Serialization and Strategy in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son

When I read Dombey and Son (1846-48), I noted that it seemed to demonstrate a much higher level of planning than the prior Dickens novel I had read, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). The structure of Chuzzlewit very much demonstrates (to me anyway) that Dickens must have been making it up as he went along, with its diversion to America and the fact that Martin (a damp squib if there ever was one) pretty much stops being the protagonist of the novel that bears his name.

Dombey and Son, on the other hand, is very obviously planned. It ran nineteen monthly installments, the last of which was double-length, making for twenty in total. At the end of every fifth installment, something of great significance happens: the death of a main character, the marriage of a main character, the flight of a main character. It's like watching the season finale of a modern serialized streaming show. I was curious about this, and reading the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition suggested that Alan Horsman's 1974 Clarendon edition of the novel would provide a detailed account of novel's composition, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

In his introduction, Horsman cites Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster, who had "stressed the contrast between Martin Chuzzlewit and subsequent books like this one which showed Dickens 'more bent upon constructive care at the outset'" (xv). Horsman argues that Forster is exaggerating a bit, as we know that Dickens had Chuzzlewit's ending in mind from the beginning. But I think (to put it awkwardly) that Horsman is exaggerating Forster's exaggeration. Sure, Dickens had his plot twist in mind the beginning... but clearly he did not have the beats and pacing in mind from the beginning in the way he did in Dombey and Son. Had he precisely planned everything in Dombey? I don't think so, based on the evidence Horsman cites, but we do often see evidence of him working ahead a bit. For example: "On 6 December [1846] he was occupied with the first chapter of Number IV. 'Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five'" (xxvi). And later: "As one would expect, the planning of Number V is very careful" (xxviii).

That said, things do get a bit looser later on. Dickens had a broad-strokes idea, but didn't have the precise planning worked out from the beginning: "The problem which the memoranda for Number VI emphasize is to continue throughout the remainder of the novel…. February letters show that he found it 'very difficult to fall into the new vein of the story'" (xxix). Perhaps this why I found my interest in the novel diminished as it went! It seems like Dickens had a lot he knew he wanted to get done by the end of no. v, but having crammed this all in, was less certain about where he was working toward for the remaining fifteen installments: "The second marriage [of Dombey] has now to sustain the greater part of the novel… he was to warn himself 'To bring on the marriage gradually'" (xxxi-xxxii). Horsman chronicles how Dickens thought of other aspects of the novel to pull into the foreground, but also how Dickens wasn't unlimited in what he could do; there were things he planned on that just didn't pan out.

Horsman doesn't mention those big turning points I identified in nos. x and xv in the same way, so it seems likely these weren't planned quite so rigorously in advance as the ending of no. v was. But it is clear that Dickens was being deliberate in his pacing in a way he had not been in Chuzzlewit, even if this ultimately undermined (I would argue) the success of the novel as a whole.

Forster said that, "for Dickens, 'the interest and passion of [the story], when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, that had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think…'" (xxxii). Again, Horsman seems a bit skeptical of Forster's claim, calling him "defensive" (xxxii), but I agree—going in publication order, for me this is Dickens's first novel to have some genuinely emotional moments, even if he would get better at this later on. And Forster also says the second half "seemed to many to have fallen short of the splendour of its opening" (xxxii)—and again, I agree. Because Dickens had to get to that twentieth installment, much like how a modern streaming show has to get its season out to ten episodes no matter what, the later parts of the novel are less dense with incident than what came before. 

It's also fascinating to learn how down-to-the-wire Dickens's composition could be; there were times Dickens had to send in each chapter of an installment as he finished it to have enough time to be typset. There were even times that a chapter had to be broken up by pages so different typesetters could do different pages simultaneously! In such a down-to-the-minute environment, I suppose the more planning you can do in advance, the better.

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Androids of Tara (2012)

The success of The Stones of Blood (2011) engendered The Androids of Tara, another David Fisher–penned renovelisation of a tv story originally novelised by Terrance Dicks.

If you've read The Stones of Blood, you won't be surprised by the approach that Fisher takes here. The story is largely what we saw on screen with bits of backstory expanded and fleshed out, particularly the society on Tara, explaining how they became a feudal world dependent on androids. Like in Stones, many of the characters get these added bits of backstory spelling out who they are and where they came from, particularly Madame Lamia and the family of Count Grendel.

Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara
by David Fisher

Originally published: 2012
Acquired: January 2025
Read: February 2025

It's funny, though—if you'd asked me about the tv stories, I would have said that The Androids of Tara was the funner one, and it's definitely the one I have fonder memories of. Like I said, the swerve into hyperspace in the middle of Stones didn't really work for me, but Androids is one of those tv stories where I feel like writing, direction, and performance are all on the same page, creating a wonderfully coherent vision that delights.

Perhaps because of this, the novel just isn't as fun. It's nice to have the bits of backstory, but there's no Tom Baker, no Mary Tamm, no Peter Jeffrey to make the dialogue sing here. Not to say this is bad, I enjoyed the experience of reading it a lot, but certainly not as much I did the experience of reading Stones. I did really like the ending, though, with the Doctor getting his fishing license finally. (I don't think this bit of business is in the screen version? It has been a long time!) I do see the audio was read by John Leeson; having heard his enthusiastic reading of other stories, I can imagine he turned this into a thumping good time and lifted it off the page.

The Target novel has an afterword by editor Steve Cole, discussing the process of how the novelisation was originally commissioned as an audio and then adapted to the page. I was a bit disappointed by this; Cole discusses how his edits restricted the point-of-view of the narrator, for example taking a reference to a "horse" out of a scene from Romana's point-of-view, as she wouldn't know what a horse was. Cole's argument is that this works on audio—where you are literally being told a story—but not on the page. I don't really see why this should be the case. Why does a novel have to be told in a third-person limited perspective? I think this has increasingly become the convention in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but I don't see why we can't have an omniscient narrator who knows what Romana is thinking and what a horse is. As I read these books, I've been listening to some other Targets on audio, most recently Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975) and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion (1976),* and those stories don't seem afraid to slide back and forth between perspectives within a scene as needed. In the latter, we even have scenes from the perspective of dinosaurs, but those scenes also let the dinos know what, for example, a "car" is! Cole's edits go so far as to add a bit explaining why Romana and the Doctor split up, allowing Grendel's men to capture Romana. I'm glad he disclosed all these changes in the afterword, but I feel like overall I'd rather have read the unfiltered David Fisher version; why get the original writer to employ his distinctive voice if you're just going to file those bits away?

