a man! Best ever! Love ya, man! Love ya!"

Exit Shaggy, gone to catch his train, or maybe find a welcoming gutter where he can settle down for life.

The thing about Shaggy is that he isn't your typical fan of the bam! bop! biff! business.

He's too rock'n'roll ravaged to be a meek, geek freak.

But Howard Chaykin isn't your average comic book artist and writer, either.

In the 1980s, he was one of the creators credited with dragging the medium kicking and screaming into the world of adult sensibilities.

Chaykin's comics - which included the sci-fi classic American Flagg - were sticky with lust.

Innuendo was replaced with in-your-face explicitness. You wanted to scrub yourself down with carbolic soap and a wire brush after reading them.

Personally, I can't think of a better recommendation.

Sure, Howard's adventures still had their fair share of lantern-jawed heroes and long-lashed lovelies. But there was also depraved sexual shenanigans that wouldn't have been out of place in a top-shelf publication.

Robust

Howard is now a grey-haired gent of 59, closing in on pensionable age. Yet there is still something wonderfully rude and robust about him.

The New Yorker punches out words, like Morse code. Sketchbook in hand, he etches figures for fans in the queue, yakking all the while.

Quick on the draw and quick on the jaw.

When we sit down to talk, the cock-crow conviction remains.

I ask him about Wally Wood, the cartoonist who took Chaykin under his wing in the 1970s.

Wood was one of the great comic book artists, although troubles with booze and women led to his early death by suicide.

"Wally was scary, influential, education," says Chaykin. "He showed me the way NOT to live your life. A very important lesson to learn."

So did he manage to avoid the excesses of his mentor?

"No. I became just like Wally," he admits.

"The way his life unravelled was a good lesson for me - but I was young and chose to ignore it."

Chaykin refuses to go into details about his wild years. However, he tells me that he hasn't taken drink or drugs since 1992.

"I'm old," he grins. "Those days are behind me. Now I don't care about anything but food."

Chaykin has settled into marital comfort in a small, affluent Californian town, although he grew up on the streets of New York, navigating his way around the rotten core of the Big Apple.

"I grew up a cowardly kid in a tough neighbourhood," he says. "You could say I came from a Jewish family with deeply Italian sensibilities.

"Lots of people I knew were Jewish mobsters.

"My stepdad was a runner for Murder Inc, and the world I remember back then was a pretty mobbed-up place."

That grey world, where good and bad blend together like a murky milkshake, must have influenced his writing.

Reuben Flagg, American Flagg's protagonist, is no boy scout. Two volumes of the original stories have just been re-released, loaded with moral ambivalence and mucky goings-on.

However, it isn't the most shocking work concocted by Chaykin's fevered imagination.

That accolade must go to Black Kiss, a comic so explicit that it was sold in a sealed plastic bag, and was unavailable in many English cities.

Yet curiously enough, Chaykin was once asked to pitch his idea for taking over Superman, the most rainbow-innocent of all the superheroes.

"I came up with this concept where everybody in the world knew that Superman was Clark Kent, but they just humoured him into believing that he was maintaining this corny secret identity," he explains.

"But the guys making the Superman comics didn't go for it."

Perhaps Chaykin's ideas were just too wild for the mainstream world of comic books. He left the industry for many years, working for TV in Hollywood.

Now he's back in the comic book medium, full-time. Does this mean he is ready to tow the line and play the part of the venerable elderly gent of the industry he helped revolutionise?

Nope.

"Hey, I want to be loved and adored," he says. "I just ain't ever been any good at making that work. I try to be polite and sweet, but I just end up coming across as this sleazy a**hole."

Somehow I can't imagine the comic book lovers of the world wanting it any other way.

Especially one booze-addled fan from London, going by the name of Shaggy.

American Flagg Volumes 1 & 2 are published by Titan Books (£12.99 each).