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Storytime with Annotations: Golden Age BLACKHAWK with Wang the Tiger
Samuel Hall
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Christopher Martin
Wang the Tiger fights for his country! Blackhawk starring in MILITARY COMICS# 25, January 1944. Come on, seriously, do you guys really need that much firepower against poor little Chop-Chop?
Samuel Perez
Here we go. Art for this story is by John Cassone and Alex Kotsky; they do a decent job, above most Golden Age technique to be honest but not up to Al Bryant or Reed Crandall levels. It's a bit startling in a wartime comic, but this story gives the Chinese their own super-hero... a freedom fighter wearing a mask (and not much else, ahem), calling himself Wang the Tiger. I am not an expert, but just from sitting through dozens of Hong Kong flicks showing traditional weaponry, that sword looks dodgy. (On the other hand, China is a big country and some areas may have not used the typical short straight blades.)
Christian Turner
Page Two, On the second page we see a weird, almost surreal contrast. The Chinese are drawn as realisticly as anyone else, and they speak normal English. Well, presumably they're speaking Mandarin or Cantonese and we're getting a translation. All except "faithful, shrewd Chop-Chop." What the heck, he's still that bizarre little goblin speaking pidgin. The final panel looks as if the two men had come from different comics universes to join forces. ("So, you are from Earth-Caricature, is that right?")
Christian Walker
Page Three. Okay, raise your hand if you immediately think it is too obvious that Wang the Tiger actually is his supposed brother the Mandarin Wang. No, it must be a trick, why would he call himself Wang if he was Wang, he'd call himself Han the Tiger or something. Why draw attention that way? Have the Japanese looking around for someone nonexistent.
Lucas Baker
Page Four.Next, there's the famous Grumman F5F-1 Skyrocket. This was not an imaginary plane. As I recall, there was one prototype made and tested, but it was too expensive or needed too much maintenance or something, so it never went into production. Looked great on the comics page, though, and it made the Blackhawks recognizable in dogfights.
Andrew Gonzalez
Page Five.Ow! Blackhawk doesn't fool around, look at the way the sentry falls after getting slugged in the back of the head with a 45 butt. In real life this would mean a likely skull fracture, concussion, no medical treatment, might as well stab the guy and get it over with. But then a few minutes later, getting caught is your own fault, Blackhawk. Take a few minutes to tie the sentry up and hide him somewhere and this wouldn't have happened.
Jordan Turner
Page Six. "That devil know more Jiu-Jitsu than me." Hindsight makes everything clearer, but in 1944 almost NO white Americans had ever heard of gung fu/wu shu Chinese boxing. Sifus kept it secret and only taught full Chinese. Jiu-Jitsu was a little better known. It was a common way for comic book and pulp heroines like Pat Savage, Nelly Gray or the Black Cat to be able to fight opponents a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier. Not that this would work most of the time either, there's a reason that boxers have weight categories but you know, fantasy adventure...
Aaron Brooks
Page Seven. That's just weak writing and art, the way Blackhawk gets loose. Have him use a lockpick hidden in his uniform, trick the guards into getting too close, whatever... but breaking a wooden post like that just looks phony.
Anthony Mitchell
Page Eight. "Are you by any chance Wang the Tiger?" "Nah, I'm another Chinese freedom fighter in a loincloth and tiger mask carrying a sword."
Jordan Nguyen
Mason Cook
Page Ten.Not sure, but I think the little block of fake-ideograms in the word balloons might mean the soldiers are speaking in Japanese which is translated for our benefit. I can buy that Blackhawk speaks Cantonese well enough to get by, he's dedicated enough to learn some from Chop-Chop during those long flights back to headquarters. So I guess most of the conversation is in Chinese except for the Japanese soldiers talking to each other.Hey, are we in a Golden Harvest movie all of a sudden? Wang cleaning his sword is a nice touch. Back on Blackhawk Island, we find the team is singing, they did this an awful lot. It's kind of odd if you ask me, but I guess it shows comaraderie or maybe they tapped the keg of beer again. The accordion is a great touch, as is Chop-Chop's blissful grin. Andre was always second-in-command. Then we see Wang chuckling, "Ha ha, there's no Comics Code yet! I can just cut off your head like this!"