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond

* I thought about doing a series of posts reviewing these too, but decided that I have probably committed myself to enough self-imposed writing projects at the moment. I do have actual work to do!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: March 2025

Pick of the month: Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie. I got this collection of Ann Leckie's short fiction last year, and finally read it this past month; I very much enjoyed the experience. I've enjoyed her novels, of course, but there's something about how a short fiction collection broadens your understanding of an author that I really enjoy.

All books read:

1. The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages by A. R. Myers
2. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
3. Uniquely Human: Updated and Expanded: A Different Way of Seeing Autism by Barry M. Prizant with Tom Fields-Meyer
4. Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie
5. Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate and Beyond by Stephen Gallagher
6. The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith, illustrated by William Stout
7. The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England by S. T. Bindoff
8. Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life by Stuart Shanker with Teresa Baker
9. Low-Demand Parenting: Dropping Demands, Restoring Calm, and Finding Connection with your Uniquely Wired Child by Amanda Diekman
10. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke

All books acquired:

1. The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England by S. T. Bindoff
2. The Lost Light Notebooks: Vol. 5 by James Roberts
3. The Lost Light Notebooks: Vol. 6 by James Roberts
4. More than Meets the Eye, Vol. 1: Elegant Chaos by James Roberts
5. Lost Light, Vol. 2: The Everlasting Voices by James Roberts
6. The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon

Currently reading:

• The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
• Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work by Robyn Gobbel
• The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon

Up next in my rotations:

1. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 
4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (down 1)

Temeraire by Naomi Novik, Book 5: Victory of Eagles

The Temeraire series is nine books long, and is currently being reprinted in three three-book omnibus volumes, which might lead you to think it a trilogy of trilogies (as is true of, for example, The Expanse). This is especially true because the first three books came out in rapid succession in the same year. But while there is at least one embedded trilogy in the series, it's actually books three through five. In book three, Black Powder War, Napoleon had steamrolled through continental Europe and the British dragons were weakened by disease; in book four, Empire of Ivory, Laurence was disgraced and separated from Temeraire; these cliffhangers are largely resolved by the end of book five, Victory of Eagles, which would work as a stopping point, though it also leaves a hook for more adventures.

This seems like a canny move on Novik's part; beginning her plot trilogy with the last book of a trilogy in terms of release sequence mean the people who picked up the first trilogy have to keep on going!

Victory of Eagles: Book Five of Temeraire
by Naomi Novik

Originally published: 2008
Acquired and read: November 2024

Anyway, having found the stuff about searching for the cure in Empire of Ivory a bit dull, I really enjoyed this one. Novik switches up the formula a bit; while the previous books were all told in third-person limited perspective for Laurence, this one makes Temeraire himself a viewpoint character for the first time, which is great. There are lots of intense, grueling sequences of the kind that Novik really excels at (and made Black Powder War such a good read) as the French slowly take Britain, and the British do their best to push back. Laurence's moral forthrightness has some good implications here, and I liked his reunion with Temeraire a lot. There's also some good stuff about what we're willing—and unwilling—to do in the desperation of war. Wellington appears as a minor character here, and he's excellent; Novik cleverly weaves some echoes of real history into her alternative one, especially with Nelson. Of course I love all the stuff about Laurence's stiff moral code, how could I not? Overall, I really enjoyed this one, my favorite since the first book.

I have sometimes been a bit skeptical about Novik's alternative history, to be honest. Why would all of European history basically be the same with dragons up until the 1800s, but begin diverging then? But most non-European countries seem to have quite different histories in this timeline. Obviously, this has to be the case, or you don't get 1) the fun premise of "Napoleonic War with dragons" or 2) any suspense. But her approach pays off here; because Napoleon didn't invade England in our history, it just feels utterly wrong when he is able to do so here, allowing the readers to experience the same alienation and estrangement as the characters. It's just not right that Napoleon should be in England. You feel this just like Laurence does, even if for a different reason.

Every ten months I read an installment of Temeraire. Next up in sequence: Tongues of Serpents

New Publication: I Interview Neil Clarke for Studies in the Fantastic

Here at Science's Less Accurate Grandmother, it's no secret that Neil Clarke is my favorite editor of short science fiction. I always enjoy Clarkesworld (the only sf mag I subscribe to), and I am a devoted reader of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies.

Last spring, I interviewed Neil for Studies in the Fantastic, the peer-reviewed journal I am associated editor for, and this month, that interview finally appeared in print and online. We talked about the importance of short sf to the genre ecosystem and the challenges generative AI has caused his magazine and others.

Here's an excerpt:

SM: I don't know if I want to go too much into this, but did you feel that way about Isabel Fall? That you found a wonderful new talent when you read that story ["I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"]? I know it went bad in the end, in some ways.

NC: The whole thing with Isabel was probably my most heartbreaking moment in the field. I'm still in touch with her. The way she was treated… unacceptable. It was an amazing story and she deserved far better.

SM: I read the story right when it was published, and I thought, "This is amazing." It really felt like you were reading something by a vital talent. And then it was a few days or a week later when everything happened.

NC: The story was out for nine days without a complaint. I remember it well because it all erupted while I was undergoing surgery to have a defibrillator removed and replaced. I was offline for a couple of days and came back to a social media hellscape. We talked about a high point seeing someone like Isabel Kim's career take off. This was the low point, seeing somebody who was just, just… no.

If you (or your institution) has access to Project Muse, you can read the complete interview here.

Black Panther & the Crew: We Are the Streets by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Butch Guice, Scott Hanna, Yona Harvey, et al.

Like World of Wakanda, Black Panther & the Crew is a prequel miniseries that ties into Ta-Nehisi Coates's first arc on Black Panther. Partway through A Nation under Our Feet, T'Challa summoned the assistance of "the Crew," reviving the all-black superhero group devised by Christopher Priest, though with a totally new membership roster. While it originally included War Machine, White Tiger, and Josiah X (son of the "black Captain America"), this version is made up of T'Challa, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and some guy named "Gates." The first and only story arc, We Are the Streets, reveals how "the Crew" (never actually called that, I think) originally came together.

from Black Panther & the Crew #1
(art by Butch Guice & Scott Hanna)

Coates and co-writer Yona Harvey borrow the structure of the original series, which is unfortunate, as I felt that the original series's structure was one of its flaws, with the group not coming together until the end of the arc. Of the first five issues here, each is narrated by a different member of the Crew in turn, focusing on their individual relationships with Ezra Keith, a black activist who recently died in police custody, leading to protests on the streets. This means we get a lot of meditations on the various characters' relationships with Ezra, but not a lot of them actually interacting with each other or, really, seemingly doing much of anything at all; it doesn't feel like there's enough going on in their investigations to justify spending six issues on it, even when it turns out that Hydra is behind gentrification in Harlem (an idea done much better in G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, as I recall). Coates and Harvey have a strong sense of voice and character, and I liked the art by Butch Guice and Scott Hanna a lot, but like A Nation under Our Feet, this rarely has a sense of forward momentum. The ending I found more of a fizzle than a climax: some things blow up, the story ends.

