The NEW Blackhawk Era!: From Junk-Heap Heroes to the Return of the Black Knights (#228–43)

To a certain type of comics fan, the story of "The New Blackhawk Era" is a familiar one. The Blackhawks were in continual publication from 1941 to 1967; despite having been designed as World War II heroes, they had survived the end of the war and even a change of publishers, going from Quality Comics to DC, and moving on from battling dictators, to battling criminals, and later aliens, and later nascent supervillains. But as the 1960s continued, the Silver Age of comics was in full swing, and a group of war characters was out-of-date. There was one attempt to rejig the Blackhawk concept with 1964's issue #196 (see item #5 in the list below), but it didn't last.

Still, clearly something needed to be done. I don't actually have any behind-the-scenes insight here, but a comic doesn't undergo a creative change like this one if everything is working fine. In the three-part The Junk-Heap Heroes! storyline (issues #228-30, written by Bob Haney, art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera), the Blackhawks go an a mission where things go horribly wrong—and suddenly the President of the United States has called in the Justice League to evaluate the Blackhawks.* Their assessment?

In the words of Batman, "They just don't swing!" (It was the 1960s. Try to imagine Kevin Conroy saying that.)

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #238
(script by Bob Haney,
art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

Over the course of the story, the Blackhawks are disbanded, they split up, they each come up with new "superhero" identities, and then they reform. The identities include such winners as Olaf getting a mechanical costume that lets him jump really far as "the Leaper," Andre displaying a previously unmentioned penchant for building machines and becoming "M'sieu Machine," Chop-Chop getting his hands encased in metal so he can be "Dr. Hands," and Chuck wearing pyjamas covered in ears because he is now "the Listener."

Okay, say that you buy the Blackhawks needed a makeover... but did they need this makeover? Surely not! Look at Hendrickson as "the Weapons Master"... is this guy supposed to look more cool? He looks dumb, surely they even thought so in the 1960s!

(That said, I did kind of like how Chop-Chop mixes "ancient Chinese wisdom" with "happening 1960s slang" in this iteration.)

One of the things that fascinates me about superhero comics, especially minor ones, the whole reason I undertake projects like my Justice Society one, like my Green Arrow one, is how they get reinvented over time, how the premise warps and mutates to accommodate what is popular. Superman and Batman can set the trend, but Green Arrow responds to it. The Blackhawks, it seems to me, are a particularly vulnerable case of this, as their original premise is so closely rooted to the context of World War II. Can you update the Blackhawks to be relevant to the 1960s without also losing what made them the Blackhawks to begin with?

Not if you do it this way, at least. Nothing of what made Blackhawk enjoyable in his original incarnation is to be found in the adventures of "Big Eye."

So far, so familiar; I'm not saying anything lots of comics critics haven't said before. Lots of comics fans know the story of "The New Blackhawk Era" and have judged it as a colossal mistake. And surely it was.

(There's a bit in issue #232 where Blackhawk asks, "Is this the New Blackhawk Era or a clown convention?" You're just tempting fate with a question like that!)

But... what about the stories?

I don't think I've ever read a review of this era that actually discusses the actual stories told about this version of the Blackhawks. Like, I've heard about the premise a million times, but that's just the first three issues. What about all the other ones?

The new Blackhawks work for G.E.O.R.G.E., the "Group for Extermination of Organizations of Revenge, Greed, and Evil"; they have a boss with a blank face (much like Mr. Cypher from the previous era) named Delta; they go on James Bond–style missions against S.P.E.C.T.R.E.-style global criminal organizations. For all the fact that they've been reinvented as superheroes visually, the actual stories owe a lot more to Cold War spy-fi. Gone are the airplanes, but now they are leaping into action in strange locales across the globe.

And do you know what else? They are actually kind of fun. Because, you know, they are written by Bob Haney, and Bob Haney is the kind of comics writer who lives the insanity. You say, "Bob Haney, the characters you have been treating as serious crimefighters are now goofy superheroes," and Bob Haney says, "Bring it." The stories crackle with energy and invention. Put aside how dumb the premise is—and I've never seen a commentary on this run do that—and they are actually kind of enoyable. The Junk-Heap Heroes! is full of energy, but I enjoyed even more the first full adventure of the new era, a three-part story running across issues #231-33 ("Target: Big-Eye"/"With These Rings I Thee Kill!"/"Too Late, the Leaper!"). I couldn't begin to explain to you why the Blackhawks are in space, but I loved the experience of reading it. On art, Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera prove they can pretty much do anything, responding well to the vim and vigor of Haney's scripts.