Jacob Cooper
Carson King
Cameron Flores
Page Thirteen.This is one of the iconic sights of Golden Age comics, the Blackhawk squadron zooming in to wipe out Nazis or Japanese forces. It's still not too late to film a BLACKHAWK movie, Hollywood. Steven Spielberg in pre-production for years and years. I picture Nazi troops lining up a dozen villagers in occupied France to shoot them down and teach the villagers a lesson. Just as the officer is about to give the order, machine-gun fire cuts him and the firing squad down and the Blackhawk planes swoop overhead. As the villagers cheer, theme music starts.
Jacob Bennett
Page Fourteen. No vows against killing for these boys. They weren't super-heroes fighting bank robbers, Blackhawks were soldiers at war. We even see Chop-Chop stabbing a Japanese soldier in the chest. He had more reason to hate the Japanese than the other Blackhawks did; they had fled Nazi-occupied European countries but he was Chinese and he knew all about Nanking and Unit 731.
Ryder Nelson
Then we find out Wang is Wang. I don't know, I was expecting a twist, like they really were brothers who hated each other or that Wang the Tiger was actually unrelated with the same name or something.Great stuff! A pampered aristocrat puts himself in disgrace and danger to fight the invaders. Scarlet Pimpernel has nothing on Wang the Tiger. ("When peace comes, then the truth about me may be told.") I can't find where the character ever returned for a second story, but I'm still looking.
Jacob Perez
The best super-power is Plot Armor Blackhawk and Chuck are getting a little smug, but they know the next issue is already at the printer's.Lee Falk's Phantom seemed to have a sense of this. In the 1930s, he would be in the most hopeless deathtrap and he'd say, "People are always trying to kill me. They don't succeed. You won't, either." And darned if he wasn't right.
Chase Cook
Blackhawk gets put through the wringerFrom MILITARY COMICS# 28, April, pencils by John Cassone and inks by Alex Kotzky.
Brayden King
Page One. Eek. Well, the Blackhawks didn't sail through WW II without some suffering. Most of them were shot, lost and presumed dead, temporarily blinded, lost their memories and in general went through a lot of physical and emotional trauma. Not to mention that they had all joined the squadron in the first place because their families had been killed and their homelands conquered. (Chuck the American was the odd exception. I never saw this addressed in Golden Age comics but maybe he was second generation and his family back in Europe had been wiped out.)
Owen Wright
Page Two. Despite Chop-Chop's leaping four feet in the air at the prospect, he hated the Japanese as much as the other Blackhawks did. "It'll give them a taste of Chungking as well as Pearl Harbor," says Blackhawk to his sidekick. Grabbing extra ammo belts, the team roars off and finds some Zeroes right where Zeroes would be expected to be.
Easton Smith
Page Three. Golden Age art sometimes causes cognitive dissonance to the point where you have to sit down and let it sink in. Never mind the cartoony CC Beck Captain Marvel in the same panel as Mac Raboy's realistic Captain Marvel Jr. Here we see a reasonably drawn Japanese pilot (the enemy we're urged to hate) being shot by the bizarre little goblin Chop-Chop (who is Chinese, the people we're being pushed to admire). I don't..I can't... Well, you know. Comics.
Isaiah Collins
Page Four. Standard wartime comics. Bombs falling, machine guns strafing. I'm not an expert on honorifics but it seems unlikely that "By the Emperor's Ears" was ever a commonly used phrase.
Austin Murphy
Page Five. That's what you get for yelling at Olaf, Blackhawk. Time to find out if you packed your parachute according to regs.
Justin Gomez
Page Six. I don't think Blackhawk is putting up a brave front while being scared inwardly. That's him through and through. Many WW II veterans reported that after a certain point they became numb emotionally because they expected to get killed at some point. The inevitability made it less terrifying. The Thousand Yard Stare set in. But later in the war, when it looked like they had a chance to survive, the fighting became extremely traumatic again. Blackhawk may have accepted the idea he's not going to make it through the war alive anyway, this might be it.He even teases the one guard, "What's the matter, nips? You look as if you think I might not like it there."
Robert Jenkins
The Thousand Yard Stare. You sometimes catch sight of this in photos of troops during combat and it makes your heart stop to see.