from Black Panther & the Crew #3
(art by Butch Guice & Scott Hanna)

Weirdly, while on the one hand the series doesn't seem to be doing enough to justify six issues, on the other hand, it seems to be trying to do more than its six issues can accommodate. Specifically, a series of flashbacks throughout most of the issues show that in the 1950s and '60s, Ezra founded an all-black superhero group with what he thought was assistance from Wakanda, but turned out to be a Hydra plot, and the group ejected him when they started using their violence for less principled reasons, but then he rejoined the group, but then he ended it. Introducing two new superhero teams is just too much for a six-issue series, and though I found some of this very intriguing, it was too rushed and too fragmentary to really work. The conflicts within the team have to happen very quickly and most off-panel, and ultimately I wasn't sure what Coates was actually trying to say about violent resistance through them.

So, as I have felt about all three stories I've read from the "Coates era" thus far, to me We Are the Streets had a lot of interesting ideas, certainly more than many other comics I have read, but also didn't know how to make those ideas work within the constraints of its format. I would have liked to have seen the Crew come together faster and do more, and to have seen the previous superhero team saved for some other story that could have done them justice.

We Are the Streets originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther & the Crew (June-Oct. 2017). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates (#1-6) & Yona Harvey (#2, 4, 6); penciled by Butch Guice (#1-6), w/ Mack Chater (#2-3, 5-6) & Stephen Thompson (#5); inked by Scott Hanna (#1-6), w/ Chater (#2-3, 5-6) & Thompson (#5); colored by Dan Brown (#1-6), w/ Paul Mounts (#5); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

The Pelican History of England #3: The Early Middle Ages (1066–1307)

The third volume of The Pelican History of England, Doris M. Stenton's English Society in the Early Middle Ages, was originally published in 1951. I have a 1974 printing of the 1965 fourth edition; I don't know if there were any subsequent editions, but judging by other Pelican Histories I've read so far, updates for later editions (the series went out of print in the 1990s) were probably minor at best.

The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307)
by Doris Mary Stenton

Fourth edition published: 1965
Originally published: 1951
Acquired: April 2013
Read: January 2025

The book covers English history from the Norman Conquest in 1066 up through the death of King Edward I in 1307; like the other Pelican Histories (I am finding), it focuses less on giving a chronological account of its era and more on giving a sketch of how society operated in the era in question. But while volume one covered nine centuries and volume two six, this one covers just three, meaning that you do get a more solid sense of the events of the period, even if they are mostly just sketched in. Additionally, the book has a timeline of key dates in the back, an innovation I found helpful whenever I got a bit lost in the chronology. Chapters here cover topics such as the king's household and government (this is where you get the sketch of the changes in kingship over the centuries); barons and knights; the organization of places such as forests, villages, towns, boroughs, and cities; the church; and the arts.

It's interesting to note how each author of the series has a different prism through which they explore the society of the period. While volume one emphasized (to its detriment, I think) locations and volume two economic power, Stenton mostly focuses on political power: the growth of Parliament, the expansion of the bureaucracy, the creation of limits on the king in the form of Magna Carta. There is a lot of emphasis here on who owed whom allegiance, and whose power was channeled through whom. It's a useful way to understand how England was operating as a state not just a nation.

Unfortunately, this is the longest of the Pelican Histories that I own (I don't have all eight yet as of this writing) and reason is that it sometimes goes into unnecessary detail. For example, that the King's Forests were highly regulated is interesting and a good example of the way the new Norman kings exerted political power... but Stenton provides more detail than a book with this audience and scope actually needs in order to make this point. Moments like this felt more like they belong in a more academic piece. (But Stenton's style is probably the most academic of the three volumes I've read so far, as its extensive end notes attest!) I found that especially as I got closer to the end, I was doing more skimming.

Still, it's reasonably accessible and provides a clear sketch of the time. I particularly found myself fascinated by the so-called "Angevin Empire" (I don't think Stenton herself uses this term) from 1154 to 1214, when the King of England also ruled other parts of Britain as well of chunks of France through various political positions, but without any kind of unified government... and indeed, the King of England was also a duke who owed homage to the King of France! Complicated and kind of fascinating, and now I'd like to read something diving into the Angevin Empire more specifically; each of these books I read makes me want to read another book.

Five Subsequent Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

The fourth in an intermittent series.

"The Commuter" by Philip K. Dick

"We don't have any service to Macon Heights." 

Over the last few years, I've been working my way through the short stories of Philip K. Dick. Many of them are justly praised, but this is probably my favorite of the three volumes I've read so far; originally published in 1953, the story is collected in volume two of the Gollancz Collected Short Stories. Above I've linked to it on a not-at-all dubious site.

Like Dick's best stories, it takes place in the real world with a sense of unreality creeping up on you. In this case, a guy who sells tickets to railway commuters has someone ask for a ticket to a suburb that doesn't exist... or does it? It's a simple story, I suppose, but effectively done, Dick doing what really only he could do.

"Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg

She turns to him and their eyes meet and he touches her and they make love in the fashion of the deads.

I read this as a potential story for my class on life extension in science fiction. It's about a future society where people who die get a second life—but they want nothing to do with those who they knew in their first life. The protagonist is a man who can't move on when the woman he loves dies and is reborn. Originally published in 1974, but unfortunately, there seems to be no online copy of it that I can fine, legal or even illegal. I read it by borrowing The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four from the library, but you can see on ISFDB that it's been anthologized a lot, including in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Four, which I do own, so I don't know why I didn't just read it there. I ended up not assigning it in my class; it's very good, but at seventy pages a bit too long compared to the amount the social issues we were interested in actually turned up.

Anyway, I really liked it. Silverberg is a writer I've read very little of but almost always enjoy when I do. This story is very creepy in its depiction of the ethos of the new dead, and it does that doubling thing I love so much in science fiction: it's both about a weird new society and it's about the world that we live in, the protagonist's inability to move on from his dead wife being a literalized metaphor for when we can't move on from a dead relationship... but man, it is a creepy and disturbing story on top of all that. Good stuff.

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason. Out there, kids had their arms ripped off while they were working in chicken processing plants, kids were left in baby boxes, and kids lived in perfect quiet misery with one parent who was an alcoholic and another parent who beat them. In Omelas, there were only good parents and no child suffered except the single one who did. How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won’t even help your own.

