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.

Review: The Jack Kirby Omnibus, Starring Green Arrow

A couple Doctor Who: Short Trips reviews have been posted over at Unreality SF: Adric meets the fourth Doctor again in "The Ingenious Gentleman Adric of Alzarius" and Susan meets the eighth Doctor again in "All Hands on Deck."

Comic trade paperback, 304 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1946-59)
Acquired December 2016
Read January 2017

The Jack Kirby Omnibus, Volume One: Starring Green Arrow

Written by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, France E. Herron, Bill Finger, Dave Wood, Robert Bernstein

Pencilled by Jack Kirby
Inked by Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, George Roussos, Frank Giacoia

This volume collects everything Jack Kirby drew during his first two tenures freelancing for DC Comics (1941-49 and 1956-59) that doesn't fit into the other Jack Kirby omnibus volumes DC has released (e.g., The Sandman, The Newsboy Legion, The Boy Commandos); it's basically an assortment of random issues of Real Fact Comics, House of Secrets, House of Mystery, Tales of the Unexpected, My Greatest Adventure, and All-Star Western, plus Green Arrow features from Adventure Comics and World's Finest Comics.

This isn't Kirby at his best; most of the time he's writing to someone else's scripts, or at least someone else's demands. I mean he's still a great illustrator, and I love seeing his image of our supposed rocket-age future:

I just love the assured tone of this thing: "probably called 'rocketeers.'" Like, why? What leads you to think that will "probably" be the case, Jack and Joe? Also, where's my rocket tube to China?
from Real Fact Comics #1 (script & art by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby)

...but giving him a two-page feature in Real Fact Comics (don't worry, there are no real facts to be found) is a waste of his talents. The Sandman, from the same era, is a much better use of Kirby's abilities; there's little trace of his trademark dynamism here.

Kirby is good at drawing bizarre monsters, so the stories from 1950s "weird" titles are more suited to him, though they're still not great. There's an odd subset of these stories that present "rational" explanations for seemingly irrational events. But I'm actually found it more plausible that a criminal found a magic lantern during a jailbreak that the idea that an undercover cop planted it there and arranged to have the criminal's three wishes granted on command in a convoluted plot to discover the location of money the criminal had stolen. I guess "impossible" trumps "highly unlikely" in the probability stakes. This must have been a thing, though, because there are a lot of stories with these kinds of endings (I'm not really telepathic, the metal plate in my skull is just picking up your dictaphone from miles away; I'm not really immortal, I just wanted to obtain your money; I'm not really a yogi, I just wanted to sell my crystal ball to another fake yogi and so commissioned a women to pretend to be a Cleopatra waxwork and kiss you; and so on).

I feel like if Oliver Queen can get something like that to fly around in circles on command, there has to be a better application for it than trick arrows.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #251 (script & art by Jack Kirby)

This is actually the third time I've read the Green Arrow tales collected here, since DC previously reprinted them in both a thin volume of Kirby's Green Arrow work, and (in black and white) in Showcase Presents The Green Arrow. I have to say, they don't hold up to repeated rereading. Some I still didn't remember reading, though! And man, does Oliver Queen have a loose definition of "arrow" and an ability to make incredibly un-aerodyamic objects fly regardless.

"Straightened out." I think your manservant is having a little fun with you.
from Tales of the Unexpected vol. 1 #24 (writer unknown, art by Jack Kirby)

Still, there are times the King of Comics gets to strut his stuff: the cool visuals of "The Two-Dimensional Man" were probably my favorite thing in the whole book. Give Kirby something totally bizarre to draw, and he will always knock it out of the park.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Star City, Part XIX: Showcase Presents The Green Arrow, Volume One

Comic trade paperback, 527 pages
Published 2006 (contents: 1958-69)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2010

Showcase Presents The Green Arrow, Volume One

Writers: Dave Wood, France "Ed" Herron, Robert Bernstein, Jerry Coleman, Bob Haney, Gardner Fox, John Broome, Dick Wood, George Kashdan, Bill Finger, Jack Kirby
Artists: Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby, George Papp, Lee Elias, Mike Sekowsky, Bernard Sachs, George Roussos, Neal Adams

This volume collects every Green Arrow comic printed between 1958 and 1969 (including those in The Green Arrow) in black and white. Though a nice idea, such an undertaking quickly reveals that these old Silver Age comics were never designed to be reprinted, as they quickly grow stale and repetitive: there are some fifty-nine comics of 6-7 pages here, all of them ending with Green Arrow and Speedy being resoundingly smug. The writing is by a variety of folks, but Lee Elias provides the majority of the art, which is good, aside from the fact that I want to punch his "cherubic" Speedy in the face.