Cameron Scott
Page Seven. "Where'd you get the idea that this is the end?" A few times in the series, Blackhawk seems to understand the concept of plot armor. Of course, by this adventure he had been captured by the Axis forces and few times and escaped. So far so good.Those bars look wide enough apart to squeeze through. Maybe not for me, ha ha. Likely there were a couple of armed guards outside itching to drill a few holes through any prisoner attempting to get out.
David Stewart
Page Eight. A few days without water softens anyone up, I don't care how tough you are. I had early pneumonia in one lung years ago, couldn't bring myself to drink water for a couple of days and it's like being undead.
Jason Jones
Page Nine. The old bamboo under the fingernails trick for three hours. Giving this treatment some thought makes me get and walk around the room going, "Ack. Eek. And Oh Noes." In real life, Blackhawk's interrogation would have been much more brutal than is shown here. Beatings with sticks was the least of it. POWs of the Japanese who survived told stories worse than anything Hollywood horror movies could match.
Chase King
Page Ten. Okay, we're in for a comic book twist of fate. Not only has Blackhawk managed to filch a knife from a guard (who not only doesn't notice later but doesn't immediately search the prisoner he was hauling), not only does he hear the tapping and understand it (long messages tapped out in Morse Code are not the easiest things to follow under the best of circumstances) but he's able to dig through the soft earth. Those rats are NOT helping.
Mason Ramirez
Page Eleven. Not sure what those pills are supposed to be. I've read that airmen and submarine crews and so forth were often issued amphetamines to keep them alert for long periods of time. Maybe that's benzedrine. In any case, now we have an enraged murderous Blackhawk hopped up on goofballs. Heads will roll.
Wyatt Lopez
Page Twelve. And the old man buys the farm. There's a cliche now about girlfriends in refrigerators, but for the past century at least, hundreds of detectives/spies/super-heroes have all been shocked and motivated by the deaths of their fathers/partners/mentors. As long as the bad guys don't kick the hero's dog, that's going too far.
Ian Reed
Nicholas King
>>114911361Page Thirteen. Guards, see what you get for being careless? You thought thids guy with the hawk emblem on his tunic was dehydrated and half-dead, you didn't know he had a connection to score some speed. Panel four hurts just to look at. The bullet goes right through the guard's hand and then his head AND helmet. Then we see Blackhawk confront the colonel, blood dripping off the bayonet. Even with all the agitation going on, the art shows the colonel going for his sidearm before he gets shot. Some Golden Age heroes were not above killing a defenseless foe in combat, but we don't see that here.
Christopher Lewis
Page Fourteen. The war's been going on for a few years, I assume Blackhawk has picked up some useful Japanese phrases even if he's not fluent. That's such a classic moment ("Give the password!" "It's called a bullet!") I can't remember the story, but a crook locked the door and yelled "Show me your warrant!" and the cop yelled back "I keep it in my boot!" and kicked the door in.
Gavin Lewis
Page Fifteen. Now the rush is wearing off and Blackhawk is coming down. Not strictly 1940s slang. He can't even muster the presence of mind to radio ahead. It's a nod toward realism that Blackhawk takes weeks to recover from his treatment. The ending seems rushed. Given a few more pages, I'd expect to see the squad sneak in and free whatever prisoners were still being held in those dungeons. Instead, Blackhawk dismisses their deaths and says they "would thank us for this!" Hey, that could have been you down there.Maybe I'm missing a line of dialogue, but why didn't the Blackhawks try to rescue their leader? They gave up on him awful quickly. At some point, when he was feeling stronger, did Blackhawk snarl, "And where were YOU guys? Playing cards and listening to Jack Benny while I sat in that filthy cell? Extra KP for everyone."
Logan Thompson
"And going out to Chris from Jenny and to Bill from Sue, it's the Andrew Sisters singing about that Boogie Woogie Boy of Company B."No, seriously, Blackhawk used to broadcast after each mission to encourage the occupied nations. Each Blackhawk came from a country under Axis oppression and had seen his family and friends killed by the Nazis (except Chop-Chop, who suffered under the Japanese). These guys were motivated.There was a real if short-lived Blackhawk radio series, no episodes appear to have survived. It aired from 9/20/1950 to 1/3/1951 on ABC.en.wikipedia.org
Nathan Gomez
Isaiah Walker
But first a moment with Lady Blackhawk
Alexander Ortiz
Which brings us to Lady Blackhawk's moment that made kids drop their comics and silently mouth, "What the...?"