You've probably read Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the justly famous thought experiment. Courtesy of Clarkesworld, this is a gonzo over-the-top reaction to it, about people trying to solve the problem by just killing the kid. There have been a number of Omelas responses and riffs over the years, but this one surely has the most jokes. I nominated it for the 2025 Hugo Awards; based on the buzz, I'd wager it has a good chance of being on the ballot.

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

“Sophomore Jinx”: The second time the basketball team covered up a murder, the coach decided that he’d finally had enough.

I discovered this story when I was on my hermit-crab story kick last year; it was recommended to me on Reddit. The story is written in the form of a Law & Order SVU episode guide. It's very effective; I've never seen SVU and so at first the descriptions all came across as perfectly plausible summaries of episodes. But as you go on, they get increasingly weird and increasing creepy. Between the lines, a bizarre story of doubles and duplicates, of violence and crime, emerges. It will take you a while to read, and I don't recommend trying to plow though all twelve seasons in one sitting, but it's worth spending some time with it.

"If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt

And as terrifying as the Mississippi River was, Fern knows it’s the West that kills the most teams.

This story was originally published in Slate, as part of its "Future Tense Fiction" series; I of course read it in a Best Science Fiction of the Year volume from Neil Clarke (number 8, which I'm still working my way through). It's set in the future, after some kind of climate apocalypse. Infrastructure has largely collapsed and nature is taking back America's transportation networks. The three protagonists are a team of racers, competing to make the dangerous trip from East Coast to West and hopefully win themselves new lives in the process. Beautifully told, in terms of characters, prose, world, and theme. As is often the case, I found myself wishing I'd read it at the time it came out; I probably would have ranked it over anything on the year's Hugo Award for Best Short Story ballot (other than "Rabbit Test").

Black Panther: World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay, Alitha E. Martinez, Roberto Poggi, et al.

Not only did 2016 see the return of a Black Panther series after an absence of four years, 2017 saw an unprecedented development in the world of Black Panther: multiple simultaneous series. While there would be just one Black Panther ongoing, from 2017 to 2023 there would be a number of mini- and maxi-series that ran alongside the parent title: Long Live the King, Rise of the Black Panther, Wakanda and Wakanda Forever, Shuri, Killmonger, Agents of Wakanda, Black Panther Legends, even a revival of The Crew. The first of these would be World of Wakanda, a six-issue miniseries mostly focused on setting up characters and concepts from Ta-Nehisi Coates's ongoing. (And though Coates gets co-writing credit on just one short story that makes up one-third of one of the six issues, he always gets cover credit, and is credited as "consultant" on all of the other stories.)

from Black Panther: World of Wakanda #2

The first five issues contain a serializes story called Dawn of the Midnight Angels. Though this was released along side the second half of A Nation under Our Feet, it mostly takes place before it, with its last issue ending during issue #1. Its main characters are Ayo and Aneka, two members of the Dora Milaje who in Nation went rogue and participated in the democratic uprising in Wakanda. Dawn shows us how they met and fell in love, and what drove them to the point of rebelling against their king. 

I've been doing this Black Panther project in publication order, but for the first time I found myself wishing I had read something in chronological order instead. Not so much because I got Ayo and Aneka's backstory—indeed, I'm not quite sure you'd care about them if you hadn't read Nation—but because Dawn fills in a lot of the Wakandan backstory missing from Nation itself. Though it's all filtered from the perspective of the Dora Milaje, we see what T'Challa and Shuri and their country and Namor went through prior to Coates's series, bits of backstory he didn't totally spell out but evidently occurred during Jonathan Hickman's Avengers. It's stuff that would have been good to know!

Unfortunately, though, I didn't find Roxane Gay's story terribly interesting on its own terms. I liked the idea of learning about Ayo and Aneka's romance, but found the writing a bit thin; quite why Aneka doesn't want to be involved with Ayo isn't very clear at first, meaning it seems like she's holding back for no real reason except to prolong the story to five issues. I also found the villain, a rogue Dora Milaje named Folami, pretty ham-handedly written; it seems like she goes evil pretty much just because. The last couple issues, as we see the events of Black Panther volume 6 #1 from their perspective, are a bit stronger in some ways, but a bit too unsubtle in others.

There are two other short stories here. One, "The People for the People," is a brief prequel about Zenzi, one of the villains of A Nation under Our Feet. Maybe I missed this piece of information in Nation, but I didn't like the idea that she was Nigandan. It seems to me that the potential drama of a democratic revolution in Wakanda is undermined when one of the revolutionaries is an outsider (Zenzi) and the other obviously "evil" (Tetu).

from Black Panther: World of Wakanda #6

Lastly, there's "Death of the White Tiger"—I had not expected the return of Kasper Cole! Cole took over as Black Panther for the last dozen issues of Priest's run, and then was reinvented as the White Tiger for The Crew. If you've read any of those stories, you've read this one. Can you believe that over a dozen years later, Cole is still trying to get a promotion and pay raise so he can care for his girlfriend (who hates him) and baby? Yikes, dude, get your life together. The ending of the story promises a role for Cole elsewhere in the Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther universe... I can't say I am excited. (It is nice that they brought back Joe Bennett, original penciler of The Crew, though.)

Dawn of the Midnight Angels originally appeared in issues #1-5 of Black Panther: World of Wakanda (Jan.-May 2017). The story was written by Roxane Gay, with consultant Ta-Nehisi Coates, penciled by Alitha E. Martinez, inked by Roberto Poggi (#2-5) and Alitha E. Martinez (#1-2), colored by Rachelle Rosenberg, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.

"The People for the People" originally appeared in issue #1 of Black Panther: World of Wakanda (Jan. 2017). The story was written by Yona Harvey & Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrated by Afua Richardson, colored by Tamra Bonvillain, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss. 

"Death of the White Tiger" originally appeared in issue #6 of Black Panther: World of Wakanda (June 2017). The story was written by Rembert Browne, with consultant Ta-Nehisi Coates, penciled by Joe Bennett, inked by Roberto Poggi, colored by Rachelle Rosenberg, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Chris Robinson.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

The Blackhawk Novel by William Rotsler

In 1982, Blackhawk returned to comics after a six-year hiatus—but more on that in the next post in this series. Around the same time, though, Warner published the first-ever (and, of course, only) Blackhawk prose novel, which was written by William Rotsler. Rotsler had an extensive career as a pornographer, both behind and in front of the camera, and also was a Hugo-winning fan artist, but is best known to me as the author of a number of Star Trek tie-ins around the same time this book came out (most notably two short story collections tying into Star Trek II and III).

