Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I've long been fascinated by Blackhawk. About a squadron of unaffiliated pro-Allies fighter pilots, Blackhawk began as a feature in Quality's Military Comics in Aug. 1941. This very World War II–focused comic lasted through all of that title's run, surviving a name change and the end of the war, until what was now Modern Comics came to an end with issue #102 in Oct. 1950. In the meantime, though, it had picked up its own self-titled book, which ran for ninety-nine issues until Dec. 1956. At that point, DC acquired the title from Quality without skipping a beat, and under DC, it ran another 166 issues until Nov. 1984 (albeit with a couple hiatuses). It then got a few post-Crisis revivals (including a three-issue 1988 miniseries and a sixteen-issue 1989-90 ongoing), and even an eight-issue "New 52" run (2012-13). Plus some of the characters have made appearances elsewhere; Blackhawk himself appeared in a 1996-97 arc of Sandman Mystery Theatre, Lady Blackhawk in Guy Gardner and Birds of Prey, and both together in Batman Confidential. And on top of all that, there was a Blackhawk novel!

That's quite a history for a comic which, to be honest, doesn't strike me as having a very adaptable premise, and over the years the premise has had to be reinvented repeatedly. If your comic is all about stopping the Nazis from overunning Europe, what can its point be in 1950, or 1960, or 1970, or 1980, or 1990? How have our conceptions of the Second World War changed over time? That's what I want to find out, starting from its 1941 debut and going all the way through its last pre-Flashpoint incarnation in 1990. (Based on previous experience with writer Mike Costa, I have no desire to subject myself to the New 52 run.) That's fifty years of comics history!

It all begins here, with the seventeen stories collected in this DC Archive Edition. The archive editions feature high-quality hardcover reprints of Golden Age material, but there must not have been much of a demand for Blackhawk, because twenty-three years on, a second volume has yet to appear. Like many Golden Age comics, Military Comics was an anthology title, with a variety of features, in this case half were about the Army and half about the Navy. Blackhawk is the only one to have had any lasting permanence, and only the Blackhawk stories are represented here.

These seventeen issues give little characterization but lots of Blackhawks-on-Nazi and Blackhawks-on-Japanese action. The earliest issues take place in the European theatre, but as the series goes on, we get more stories that focus on Japan. Ususually the Blackhawks fly somewhere, get involved in some kind of Nazi plot, foil it, and move on. To be honest, I don't think dogfighting plays to the strengths of the comics medium; it comes across as a series of still images of airplanes. So, the plots often revolve around the Blackhawks infiltrating or extricating or committing acts of sabotage.

In the early stages, the make-up of the group is pretty vague, but soon it settles down into a set of regulars, each from a different European country: Blackhawk, Hendrikson, André, Stanislaus, Olaf, and Chuck. (Plus Chop-Chop, but more on him later.) I know Blackhawk himself is eventually named Janos Prohaska, but that's not in this book. Most of these characters get little in the way of distinctive dialogue; André is the vaguely smooth French one, Olaf is an oaf, and that's about it. I couldn't pick the other three out of a line-up.

The earliest issues, written by Will Eisner and illustrated by Chuck Cuidera, have them getting involved in different Nazi plots: Blackhawk hunts down the German baron who killed his family and spars with a nurse, they steal radium from Paris before the Nazis can use it to build a bomb, the meet up with the nurse again to help her defend a refugee column, they try to stop the Nazis from capturing a munitions ship in the Suez Canal, and so on. None of it's high art, with crude but powerful writing and art, but it's fun if often ridiculous. There's a bit where André realizes that they need an avalanche to stop some Nazis... and so he flings himself down a mountainside, killing himself in order to be the incitement of an avalanche!

Even without the credits, you can tell a new writer takes over with #5, because suddenly things get less war-focused and more fantastic. Weird-looking people called the Scavengers, killer germs, an island that suddenly appears in the middle of the Atlantic, a haunted castle, and so on... These stories are written by Dick French, and left me wondering how the title had run out of ideas so quickly! The haunted castle one is pretty stupid—the ghost turns out to be André wearing a suit of armor because he's embarrassed by his disfigurement—but at least it has strong art by Chuck Cuidera, with lots of cool layouts that really capture the vibe of the castle. The next story is even stupider, though, as the Blackhawks kidnap a Jewish plastic surgeon from a concentration camp to repair André's face but because he's mad with grief he makes a mistake, but this turns out to be that he looks exactly like the Nazi general who kidnapped the surgeon's daughter, so André replaces him! Like, lol, wut?

Thankfully Bill Woolfolk soon takes over as writer and Reed Crandall on art, and I found their vibe much closer to the first four issues', and more consistently enjoyable. Woolfolk also gives the other team members more to do, especially Olaf... though he also has more of a thing for phonetic accents. Blackhawk gets to face down Von Tepp's brother "the Butcher," though he also keeps meeting Asian women who have fallen in love with him and switch allegiance. Crandall is a good artist, but I do kind of miss how Cuidera drew Blackhawk's face!

Chop-Chop is a Chinese man who is sent by Blackhawk's Red Cross nurse flame in Military Comics #3 to ask for the Blackhawks' help; he fixes up a busted Nazi plane and manages to to fly it to Blackhawk Island all by himself. He's a weird character, in that visually, he's an offensive racist caricature, and also the white characters mostly don't respect him... but he's sometimes a buffoon and sometimes surprisingly competent, perpetually underestimated even by his own teammates. Also he can curse up a storm! I am not totally sure what the writers are going for with him other than "Chinese people are victims of imperial aggression yet also hilarious," but I guess I'll see what future creators make of him as I go on.

The Blackhawks: Next in sequence »

50