Luke Cruz
"You and the others take a firm hold." Oh, Zinda. Were you toying with these guys? Honestly.
Jayden Brown
Of course, this was nothing out of the ordinary for early Silver Age DC. Everyone from Perry White to Tomahawk to Sugar and Spike developed super-powers at some point. Every month, there were all those pages to fill and most DC comics had three short stories each issue. ("Ummm... Jimmy Olsen becomes the Sphinx. The Challengers of the Unknown turn into gorillas. Adam Strange fights talking toothbrushes from outer space." "Fine, have it on my desk Friday."
Landon Morales
Chop-Chop starts taking a walk down Normal Street. Between two issues, Chop-Chop got a lot less grotesque. The first picture shows how he had been drawn since his first appearance (in MILITARY COMICS# 3, back in 1941) and the second is how he appeared in his final solo story in BLACKHAWK# 95, November 1955. Well, it's still not perfect but it's a step in the right direction. Over the next few years, Chops would gradually be drawn more realistically until eventually he was as about as realistic a depiction of a young Chinese man as the artists could manage.Chop-Chop was the strip's comedy relief. Like Plastic Man's Woozy Winks and Green Lantern's Doiby Dickles, he was short and round and excitable. Any number of Golden Age heroes had a funny sidekick; I suspect the artists and writers got the idea from B-Movie Westerns where the hero had Gabby Hayes or Andy Devine tagging along to provide some laughs. Chop-Chop had fled occupied China, giving him the same motive as the other Blackhawks, who were from countries overrun by the Axis. (Except for Chuck, who was American.. maybe he had relatives in Europe?) Staying as a cook, Chop-Chop insisted on going on missions and usually rode along with Blackhawk. When the fighting started, he wielded a butcher's cleaver, which seems like an amusing image until you realize he was using it on the enemy.
Aaron Brooks
Even more startling was that Reed Crandall and Al Bryant were among the more naturalistic artists of that era. So, when Chop Chop went with the Blackhawks into occupied China, he was surrounded by normal-looking Asians while he remained a three-foot-tall Martian with teeth a beaver would envy and ears like a fennec. The contrast was surreal.When DC bought the Blackhawks property in 1957, Chop-Chop rapidly became more a regular member of the team and less the sidekick. Of course, DC being the way it was, the Blackhawks stopped fighting dictators and international crime and had to deal with aliens from outer space, giant robots, bizarre super-villains and that sort of thing. They ended up as nothing more than another Challengers of the Unknown team, just with snappier uniforms and individuals jets.In recent decades, of course the Blackhawks have been brought back a number of times in varying incarnations. Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle did an excellent series in the 1980s, as I remember, and Howard Chaykin did a version in which (of course) everyone was unlikeable and self-serving. I have no idea what the current status of the Blackhawks in the DC Universe is, but luckily those old 1940s and 1950s issues of MILITARY COMICS and BLACKHAWK still exist safe and sound, beyond tampering.
Jose Smith
From BLACKHAWK# 15, Summer 1947.
Nathan Cox
Golden Age super-heroes frequently had comedy sidekicks who were drawn in a less realistic style than everyone else and who were usually short (chest high), obese (shaped like beach balls with limbs), homely and speaking in an ethnic dialect or slang. Plastic Man had Woozy Winks, Green Lantern had Doiby Dickles, Wonder Woman had Etta Candy. Lady Lucky had her giant Italian chauffeur Piccolo. Even the Spectre had Percival Popp. And the Blackhawks had Chop Chop. Now, the Chops of the 1940s was a grotesque sight to be sure, looking more like a Martian than a Chinese youth. And where the other Blackhawks had a tinge of stereotyped national dialect ("By Gar! I ban land the plane now!" and "Zut alors! Zat fellows ees a fool, no?"), Chop Chop went way overboard with it.Oddly enough, Chop Chop was popular enough with the readers to be mentioned frequently on the cover ("Also in this issue, a laugh a minute with Chop Chop!") and he was the only Blackhawk to have his own regular solo story... in fact, the other team members may have had stories spotlighting them but I don't recall Olaf or Chuck or Stan ever getting a strip of their own. (Not that they would necessarily want one if it meant being depicted this way.)