What kind of book this is is signaled by the paratext: the book has one page of ads for Superman products (including the two Elliot Maggin novels), but two pages of ads for men's adventure fiction, books with titles like S-COM: Stars and Swastikas and Ninja Master: Borderland of Hell and Boxer Unit—OSS: Operation Counter-Scorch. (My favorite is the blurb for The Hook, which tells you that he "crosses 1930's America and Europe in pursuit of perpetrators of insurance fraud"—nothing quite so exciting as insurance fraud!)

Blackhawk by William Rotsler

Published: 1982
Acquired: March 2024
Read: January 2025

Consequently, there's nothing deep here... but I guess you wouldn't be reading a Blackhawk novel if you wanted something deep! The first third of the novel is an expansion of the original appearance of Blackhawk in Military Comics #1 (see item #1 in the list below). The story, in the tradition of Golden Age comics, positively rocketed through its events, going from Blackhawk's family dying to the Blackhawks being an established fighting force is eleven pages. This story goes through some pains to expand all that out. We learn more about Blackhawk's family. We're told that though he's Polish, he spent some time living in America, explaining why in the comics his siblings live on a Polish farm but he's usually called an American. Rotsler side-steps the issue of Blackhawk's name; the narrator just calls him "the pilot" up until the point he adopts the identity of "Blackhawk" and thenceforth he's Blackhawk. No "Bart Hawk" here! 

Though we don't see Blackhawk recruit the other members of the squadron, we do get a detailed explanation of where the squadron's funding and equipment comes from; Blackhawk talks to a friend of the family who's an American banker who agrees to bankroll the Blackhawks and gives them access to a fog-shrouded island off the coast of Scotland. While in the comics, it usually seems like the Blackhawks do all their own maintenance somehow, Rotsler gives the island a live-in maintenance crew. We see how the Blackhawks hunt down Baron von Tepp, the man who killed Blackhawk's family. The nurse in Military Comics #1, who has no name and is fairly antagonistic to Blackhawk in the original comic (clearly going for a love-hate vibe), is here named Edwina Edwards and made into more of an actual love interest. (When the nurse returned in Military Comics #3, she was named "Ann," but there's no evidence in this book that Rotsler read any issue of Military Comics other than the first.) 

One big change (diverging both from the Military Comics run and later versions of the origin such as the one from issues #198 and 203 [see item #5 below]) is that Chop-Chop is a member of the Blackhawks from the beginning; Rotsler gives him a phonetic Chinese accent sometimes but otherwise he is treated as a serious member of the team.

I enjoyed all of this; it's pleasing the see the deeper realistic logic of prose fiction applied to comic books. It makes it all feel more real without losing the passion and energy that made the original comic work so effectively. To me, it seems like exactly the kind of thing you'd want a prose tie-in to a comic book do. Rotsler obviously knows his stuff when it comes to World War II; there are lots of references to specific equipment and specific battles and specific dates, the kinds of stuff the original comics left pretty vague.

The last two-thirds of the book give a series of standalone adventures for the Blackhawks, various escapades. This all culminates in one where the Blackhawks have to take down a giant bomber than can resupply in mid-air and is thus threatening to destroy London itself. It's all pretty fun stuff, though the female Nazi who gets sexually aroused by massive destruction is probably a bit too much even if it probably totally fits into the men's adventure vibe this book was clearly going for. (I guess this is where Rotsler's pornography background comes into it.)

The book chronicles September 1939 to June 1940, so there was a lot more of the war to cover, and Rotsler's afterword calls it "the first novel of the Blackhawk saga" but there never was a second. I think this is the time that it was first floated that Steven Spielberg was going to make a Blackhawk film, and I wonder if the novel was intended to cash in on the attention the film was bringing to the property, much as Warner did the two Maggin Superman novels when the first two films came out even though they weren't actually adaptations of the films. In any case, there never was a Spielberg film (even though the idea was floated again in the 2010s!) and nor was there a second novel, but I would gladly have read one.

One last thing: Rotsler names various Allied minor characters after creatives who were either directly involved with the Blackhawk comics or at least just worked at DC, such as Levitz and Cuidera and Crandall and so on. But what stuck out to me most was a German villain named Sternbach, surely a reference to Star Trek illustrator Rick Sternbach. Hopefully he appreciated the nod! (Given both Rotsler and Sternbach were Hugo-winning illustrators, it seems likely they moved in the same circles.)

This is the eighth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 and DC Comics Presents #69. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
   

Index to Posts: DC Comics Space Heroes

A thing I do a lot is work my way through some kind of collection of superhero comics in publication order. These days I am fairly methodical about it, and I chronicle the process in detail. Witness the final post in my Justice Society sequence, for example.

But in this blog's early days, I was much less consistent about writing up comics I read as single issues, and much less methodical about cross-linking them. So, even though I read a whole bunch of comics about DC Comics's "space heroes" (broadly defined as those characters from or in space who aren't Green Lanterns), I don't have any master reference list for them.

So here is my best effort to reconstruct one for the "space heroes" stories I chronicled on this blog:

1. Invasion! (1988)
2. L.E.G.I.O.N. (1989-94)
3. The Darkstars (1992-96) [reading order]
4. Adam Strange: The Man of Two Worlds (1990)
5. R.E.B.E.L.S. (1994-96)
6. Bob the Galactic Bum: The Piker (1995)
7. Weird Worlds vol. 2 (2011)
8. Adam Strange: Planet Heist (2004-05)
9. Omega Men vol. 2 (2005-06)
10. My Greatest Adventure vol. 2 (2011-12)
11. R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Coming of Starro (2009)
12. R.E.B.E.L.S.: Strange Companions (2009)
13. R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Son and the Stars (2010)
14. R.E.B.E.L.S.: Sons of Brainiac (2010)
15. R.E.B.E.L.S. #21-28 (2010-11)
16. IronWolf (1973-74)
17. DC Super-Stars of Space (1976)
18. Star Hunters (1977-78)
19. Starfire vol. 1 (1976-77)
20. Time Warp vol. 1 (1979-80)
21. Threshold: The Hunted (2013)
22. The Prehistory of the Omega Men (1981-83)
23. Spanner's Galaxy (1984-85)
    
24. The Omega Men: The End Is Here (2015-16)
    
25. Sun Devils (1984-85)
26. Twilight (1990-91)
27. Ironwolf: Fires of the Revolution (1992)
28. Hawkworld vol. 1 (1989)
29. Hawkworld vol. 2 (1990-93)
30. Hawkman vol. 3 #1-6 & 19 / Annuals #1-2 (1993-95)
31. Cosmic Odyssey (1988)
32. Green Lantern: Mosaic (1991)
33. Green Lantern: Mosaic (1992-93)

You'll see that I roughly work my way forward chronologically from Invasion! to R.E.B.E.L.S., with some other stuff thrown in, and then I circle back to IronWolf and work my way forward again, picking up all the stuff I'd missed the first time around until ending with Green Lantern: Mosaic.