Well, anything except make the new costumes look good. Most comics creators struggle to come up with one good superhero design, and unfortunately, they had to think up seven.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #232
(script by Bob Haney, art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

That said, you can tell Haney was making his stories up as he went along, and he doesn't always get away with it. In "The Terrible Twins"/"A Coffin for Blackhawk" (#234-35), we lurch from complication to complication, and what began as a Cold War thriller ends with the Blackhawks learning that the circus owner was a G.E.O.R.G.E. agent all along, who can just solve all their problems for them... presumably because Bob was out of pages. "Melt, Mutant, Melt!" (#236) is similarly rushed, but I did really enjoy "The Magnificent 7 Assassins"/"The Walking Booby-Traps!" (#237-38), where the Blackhawks discover they may have caused the death of a fellow G.E.O.R.G.E. agent... only he's still alive? And... evil!? And... an android?!? Go for it, Bob Haney, why not. Again, it kind of fumbles the ending, but when the journey is such a pleasure, I don't really care.

(Also, Lady Blackhawk is accidentally restored from her Queen Killer Shark identity in #228... and the proceeds to stand around making tea for the remaining issues. Is this really my Zinda Blake? I'm not sure why they bothered.)

Alas, this is clearly the point where DC realizes the series can't be saved. With issue #237, it goes bi-monthly; with issue #240, the main stories drop from twenty-four pages to sixteen, with an eight-page reprint to pad it out. (#240 reprints 1957's "The Perils of Blackie, the Wonder Bird" from #111; #241 reprints 1961's "The Phantom Spy" from #160.) Issue #241 marks another important change; the editor begins apologizing. (GCD says Dick Giordano took over from George Kashdan with #242, but Giordano clearly did at least the lettercol for #241.) Sorry, they say, the new Blackhawks are stupid.

And then in #242 ("My Brother–My Enemy!"), the New Blackhawk Era is quite definitely ended. While the Blackhawks are on vacation, literally everyone in G.E.O.R.G.E. is killed. Since they left their new costumes at the G.E.O.R.G.E. base, the Blackhawks must readopt their OG WWII-era uniforms to fight the villain, who turns out to be Blackhawk's Nazi-brainwashed brother. The story is plotted by Marv Wolfman, but still scripted by Bob Haney! I tell you, the man can do anything, even completely reinvent the characters he just completely reinvented eighteen months prior, and casually dismiss the entire premise he'd spent fourteen previous issues building up.

This is the first story to tell us Blackhawk's real name, and unfortunately, it's "Bart Hawk," but other than that, I found it pretty solid, especially thanks to the stylish, dark artwork of Pat Boyette. Good use of the series's WWII roots, though I think the origin for Blackhawk doesn't fit what we learned in Military Comics #1 or Blackhawk #198.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #243
(script by Bob Haney, art by Pat Boyette)

I also enjoyed #243 ("Mission Incredible"), again by Haney and Boyette, a largely grounded spy thriller about the Blackhawks having to evacuate a little girl from the other side of the Iron Curtain. It seemed to me that the creative team was working out a space for Blackhawk in the spy-fi era... but even though the lettercol in issue #243 promises more would come, it never did. Blackhawk was finally cancelled after a run of eleven years and 136 issues at DC, not to mention its previous sixteen years at Quality.

But cancellation at issue #243 doesn't mean there's no issue #244. Stay tuned for next time!

This is the sixth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 and The Brave and the Bold #167. 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)

* This is the first explicit indication that the Blackhawk stories take place in the DC universe. In the pre-Crisis cosmology, this surely must be Earth-B.

New! Blackhawk (#196–227)

In my previous post in this series (see item #4 in the list below), I had originally planned to cover up through issue #200, since I had bought issues #151 through 200 in one batch. But when I read issue #196 (May 1964), it was obvious that something had changed in the world of Blackhawk, and that issues #196 through 200 belonged with the run that followed, which would go up through issue #227 (Dec. 1966). (Issue #228, as I'll cover in the next post in this series, is the infamous Junk-Heap Heroes story that saw the Blackhawks reformatted as superheroes.)

In its early DC years, in my opinion, Blackhawk had settled into a rut. Really generic, really tedious stories of the Blackhawks fighting criminals or aliens or alien criminals, stories that drew in absolutely no way on the unique attributes of the Blackhawks of the things that actually made them appealing to begin with. But to a degree, isn't this inevitable? That's the question I'm exploring in this series. Unlike, say, Superman, I don't think the premise of Blackhawk is terribly adaptable outside of its original setting. Moving the characters outside of World War II is perhaps innately doomed to failure. DC's attempts to tell Blackhawk stories from 1957 to 1964 didn't take advantage of the unique attributes of the premise, and the kinds of stories they were telling would almost certainly have been done better with a different group of characters.