Parker Watson
Well, this Chop Chop has long since become apocryphal. By the 1950s, he suddenly became a normal-looking Chinese man, then got a Blackhawk uniform of his own. The last I heard, it was retroactively decided that that was the real character, a freedom fighter named Wu Cheng and this bizarre little guy was just a scurrilous slur in comics that the "real" Blackhawk read and took umbrage over. But as always, the original comics still exist and the new revisionism can't erase them completely.
Dylan Gonzalez
Blake Parker
Joseph Cruz
>>114912545I should mention the art is by Bill Ward. He was able to turn out perfectly good heroic art but his real strength was in this cartoony pin-up style. Ward's TORCHY is still striking in its audacity and its good natured ribaldry.
Jayden Richardson
>>114912479Excuse me, Chops. Your honorable ancestors did not say money is the root of all evil. Unless you are descended from Israelites and we were never told. It's also worth noting that Chop-Chop like the other Blackhawks got a regular paycheck, Since they lived and ate on Blackhawk Island, I bet most of them socked their money away for when the team broke up or they got aged or disabled. No insurance for air pirates.
Carter Morris
Ethan Edwards
Gabriel Russell
>>114912772You know, THOSE Chinese speak correct English without putting an "L" in every other word. Maybe they're speaking Cantonese and we're reading a translation, while Chop-Chop is struggling with pidgin English he learned on the streets somewhere.
Chase King
Blackhawk seemed to genuinely LIKE Chop-Chop in a way he didn't with the rest of the team. Maybe it was the age difference, All through the 1940s, Chops seemed to be a minor. People meeting him for the first time called him "young man," "kid" and "son." So BLACKHAWK got its money's worth with this character. He was the teen sidekick, the comedy relief AND the ethnic stereotype all at the same time.
Nathaniel Russell
>>114912772That's a good-hearted dream, buying a restaurant where poor people can eat free. (I guess he means a soup kitchen.)You must be all right when you give the Devil a conniption attack.
Joshua Young
Fourth wall? What fourth wall?You mean the page of this comic book I'm in, that I just stepped out between the panels?
Dylan Gomez
Slapstick war with BLACKHAWK This odd little cmbination Errol Flynn/Marx Brothers sort of tale appeared in MILITARY COMICS# 12, back in October 1942. It was a transitional story in some ways, the last one written by Dick French and the first drawn by Reed Crandall. William Woolfolk signed on as writer the following issue, and he leaned more heavily on a grim, even fatalistic view of war and the sacrifices it demands. Crandall was one of the very best artists of the Golden Age, improving steadily at time went on. He drew with a solid, covincing approach; his figures and planes looked as if they had weight. (Quality Comics in general had some very good art. Plastic Man, Doll Man, Uncle Sam, the Ray...)
Dominic Jenkins
As for this Xanukhara yarn, well it's brisk and fun and full of action but it frustrates because not much is ever explained. I really thought there would be another page or two tying up loose ends but nope.
Adam Bennett
Page 2. I could do without this bearded narrator. Who the heck is he supposed to be? Not personfied War, who was usually shown as either the Grim Reaper or the Roman god Mars with helmet and armor. Is he Fate or Destiny or what? God knows. (Maybe he was the editor of MILITARY COMICS, ha ha.) In any case, he doesn't add anything that some captions wouldn't do better.
Joseph Wood
Page 3. Blackhawk looks good in his dark blue trenchcoat. He had enough sense not to walk around Washington DC in his uniform with the hawk's head symbol on the chest. You or I might expect there to be some sort of sentry outside the War Department building, or at least for the major to keep his window locked but you know, *comics." This is Blackhawk. Either he snuck up on the sentry and knocked him out or drugged him with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform or something like that. Nothing so mundane as slipping the guy a couple of fifties. The orderly may be treacherous but he's sure nimble. Too bad he's not nearly as skilled at finding the fire escape landing *splat*
Brody Adams
Page 4. Are you sure that note isn't more likely to mean WAKE island? Oh well. This page shows (in a blatant comic book way) an idea I have seen mentioned before, that the Blackhawks were covertly supplied and financed by Allied military. The Americans or the British couldn't openly endorse these air pirates running around breaking every rule of international conduct, but they could quietly drop off large quantities of fuel, foodstuffs, tools, that sort of thing. And they could use the Blackhawks as an unofficial strike force who could be disavowed if things went terribly wrong, such as a large amount of civilian deaths.