But also of interest is the order I would have read everything in, had I read everything in order... and had I reviewed everything on this blog, which I didn't. It's a sequence that rivals my JSA one... perhaps someday, I will do it in order!

1. IronWolf (1973-74)
2. DC Super-Stars of Space (1976)
3. Starfire vol. 1 (1976-77)
4. Star Hunters (1977-78)
5. Time Warp vol. 1 (1979-80)
6. Green Lantern vs. Eclipso (1981)
7. The Prehistory of the Omega Men (1981-83)
8. Tales of the Green Lantern Corps (1983-85)
9. The Omega Men vol. 1 (1983-86)
10. Spanner's Galaxy (1984-85)
    
11. Sun Devils (1984-85)
12. DC Comics Presents #94 / Secret Origins Annual #1 / The Adventures of Superman #438 (1986-88)
13. Cosmic Odyssey (1988)
14. Invasion! (1988)
15. Blasters Special (1989)
16. Hawkworld vol. 1 (1989)
17. L.E.G.I.O.N. (1989-94)
18. Adam Strange: The Man of Two Worlds (1990)
19. Twilight (1990-91)
20. Hawkworld vol. 2 (1990-93)
21. Green Lantern: Mosaic (1991)
22. Ironwolf: Fires of the Revolution (1992)
23. Green Lantern: Mosaic (1992-93)
24. The Darkstars (1992-96) [reading order]
25. Hawkman vol. 3 #1-6 & 19 / Annuals #1-2 (1993-95)
26. R.E.B.E.L.S. (1994-96)
27. Bob the Galactic Bum: The Piker (1995)
28. Hardcore Station (1998)
29. Adam Strange: Planet Heist (2004-05)
30. Rann-Thanagar War (2005)
31. Omega Men vol. 2 (2005-06)
32. Mystery in Space with Captain Comet, Volume One (2006-07)
33. Mystery in Space with Captain Comet, Volume Two (1988-2007)
34. Countdown to Adventure (2007-08)
35. Rann-Thanagar Holy War, volume one (2008)
36. Rann-Thanagar Holy War, volume two (2008-09)
37. R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Coming of Starro (2009)
38. Strange Adventures vol. 3 (2009)
39. R.E.B.E.L.S.: Strange Companions (2009)
40. R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Son and the Stars (2010)
41. R.E.B.E.L.S.: Sons of Brainiac (2010)
42. R.E.B.E.L.S. #21-28 (2010-11)
43. Weird Worlds vol. 2 (2011)
44. My Greatest Adventure vol. 2 (2011-12)
45. Threshold: The Hunted (2013)
46. The Omega Men: The End Is Here (2015-16)
47. Adam Strange / Future Quest / From Beyond the Unknown Giant (2017-20)
48. Strange Adventures vol. 5 (2020-21)

Black Panther: A Nation under Our Feet by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, et al.

In my ongoing Black Panther readthrough (see link below), there have been a few gaps where there were no Black Panther comics being published: 1980-87 and 1992-97 are probably the two longest ones. There was another one from 2013 to 2015, the gap between The Most Dangerous Man Alive! and Black Panther volume 6. It's comparatively short, but on the other hand, it's the first time that a number of significant events have apparently transpired between Black Panther runs... they just happened to Black Panther in other comic books. Since we last saw T'Challa, he's become king of Wakanda again, his sister (queen of Wakanda on her last appearance) is dead, he and Storm have gotten divorced, and Wakanda has been invaded by both Namor and Thanos. It's quite a lot!

from Black Panther vol. 6 #5

The first twelve issues of volume 6 make up a single story arc, A Nation under Our Feet, which chronicles a populist uprising in Wakanda that causes T'Challa to grapple with the meaning of kingship as he also sets out on a quest to resurrect Shuri... who despite being dead is on her own quest. I'd actually read some of this before; the collection of the first four issues were a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2017. I ranked it sixth, finding it incomplete and impenetrable. Having now read the whole arc with the context of earlier Black Panther comics, I'm pretty baffled that issues #1-4 were collected on their own; the story hasn't even come to a stopping point, it just stops. At the time, I assumed what confused me was from earlier Black Panther comics, but that wasn't the case—annoyingly, it mostly happened in Avengers, I think. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates fills you in a little, but often not enough; in issue #12, for example, T'Challa apologizes to the way he deserted Shuri before she died, but because I didn't know he did that until the apology, the moment falls flat.

from Black Panther vol. 6 #1

Overall, I felt like this arc had some interesting ideas but Coates didn't know how to pace a comics story; at twelve issues, it feels like the whole thing goes in circles a bit too much. Again and again, T'Challa agonizes over what to do about this revolution; again and again, the two different rebel factions bicker; again and again, Shuri talks to someone in the afterlife. It rarely felt like anything was moving forward, like the state of play was changing. In a twelve-issue arc, I think you need to have clear moments of energy and upset, but this story didn't have that.

I did, however, very much enjoy issue #10, which is where I felt Coates finally nailed what he was going for—and the majority of the issue is a conversation between T'Challa and a political science professor! But in this conversation, I felt there was a lot more dynamism than in the story's endless series of action sequences that didn't actually move the story forward. The idea of T'Challa grappling with kingship finally pays off here, and though the idea of a T'Challa who'd rather be a hero than a king doesn't accord with how I see the character (I prefer Priest's take), it works well enough on its own terms.

from Black Panther vol. 6 #12

Unfortunately, the climax in #11 is a bit disappointing. After all the stuff about returning power to the people, moving away from a system of "one man" having a "nation under his feet"... the way T'Challa defeats the rebel army is by summoning spirits of all the previous Black Panthers? Why? I didn't see how it paid off anything from the previous issue or story as a whole. And I'm curious how the new government promised in #12 is different from the old one, but I guess that's an issue for stories going forward. I am also curious to see more of some of the supporting cast, such as the politics professor and the two rogue lesbian Dora Milajae.

Brian Stelfreeze is pretty good on art, but like a lot of superstar artists on high-profile runs, he draws fewer issues than the fill-in artists do!