Back into action like in the old days!
from Blackhawk vol. 1 #196
(script by Arnold Drake, art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

As soon as you read issue #196 ("A Firing Squad for Blackhawk!"), it's clear something has changed. The story has the Blackhawks recruited by the mysterious "Mr. Cipher" (his face is a blank) from the United Nations, who sends them on a mission to do the kind of things they actually are good at—the taking down of dictators! To me, this does a good job of threading the needle of what makes the Blackhawks fun and interesting while still keeping them in the present day. It's essentially the kind of thing they used to do before America joined in on the Second World War, go places where there was tyranny but there couldn't be official intervention. I really enjoyed the issue; though like all previous DC issues it's illustrated by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera, even the artwork feels fresh, probably because the script gives them something dynamic and exciting to draw for once.

Issue #197 isn't quite as good ("The War Between the Blackhawks"), but continues in the same line. Again, Mr. Cipher sends them on a mission, this time to stop a war between two neighboring countries in Southeast Asia; the Blackhawks split into two groups, each of which advises each side. There's some silly sci-fi stuff here (monsters or robots or robot monsters or monster robots), but it's used in the kind of plot that, once again, plays to Blackhawk's strengths as a premise. To go undercover on their mission, the Blackhawks need to don new uniforms, which at the story's end they decide to keep, red shirts with green pants. I wasn't very into them at first, but as I kept reading the run, I did come around on them, and I grew to like the fact that there were different uniforms for their wartime and postwar adventures. (More on that in a bit.)

Issue #198 does something new and different; it jumps back to the war. Obviously we got a Blackhawk origin of sorts in Military Comics #1 (see item #1 in the list below), and the text story in Blackhawk #50 gave us some more details (item #2), but "D-Day for the Blackhawks" is an issue-length story about how the Blackhawks were founded. It does not accord with the Military Comics run, though, depicting the Blackhawks as an official unit of the military, and not having them go into action until D-Day.*

All three issues are credited to writer Arnold Drake, but knowing what I do of the era, my guess is the changes are mostly down to editor Murray Boltinoff, who took over with issue #196 according to the Grand Comics Database... and unfortunately, #198 is his last issue. With #199 ("The Attack of the Mummy Insects," writer unknown), we're back to the same old crap as George Kashdan takes over as editor—though my guess is it might be an inventory story from the previous era.

The same is probably true of #200, though it's a landmark issue in some ways. "Queen Killer Shark" reads like a totally generic Blackhawk issue of the previous era, and I suspect it probably was, as it's written by Dave Wood, who was a prolific contributor in the previous era, but never penned another Blackhawk story again. Recurring Blackhawk nemesis Killer Shark uses poison or some shit to turn Lady Blackhawk into the evil Queen Killer Shark. To me, it reads like a totally normal one-off, except that at the end, she doesn't get turned back, and I wonder if the editor made a change to an existing script. By now, it's 1964, and the Silver Age of superheroes is underway at DC, with all kinds of recurring subplots—not the kind of things the Blackhawks usually went in for. So I think the editor (be it the outgoing Boltinoff or the incoming Kashdan) had the end of the story tweaked to bring it more in line with the kind of stuff contemporary superhero comics were doing.

There's one other format-busting issue here, "Operation White Dragon" in #203 (script by Bob Haney). Just as "D-Day for the Blackhawks" retold the origin of the Blackhawk team, this retells the origin of Chop-Chop. In the original Military Comics run, Chop-Chop is for some reason helping a nurse the Blackhawks meet in Nazi-occupied Europe and ends up following the team home; here, the Blackhawks meet Chop-Chop when they go to China to help liberate a town from the Japanese. Chop-Chop (real name: Liu Hang) is the nephew of a local lord that the Blackhawks are trying to convince to come over to the Allies. He turns out to be a secret badass working to undermine the occupying Japanese forces. It's a fun story, and a much better origin for Chop-Chop than what we originally got, though as far as I know it never really gets picked up on again. In general, Chop-Chop does much better in this run than in the previous, as he's more treated like a regular member of the team (he gets a uniform when everyone else switches) and not just an adjunct to Blackhawk.

Other than that, issues #201 through 227 settle into a pretty predictable pattern. There's always a main story of around sixteen pages. Though they go back to the goofiness and sci-fi trappings of the pre-Boltinoff Blackhawk, I enjoyed these more. There's fewer stupid stories about aliens, or about generic criminals, more about supervillains. They're more stylishly told, too. Sure, they're silly, but there's a good sense of fun, a feeling that the writers (still usually uncredited) are having a good time, as opposed to knocking out something before lunch. I particularly enjoyed "Five Fears for the Blackhawks" from #215 (writer unknown), which doesn't really make any sense, to be honest, but really leans into the 1960s happening vibe in a way I found totally delightful. Many of the stories of this era are by Bob Haney, and I suspect it was his work I enjoyed the most; I was less into Ed Herron, who unfortunately takes over as regular writer with #223. (This is when the series starts a short-lived habit of crediting writers and artists, so we actually know this for a fact.)