Colton Fisher
The outraged portrait on the wall behind the major and the colonel is a nice touch. It adds a surreal comment.
Blake Taylor
Page 5. How DOES Xanukhara get away with this sort of killing, leaving a corpse standing upright, murdering every man on a base with no visible signs of a struggle? It smacks of the supernatural and is never explained. And there's another clue that doesn't help at all and could be seen as nothing more than a calling card.
Andrew Allen
Page 6. Ooohkay. If you say so. Here is where the story takes a sharp turn into Golden Age whacko and leaves plausibility in the dust. So, seven men fly into Tokyo in 1942, crash land and run around shooting everyone in sight, steal some planes and take off again without a single casualty or even broken fingernail. This goes right next to that early Captain America story where Cap and Bucky openly invade Berlin by themselves and beat up Hitler and Goering. I enjoy this stuff for its brazen wish fulfilment and over-the-top quality but it works on the same level as Phineas and Ferb building a giant rollercoaster by themselves in one day, only to have it conveniently self-destruct and not leave a trace just as their sister is about to bust them.
Anthony Thomas
Characters knowing they're in a comic book, addressing the readers... not exactly a new concept.
Colton Powell
Page 7. More men killed, more laughs. Oh well. I was wondering how Xanukhara survived the arrow to the gizzard but most likely this was just one of the army of female spies/secret agents/assassins at work and another one took over.
Connor Davis
Ian Fisher
Jordan Gray
Page 10. So what are we dealing with here anyway? Xanukhara seems to be a ringleader of some sort of organization. We see two of her underlings, both attractive young women in military uniforms complete with sidearms; in fact, Zara there seems to be wearing a Blackhawk outfit herself...! I have nothing against Xanukhara's outfit, the fur-lined cloak with the cross-chest cord is a great touch. In the original of this comic she was showing a healthy expanse of skin in that area colored green in the reprint. Cleavage has been a tool and a weapon for ages.
James Sanders
Page 11. And this is the only explanation we get, that she wants Blackhawk to rule the world with her? Why him? He's a top fighter ace and all that, but his whole career indicates that he wouldn't agree to work with her and she must know that. The slap is a bit shocking for 1942. The unwritten chivalry of that time made striking a woman taboo, which is why so often the hero was saved by a villainess' underling stepping in and shooting the bad girl dead, or else having her fall off a cliff etc while trying to kill the good guys. Blackhawk is a hardnose, no fooling. But really, he doesn't knock her out or anything, she curses and gets up annoyed but unhurt. And in the next panel, she's going for her gun. Maybe he should have said, "Aw hell" and used a closed fist. Whoops. Huh, why did that briefcase explode? Was it boobytrapped with a few sticks of dynmite or something? Okay, there was a blast that started fire and injured Blackhawk enough that he has to be dragged from the room, but this is a comic and OF COURSE Xanukhara could easily turn up in the next issue without a scratch.Then Whatisface with the beard materializes. Not very satisfying, buddy, I sure hope you are not going to come back and tease us in future stories. The Crypt Keeper you are not.
Logan Gray
Cameron Allen
>>114910490I was more curious about why the heck he was nearly naked.There's a lot of naked dudes in this comic.There's even a butt here.>>114910699
Colton Lee
>>114914156>260It's the climate. Parts of China are arid desert but other parts are down by Vietnam, Thailand, Burma. Hot, muggy, steamy jungle. The real puzzle is why Blackhawk doesn't sweat to death in that outfit.