A Nation under Our Feet originally appeared in issues #1-12 of Black Panther vol. 6 (June 2016–May 2017). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates; illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze (#1-4, 9, 12) and Chris Sprouse & Karl Story (#5-8, 10-12), with finishes by Goran Sudžuka (#11), Walden Wong (#8, 11), Roberto Poggi (#11), and Scott Hanna (#12); colored by Laura Martin (#1-12), with Matt Milla (#4, 11-12), Larry Molinar (#11), Rachelle Rosenberg (#11), and Paul Mounts (#11); lettered by Joe Sabino (#1-7, 9-12) and Clayton Cowles (#8); and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. XVII–XIX (Chs. 52-62)

I'm afraid my Dombey and Son project got away from me in February, both in the sense that I didn't get very much of it read, and it in the sense that I stopped writing up each installment immediately after reading it, so I can't do my usual thing of reacting to each installment on its own.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: February–March 2025

Perhaps it was my otherwise distracted state, perhaps it was the book, but I found that it more fizzled out than climaxed. The last three installments have depressingly little of Florence and her emotional states; once she (inevitably) gets engaged to Walter, she basically fades out as a focal character. There's even little of Dombey himself. He and Florence reconcile, I guess, but it felt to me like this was mostly something we heard about secondhand rather than experiences. There's some good stuff with Dombey's wife, at least, which was probably the highlight of these last three installments.

I am a woman... who from her childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and rejected, put up and appraised, until my very soul has sickened. I have not had an accomplishment or grace that might have been a resource to me, but it has been paraded and vended to enhance my value, as if the common crier had called it through the streets. My poor, proud friends, have looked on and approved; and every tie between us has been deadened in my breast. There is not one of them for whom I care, as I could care for a pet-dog. I stand alone in the world, remembering well what a hollow world it has been to me, and what a hollow part of it I have been myself. (823)

I never particularly enjoyed Mr Carker as a villain, and found the way he was eliminated kind of disappointing. Thinking about it, though, I'm not sure Dickens's villains have ever really worked for me, even the ones other people seem to be really into (e.g., Uriah Heep). 

Overall, I enjoyed the earlier installments of Dombey but it lost me the more it went on... but of course, if you've ever seen a modern streaming show, you'll know that's a thing that happens all the time in serialized fiction!

This is the final in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
4. Nos. XI–XII (chs. 32-38)
5. Nos. XIII–XIV (chs. 39-45)
6. Nos. XV–XVI (chs. 46-51)

My winter 2025/26 Dickens novel will be The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The Pelican History of England #2: The Anglo-Saxon Period (A.D. 449–1066)

The second volume of The Pelican History of England covers the early Middle Ages, from the time of the Roman withdrawal to the time of Norman Conquest. Originally published in 1952, the book went into a second edition in 1954. The copyright page of my 1991 printing notes it was revised several times after 1964, most recently in 1974; author Dorothy Whitelock died in 1982, but the book would not be superseded by a volume of The Penguin History of Britain covering the same period until 2010. I purposefully picked a 1991 printing because I figured it would match my 1995 printing of volume 1, but even though they have the same cover design, they're different sizes! My copies of all the ones I have so far (volumes 1-4 and 8) are mass market paperbacks, except for volume 1, which is a trade paperback. But my copies that are the same size also span several different decades and thus have different cover and spine designs. By the time I am done, I will have a very higgledgy-piggledy collection if this keeps up.

Anyway, like I. A. Richmond and Malcolm Todd in volume 1, Whitelock does not attempt to cram a narrative of over five hundred years into 243 pages; the book makes no claim of being historically comprehensive. There are lots of kings mentioned, but you won't get explanations of who became king when and why; we are told the Anglo-Saxons took over in 449 but not really why or how. Which makes sense—how can you go blow by blow when you'd have to cram over two years onto each page?

The Pelican History of England: 2. The Beginnings of English Society
by Dorothy Whitelock

Second edition published: 1954
Originally published: 1952
Acquired and read: January 2025

But unlike in volume 1, where I felt like I was getting a bunch of disparate facts about different places in Britain, Whitelock approaches the period by trying to provide you with a snapshot of various levels of English society and how they connected. So there are chapters about kings, lords, churls, slaves, and religious orders; there's also chapters about topics that explore the connections between these levels, such as taxation and finance, trade, and law.

The book has a real emphasis on economic power. If Whitelock has a thesis, I would say it's that the power of the king was exerted through money, but that the responsibility of the king was thus to regulate the economy. She gives a lot of data about the penalties for violating bonds and oaths and laws other obligations, which were almost always financial: lord to king, churl to lord, it was all about supplying economic power but also receiving economic power on your behalf. If you raised cows for a landowner, for example, you of course had to bring in as much profit as you could... but the landowner also provided you with a certain number of those cows per year, encouraging your best work.

Probably this is obvious to actual historians (I am but a literary critic, of course), but I had not actually really thought about kingship in this way before, more in terms of military might and protection. But as Whitelock tells it, anyway, the power and potential of kingship was largely economic, more as a regulator of trade than anything else.

The last few chapters flesh out other aspects of early English society—education, literature, and art—and to be honest, they felt a bit tacked on; I felt like Whitelock had more to say about Beowulf, for example, when using it earlier in the book to illuminate aspects of kingship than she did when discussing it as a literary work. But that's a small negative in what I found to otherwise be a successful book; I hope later volumes of the Pelican History are more like this one than the first.

As a small aside, I—as a person who was quite enthusiastic about all things Arthurian in my youth—was a bit surprised that the historical Arthur didn't even rate a passing mention. I mean, I know he wasn't actually a king of Britain, but surely he did something worth noting as an early warlord. But if he was mentioned, I missed it, and he's not listed in the index. I did a bit of research and learned that current thinking is that there probably wasn't any historical Arthur, not even as a random post-Roman warlord! A bit depressing, but there are some books I think I'll check out when I'm done with this project to learn more.

The New Blackhawk by George Evans, Steve Skeates, Ric Estrada, et al.

After eleven years at DC, Blackhawk was finally cancelled in 1968 with issue #243 (see item #6 in the list below); retooling the Blackhawks as superheroes had not worked, and nor did a short-lived back-to-basics approach in the title's last two issues.

But the Blackhawks were not dead. In 1976 not only was the concept revived, but so was the previous title. It's hard to imagine in this modern era, where every time someone sneezes, a series starts over with a new #1, but despite being gone eight years, DC chose to pick the series back up with issue #244 for a new run.

