It's been said that the "Golden Age" of comics is 12. I started reading comics when I was younger than that but certainly my adolescent years were full of comic books. It was the last few years of the 1950's and the early years of the '60s so it was also a special time for comics as it saw the flowering of Marvel and a new kind of comic book hero. Like most kids of the time I was a huge fan of Spider-man, the Fantastic Four and many of the other new Marvel heroes. But I was also reading war comics; Marvel's Sgt. Fury, of course, but most of the good war comics at that time were published by DC. It was a time that saw the introduction of Sgt. Rock and Easy company, the Haunted Tank, Johnny Cloud, and Enemy Ace, just to name a few.
There was another comic published at that time by DC that should have been a war comic but wasn't. That was Blackhawk. In the early '60s, the Blackhawks were fighting sci-fi villains and aliens from outer space, but it hadn't always been that way. In it's earlier days, Blackhawk had been the greatest war comic of all.
Blackhawk was first published in the August, 1941, No. 1 issue of Military Comics. Military was published as part of the Quality line, which was best known at that time for the titles Plasticman and Dollman. As with most comics of the time, Military included an assortment of stories, some serious like "The Blue Tracer" and some comedic like "Death Patrol." But from the very first issue, the star strip in the new comic was "Blackhawk." Created by artist Charles "Chuck" Cuidera and writer Bill Powel, with some assistance and supervision by the comic legend Will Eisner, the Blackhawks were a paramilitary commando team formed by the mysterious leader known only as Blackhawk. The team had an international composition with members from France, Holland, Sweden, Poland, the US, and China.
The national origin of Blackhawk himself was never explained though it was implied that he was an American of Polish extraction. The Blackhawks were all ace pilots but each also had a specialty such as weapons or communications that allowed them to tackle any situation. They flew Grumman F5F-1 Skyrockets, an unusual looking twin-engine plane that's fuselage nose did not quite reach the leading edge of the wing. In reality, the Skyrocket was a prototype of which only two were every built, but in the pages of Blackhawk it had a varied and glorious combat career.
The Blackhawks flew their Skyrockets from a hidden base, Blackhawk Island, to both the European and Pacific theaters to fight all manner of Nazi and Japanese enemies. They occasionally fit in non-war stories but those were rare. While the war raged around the world, the Blackhawks were in the thick of it.
After their introduction in 1941, the Blackhawks became very popular. By 1944, newsstand sales were equal to Captain America, The Flash and Batman. In the winter of 1944, Blackhawk #9 was established as a quarterly (it took over where eight issues of Uncle Sam left off). With issue #44, November 1945, Military Comics was retitled Modern Comics. It still featured Blackhawk as the lead story.
When the war ended, the Blackhawks spent a few issues fighting hold-outs and hidden Nazis, but that gave way to more adventure oriented stories. Then the threat of Communism, especially the Soviet Union, became palpable in the U.S. and the Blackhawks once again had an enemy. Through the remainder of the '40s and the '50s, the Blackhawks fought all manner of Commie villains, with occasional forays into lost worlds or encounters with super-science criminals.
When Quality folded in 1956, Blackhawk was picked up by DC. The focus of the stories under DC turned away from the Communist threat to even more super-powered criminals, aliens and other sci-fi oriented activities. The title gradually lost popularity but it continued publication. In fact, only three comic book costumed heroes had continuous publication from the 1940's to the 1960's. They were Superman, Batman and Blackhawk. All the rest, even big names like Flash, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman fell out of publication during the backlash against comics that arose from the Congressional hearings on comics and juvenile delinquency. Unfortunately, the Blackhawks as superheroes did not really work and the title was eventually canceled in November 1968, after twenty seven years of continuous publication.
Blackhawk was revived several times, most successfully by Mark Evanier and Dan Speigle in 1982. They wisely decided to place the stories during World War II, the time for which the Blackhawks were created.
The Blackhawks still make occasional appearances in DC comics (Lady Blackhawk is a recurring character in Birds of Prey) but it seems unlikely that they will return in their own book unless war comics in general make a come back.
We can wish for that to be true.
October 2007
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