Jose Murphy
There was a BLACKHAWK novel? From August 1982, this novel by William Rotsler is pretty good stuff indeed, telling the origin from the 1941 MILITARY COMICS with new details and explanations, then going on to throw our heroes into a series of adventures. Rotsler uses a blunt, straightforward style with few colorful images or flights of speech. He also painlessly supplies a good amount of background information on what was going on in the war at the time, ending these paragraphs with Blackhawk's activity. But he doesn't go on too long with these and avoids turning the adventure into a textbook.It's a nice little tribute to the writers and artists of the comics that Rotsler names nearly all the secondary good-guys after them. Levitz, Cuidera, Dillion, Herron...if you didn't know these names, their inclusion makes no difference but if you were already a BLACKHAWK fan, it's worth a smile. (But where were 'Eisner" or "Crandall", may I ask?) This book was written to tie-in with the planned BLACKHAWK movie which Steven Spielberg never got around to filming. Certainly the structure of the book and the big explosive finale would have worked very well on the screen. In a one-page afterword, Rotsler describes this as "this first novel of the Blackhawk saga", and I would love to know if he had a second book in the works that wasn't published.
Asher Torres
More about the novel:Blackhawk himself is portrayed consistently with his classic incarnation (not the unlikeable, self-serving Howard Chaykin version), but he's not impossibly brave or powerful. He's a fine pilot but not infallible, a good fighter but not invincible. We only get deeper than the surface into Blackhawk's thoughts a few times, and this effect reinforces the semi-documentary feel. The other members of the squadron get only cursory time on stage. They're all present and active, true to their established backstories, but none really get a chance to shine.Chop-Chop is a cleaned-up version of the originalcharacter, who sometimes seemed more like a Martian than a young Chinese man-- his martial arts skill is limited to a few hand-edge strikes, but he does get to throw a hatchet with effect.What gives this book a feeling of authenticity is that the writer doesn't tell a single, unified story about the Blackhawks fighting one specific mission. Instead, there are skirmishes and sorties, including an attack on some new Nazi giant tanks called the Warlions (bizarre German superweapons being a trademark of the old comics), and building up to a wonderfully lurid, over-the-top climax as an immense enemy bomber is heading to crash into Buckingham Palace. 'Both wings on fire, anti-aircraft guns getting the range, the controls shot away, beautiful but deadly Nazi running naked through the ship, a crash landing at night his only way out."
Dylan Torres
>>114914248>This book was written to tie-in with the planned BLACKHAWK movie which Steven Spielberg never got around to filming.Wait he was still interested in doing a Blackhawk project even that far back? No wonder they were trying to get him to do it in recent years.
Luke Howard
There are a lot of nice touches here, including the scene where Blackhawk, having buried his brother and sister on their bombed homestead, places his own dogtags on his brother's marker. Reminiscent of the way the Lone Ranger had symbolically died and had an empty grave dug, this shows that Blackhawk is the real identity now. A classic detail is Blackhawk leaving a smal decal of his emblem after terrorizing a Nazi. From the Phantom's skull mark to the mark of Z left by Zorro, this is a tradition in pulp fiction that deserves an article of its own.It's also neat how much the team act as spies and saboteurs, masquerading in German uniforms and doing as much resistance fighting as flying. Rotsler fills in a good deal of how the squadron is funded and how the island headquarters works. I especially enjoyed the way the mehanics and flight crew regard the planes as theirs and resent the way the Blackhawks bring the craft back, shot full of holes and burning.Throughout, we're reminded that these seven are in efffect outlaws-- an illegal paramilitary group who act entirely on their own. They would be shot down by the British as quickly as the Germans. The vigilante status of the Blackhawks has been forgotten as they became more famous and accepted by the Alles, but they were after all air pirates.
Luke Brown
>>114914343Oh, I think Dan Akroyd was interested in appearing in it. Not as Blackhawk certainly, but maybe one of the others. Every time there's a renewed discussion of a movie being developed, DC puts out a new series. I mean, they'd want to keep the trademark active in any case but a few appearances even in flashbacks would do it. I'd like to see a BLACKHAWK movie with real planes and live action stunts but Hollywood is not returning my calls.
Nolan Butler
>>114914248I wanna try and read this. Thanks for letting me know it exists.
Cooper White
Finishing up about the novel:There was always a strong element of sexuality in the original comics, mostly in the shape of gorgeous, treacherous lady spies (and as drawn by the great Reed Crandall, they WERE pretty hot) trying to seduce Blackhawk or his men. In particular, the freelance mercenary who called herself Fear always livened things up. In this book, we have a really extreme downright evil villainess. Voluptous but completely perverted Major Karla Kleinemann, who is deeply into whips and bondage and that sort of thing. She and her Nazi friends have sex in the cabin of the bomber, tied to a big metal swastika hung from the ceiling watching the death and destruction in London below. (Blackhawk's black leather uniform probably turns her on, itself.) That's quite an image, like something from those 1950s Men's Adventure magazines like STAG and REAL MAN.