In some ways, this was back to basics; in others, it's an attempt to reposition the team for the 1970s. The actual content of the issues doesn't dwell too much on what happened while the Blackhawks were "gone," they just plunge you right into the new set-up. The Blackhawks (the core seven members all present and accounted for, though "Chop-Chop" is now "Chopper"; Lady Blackhawk does not appear and is not even mentioned) are mercenaries based out of Blackhawk Island. They'll come and save you... if you can pay their fee! Between adventures, though, they (mostly) don't live on the island, but inhabit a variety of alter egos. Blackhawk, Chopper, Chuck, and Stanislaus all work for Cunningham Aircraft, developing and testing new planes; Andre and Olaf reside in Europe (Olaf is a ski instructor who seems to hit on married women; if it's specified what Andre does, I don't remember). Henderson, friend- and family-less aside from the Blackhawks, is the one who stays on the island and maintains it between adventures.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #250

New allies and enemies are introduced, most prominently Duchess Ramona Fatale, a mercenary who the Blackhawks sometimes battle, sometimes work alongside. (She's nicknamed "Patch" because she has an eyepatch, though I'm not sure why someone who can go by "Duchess Fatale" needs a nickname!) She and Blackhawk have sexual tension, no doubt exacerbated by her tendency to undertake adventures in a bikini. (During her first appearance, this is because her base gets attacked while she's relaxing on the beach, so she has to flee with no other possessions; it's not clear to me why she continues to run around in just a bikini in later stories!) Henderson's daughter eventually turns up (I think this is the first-ever indication of such a character), mad at her father for abandoning her; the letter page in one of the later issues hints she may become a new Lady Blackhawk, but nothing along those lines ever happens in the stories themselves.

They do have new, very 1970s, uniforms, with plunging necklines. Disco Blackhawk!

A text page in issue #244 fills in some background and carries out some retcons, indicating that the Blackhawks emerged after World War II,* and that it was only rumored they battled aliens, and that they were superheroes is just fiction. It also indicates they've been missing since 1968 (and so must have only recently reemerged); the only indication this run is set in the DC universe comes from this page, which says the JLA issued a release of "No comment" when the Blackhawks vanished. "Bart," the name given for Blackhawk in #242, is used in this series, but the text page also says Chopper's real name is unknown even though he received one in #203 (see item #5). At first, there's not a lot of connections to old adventures, but the War Wheel reappears in issues #249-50, and Killer Shark in #250.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #249

I found that the stories themselves were fine, but the run started stronger and got weaker as it went. I very much enjoyed the first three issues, all written by Steve Skeates with George Evans on art (joined by Ric Estrada for #246). The first is strong opening story setting up the new status quo for the Blackhawks and a fun adventure alongside Duchess Fatale. The next two issues make a two-parter, about the Blackhawks battling the Anti-Man... who turns out to be "Boris," a member of the Blackhawks seen just once in Military Comics, before the line-up was standardized as the seven we know now. This is perhaps a bit silly, but other than that, it's another fun adventure, with mercenary action and good twists; I enjoy the way Skeates is always embedding a lot of flashbacks into his narratives. Evans and Estrada are strong artists, well-suited to the action-heavy style of these issues, but also capturing the appearances of the characters going way back.

David Anthony Kraft takes over with a two-parter after that, and this I did not enjoy; it felt like one of those stories that randomly and arbitrarily piles on twists, and has lots of mediocre fake-outs, where in one issue it seems like someone is dead... and in the next issue the resolution is just, "oops, no I'm not." I did appreciate the presence of James Sherman of future Legion of Super-Heroes fame as guest penciller on #248, though. Skeates returns with #249, but I felt like the series didn't have enough time to get back on track; I totally lost what the "Empire of Death" was actually trying to do in the end, and it was clear every issue had a totally different take on Henderson's daughter Elsa.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #250

The creators clearly had long-term plans that didn't pan out; incoming editor Jack C. Harris refers to Kraft, Estrada, and Evans as the ongoing creative team on the letter page in #248... even though Kraft would never write another issue! Issue #250 ends on what I suspect was originally scripted as a cliffhanger, with Chuck supposedly dead (and Chopper seriously injured), but the issue leans into its status as the last one, with a final panel caption of "AND NOW... OBLIVION!" and a vignette on the issue's text page about Chuck's funeral that indicates Blackhawk disbanded the team to they could "go their separate ways and lead the private lives that they have never known." It's surprisingly well written...

...and given that the Blackhawks never made another pre-Crisis appearance in the present day, it might even be true! All their future appearances were set during World War II, so there's nothing to contradict the idea that this was their final adventure and that Chuck was actually dead.

from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #167

The first of those WWII-set tales would be issue #167 of DC's Batman team-up title, The Brave and the Bold. Writer Marv Wolfman gave us the first wartime tale since the war ended (other than the "World War II Combat Diary" back-up tales featured in issues #196-227, see item #5 below). He was able to make this work as a Batman story by setting the story on Earth-Two and thus teaming the Blackhawks up with the Golden Age Batman—something that could never happened during the actual Golden Age, since at that time, Batman was a National Comics character and Blackhawk a Quality one. (This is also, I think, our first indication that there are Blackhawks on Earth-Two in the pre-Crisis DC cosmology; more on that in a future post.)

It's a fun enough story, though the Blackhawks and Batman actually have very little interaction. In Gotham, Bruce Wayne investigates a mysterious Nazi conspiracy, while on the front lines, the Blackhawks follow a different trail to the same ending. This culminates in a big battle in Gotham Harbor to destroy a Nazi doomsday weapon, where Batman joins the Blackhawks in a Bat-plane. I would have hoped for more interaction, and with eight main characters in seventeen pages, the story feels a bit cramped. But on the other hand, Dave Cockrum delivers on art—great, dramatic action.

But... cancellation at issue #250 doesn't mean there's no issue #251. Stay tuned!

The New Blackhawk originally appeared in issues #244-50 of Blackhawk vol. 1 (Feb. 1976–Feb. 1977). The stories were written by Steve Skeates (#244-46, 249-50†) and David Anthony Kraft (#247-48); pencilled by George Evans (#244-45), Ric Estrada (#246-47, 249-50), and James Sherman (#248); inked by George Evans (#244-46, 248-50), Al Milgrom (#247), and Frank Springer (#250); colored by Liz Berube (#247) and Carl Gafford (#248-50); lettered by Gaspar Saladino (#247-48); and edited by Gerry Conway (#244-48) and Jack C. Harris (#249-50).

"Ice Station Alpha!" originally appeared in issue #167 of The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 (Oct. 1980). The story was written by Marv Wolfman, illustrated by Dave Cockrum & Dan Adkins, lettered by Ben Oda, colored by Adrienne Roy, and edited by Paul Levitz.

This is the seventh post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Blackhawk by William Rotsler. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
   

* That the Blackhawks emerged postwar is confirmed by a flashback in #246, showing them having one of their early adventures on "an old W.W.II beach" during the Cold War.

† Issue #249 is credited to "Harold A. Harvey," but the Grand Comics Database indicates this is a one-off pseudonym for Skeates.