Chop-Chop... ace pilot!
from Blackhawk vol. 1 #212
(art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

It's unfortunate that Boltinoff and Drake left, because I liked their approach a lot more, and also they were clearly setting up some kind of ongoing plot about Mr. Cipher, who (to me, anyway) seemed fairly suspicious as bosses went. But he never appeared again after #197, nor was the fact that the Blackhawks worked for the UN ever relevant again. (In the forthcoming "New Blackhawk Era" they work for the U.S. government.) The stuff about Queen Killer Shark is an intermittent recurrent thing; they sometimes temporarily cure her but she always ends her issues evil again. At the end of her last appearance, "The Revenge of Queen Killer Shark" in #225 (script by Ed Herron), both her and Killer Shark are taken into custody. It's also worth pointing out a lot of stories end with the narrator wondering if a particular villain will come back... but they never do.

The other part of each issue is an eight-page backup. These backups usually alternate between two features. One is the "Blackhawk World War II Combat Diary," which will tell a quick lost story of what the Blackhawks got up to during World War II. These I enjoyed a lot. They're not all great (one involves aliens for some reason), but most are solid, quick stories of Nazi-fighting shenanigans. I particularly enjoyed "Chained Enemies!" (#200), where Blackhawk and a Nazi get tied up together but have to survive; "Chop-Chop's Suicide Mission" (#212), where Chop-Chop goes undercover with Japanese kamikaze pilots but ends up having to kamikaze himself against his own squadron; "Rescue Riley's Rangers!" (#218), where how people write the number 7 turns out to be vital to the war effort; and "The Mystery Prisoner of Stalag 13!" (#226), where the Blackhawks try to infiltrate a Nazi prison only to find out they've been anticipated. There are no collections of Blackhawk vol. 1 aside from the one Showcase Presents Blackhawk volume, and to be honest, I can't blame DC for that, but I think a good collection of this era's WWII adventures wouldn't go amiss.

Always love a prison infiltration story.
from Blackhawk vol. 1 #226
(art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

The other regular feature is the "Blackhawk Detatched Service Diary," which are short stories focusing on single members of the team. This is the usual stupid stuff for Blackhawks of the era with aliens and dimensions and whatnot, just focusing on one member at a time. There's no sense of real personality here, they're just silly stories that make you roll your eyes.

(The GCD attributes all of these back-ups from #200 to 227 to George Kashdan, on the basis of a comment he apparently made in a fanzine: "In The Comic Reader #27 (July 1964), George Kashdan is credited with writing the Blackhawk fillers. Info per Nick Caputo." It seems a bit weird to me to use a bit of data from July 1964 to attribute stories all the way up to December 1966! The writing is variable enough, in terms of quality and style, that it's hard for me to believe it's all one person's work.)

For those of us who track these things, there's still no real hint if these stories take place in the DC universe, except that when a bad guy in #227 dons a supervillain outfit, he comments that people are doing this more and more these days. There's no indication, however, of the full-on integration into the DC universe that's about to come. More on that in the next installment of this series...

I was excited when this era introduced a letter column, but in most issues, it's just taken up by fans writing in to buy/sell issues of Blackhawk with other fans. I did skim to see if I recognized any names, and indeed I did, in #227 there's a letter from Craig Russell of Wellsville, Ohio; this is the comics artist we now know as P. Craig Russell. He would have been fourteen.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #227

The same issue has a hilarious public service advertisement I've included on the right. What do you like less, alligators or Catholics?

("New! Blackhawk" is the branding used on issues #197 and 200-01; #198-99 have the slight variation "New Blackhawk." Of course, don't confuse this with subsequent branding iterations "The New Blackhawk Era" [#228-35] or "The New Blackhawk" [#244-45]! How many times can you be new?)

This is the fifth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers issues #228-43 of Blackhawk vol. 1. 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)
   

* This is of course the era of DC's multiple Earths. I'm sure lots of people have their own ideas, but mine is that the Military Comics stories are probably set on Earth-X (where DC put all the Quality characters) and the postwar stories up through the "Junkheap Heroes" era are Earth-B (where DC put all the goofy-ass shit that Bob Haney and Murray Boltinoff came up with). We'll see about later runs.