Wyatt Lee
>>114914397I don't think it's going for much on eBay or Amazon. I picked up a copy years ago in a second-hand book store I haunted like a ghost. It's definitely worth a read. You can tell Rotsler gave some thought to how the Blackhawks operated.
Samuel Baker
I've mentioned Reed Crandall as THE Blackhawk artist but I haven't actually shown his work on a story. Crandall brought a sense of solidity to the art. His characters stood and moved as if they had weight, the uniforms had texture and creases where they should. After BLACKHAWK, Crandall worked all over the place. He did some fine stories for EC, home of TALES FROM THE CRYPT. He worked for CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED and the 1960s Warren magazines CREEPY and EERIE. Here are two book illustrations he did for Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. Barsoom never looked better!
Ryder Rodriguez
Charles Bennett
If that Disney movie had some of the drama in this art!
Colton Brown
BLACKHAWKS - The last free men of conquered nations See, the first Blackhawk comics I saw were from the early 1960s. I just didn't see the point of the team. They seemed interchangeable with the Challengers of the Unknown... normal humans fighting aliens, monsters, mad scientists etc. But there were seven Blackhawks, so none of them got much of a chance to shine except the leader himself. Why did they each fly a jet? Why did they seem to be a military group fighting crime? I just wasn't taken with the comic.Years later, though, I found issues of MILITARY COMICS (later MODERN COMICS) and BLACKHAWK from the WW II era, and the team came to life with purpose and intensity. They were a group of air pirates, men who had escaped from countries which had been conquered by the Axis, and they fought back against the aggressors with a vengeance. No harmless gas guns or gimmicks, either... these guys carried Tommy guns and 45s and used them. They were not super-heroes, they were soldiers with a mission.
Nathan Allen
The Blackhawk strip first appeared in MILITARY COMICS# 1, August 1941, a product of the Will Eisner studio (although he doesn't seem to have had as much to do with their creation as did Bob Powell and Chuck Cuidera. Reed Crandall soon became the artist most identified with the strip in its glory days, with his solid realistic style (he was the Norman Rockwell of comics). It's hard to recapture today the emotional power that the strip's concept must have carried at the beginning of the war. One nation after another had fallen to the Germans, and Japan was spreading its conquests in the Pacific. The future looked very dark and uncertain. Looking back eighty years later, we know how things turned out but it was a terrifying era to live through. The idea of men who belonged to the conquered nations banding together to fight back was a potent one.After the war, the Blackhawks went after Communist agggression with the same grim determination, and the stories up until the mid-1950s are still dark and fatalistic and exciting. Then DC bought the property from Quality, and Blackhawk quickly became as I mentioned earlier... a copy of the Challengers of the Unknown, but with accents and jets. Since then, the Blackhawk characters have been through a lot of abuse and reincarnations and debasement. Bah! Luckily, their original comics still exist to be enjoyed, safe beyond tampering and improving.
Benjamin Parker
This is from HIT COMICS# 26, back in February 1943. The metaphysics of it all escapes me. Kid Eternity had the power to temporarily summon figures from history or mythology to help him out. Achilles, Robin Hood or Samson on one hand; John L. Sullivan, Napoleon or Marc Anthony on the other. (And they were all so glad to pitch in, too. You might expect some of them to say, "I was a king, why should I listen to this boy?" But who knows, maybe they were bored in the afterlife. It may not be all it's cracked up to be.Anywhat, here we see Kid Eternity call on Blackhawk to help. Both the Kid and Blackhawk mention he comes from MILITARY COMICS. So, was our favorite air pirate a fictional character to Kid Eternity? I guess. He sure wasn't dead at that time, especially considering his comic sold just below CAPTAIN MARVEL and SUPERMAN, beating HIT COMICS by a mile. Beats me what's going on, but I suspect fans spend more time worrying over canon and continuity than the writers and editors ever did. ("That's off to the printers. Now, next month suppose we do a locked room mystery story, twelve pages, Fred Kida is available to draw it...")
Blake Wilson
Jason Stewart