There's a weird number of stories about Native American tribes who still practice "the old ways"; I'm assuming this is because obviously all Indians practice archery, so our hero fits right in. What makes this even weirder is that in "The World's Worst Archer!" we learn that Speedy used to live with an old-ways Indian tribe... a fact never mentioned before or since, though it would have been relevant on any number of occasions. Later stories are a little bit more sensitive towards this, though "The Wrath of the Thunderbird" has a character unquestioningly assert that the reservation system has done nothing but good for Native Americans. Also weird is this volume's depiction of women in the person of the lovely Miss Arrowette, whose arrows are of course all feminine (the hairpin arrow, the powder-puff arrow, the lotion arrow, and so on), but can't cut it because crime-fighting's too dangerous for a woman. Right, Oliver-- I see that it's not too dangerous for your thirteen-year-old ward. She returns a couple times, though, and eventually gets a story where she's able to hold her own and help GA in solving a case, rather than hinder him.

The best stories are the ones that actually have some room to breathe, and thus include a plot-twist or two. Toward the end of his run, Green Arrow began receiving ten-page stories, the strongest of which was the nicely surreal "The Land of No Return". Even better, however, were his appearances in The Brave and the Bold alongside the Martian Manhunter and Batman. My favorite story was "The Senator's Been Shot!", which sees both Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne contemplating giving up their secret identities-- Oliver so he can use his financial wealth to do good, and Bruce so he can go into politics. They don't, of course, but it's nice to see the characters wrestling with any kind of moral quandary, and Neal Adams's fantastic art and layouts make what could have been a still-somewhat-conventional story fairly edgy in tone. Coming at the end of the book and the end of the Silver Age, the changes this story brought were a long time in coming.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Star City, Part XVIII: The Green Arrow

Perfect-bound comic, 71 pages
Published 2001 (contents: 1958-59)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2010

The Green Arrow

Writers: Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Dave Wood, Ed Herron, Robert Bernstein
Artists: Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby

This volume collects all the Green Arrow stories drawn by Jack Kirby before he went to Marvel and co-invented the Fantastic Four. It's just eleven six-page stories, not exactly a lot of a reading-- or very complicated reading. At that length, there's scarcely even room for plot complications. The writing of only one of the stories is officially credited to Kirby, but Kirby disciple Mark Evanier's introduction reveals that he usually rewrote the stories as he drew them. The most Kirby-esque one is the two-part "The Mystery of the Giant Arrows"/"Prisoners of Dimension Zero!", where Green Arrow (and sidekick Speedy) are plunged into another reality where everyone is a giant... including a very familiar crime-fighter called Xeen Arrow. Nothing here stands out very much, aside from GA's ridiculous original origin story, "The Green Arrow's First Case". Who keeps a diary on a cave wall?

Green Arrow has gotten flack ever since Quiver for the boxing glove arrow, but what reading this story revealed is that it is one of the least bizarre arrows in GA's arsenal. In these mere eleven stories, he deploys the heli-spotter arrow, the ricochet arrow, the mummy arrow, the boomerang arrow, the rain arrow, the cable arrow, the cocoon arrow, the jet arrow, the firecracker arrow, the balloon arrow, the parachute arrow, the rope arrow, the short-circuit arrow, the acetylene arrow, the aqua-lung arrow, the two-way radio arrow, the fountain-pen arrow, the dry-ice arrow, the flare arrow, the two-stage rocket arrow, the siren arrow, the tear-gas arrow, the smokescreen arrow, the machine-gun arrow, the fan arrow, the net arrow, the ink arrow, and the greatest of all, the fake-uranium arrow. And that's not even counting arrows from other sources, such as the charmingly stereotypical Green Arrows of other countries, or the people of 3000 A.D., who send GA hi-tech arrows. But you do have to admire the single-minded worldview of these stories: there's not any problem that can't be solved through the deployment of the appropriate arrow.