(Military Comics 001, 1941) 

Aviation comics are, to me, one of the more boring of the sub-genres which makes it especially galling that they are filled with gimmicky pilots with special names and super planes and so forth who clearly meet all of my criteria for being counted as a super-hero or -villain.

But even if I let the boredom I felt at reading page after page of lovingly-detailed airplanes zooming around rule me and discounted all the pilot-heroes and air pirates from this blog out of hand, the Blackhawks would still have a place here. As the top gang of pilot-protagonists in comics, they appeared steadily from their first appearance in 1941 through to 1985 (and arguably through to 1990, with a three-year gap between ’85 and ’88), and for much of that time they were engaging in super-science showdowns with mega-criminals of every stripe. Heck, they’re still a DC Comics touchstone to this day, albeit usually just as the name of some shitty military unit or another and not anything fun.

The Blackhawks’ origin is really the origin of their leader and namesake Blackhawk, an otherwise-unnamed (at least, not for a few decades) pilot flying for the Polish during the Nazi invasion of that country. Forced down after his plane is shot to pieces, Blackhawk is targeted for destruction by Luftwaffe leader Captain von Tepp as he attempts to seek shelter in his family farm. Though Blackhawk himself is unharmed by von Tepp’s bombs, his brother and sister are killed and Blackhawk swears eternal vengeance.

Blackhawk’s search takes him two years but only one issue, and by the end of his first appearance he has engaged von Tepp in a one-on-one dogfight and emerged victorious (and please note the classic samurai-doesn’t-know-that-he-lost-the-duel death that von Tepp gets). No years-long hunt for vengeance for this hero, no sir.

But what of the Blackhawks, plural? There honestly isn’t very much of them in this origin story, I’m afraid. At least eight of them show up to help Blackhawk capture von Tepp but the only named Blackhawk member who we meet is Baker, a cheeky Cockney who makes a couple of Golden Age appearances but then disappears forever – he seems to be one of the few minor Blackhawks who isn’t even dredged up for the Howard Chaykin reboot in the 80s.

If this origin story is light on named Blackhawks then at least it introduces a few long-running bit, such as the group’s audio calling card “The Song of the Blackhawks.”

It also features the the first of several Blackhawk Islands, this one located in the Atlantic and featuring not only the customary camouflaged airfield but a lot of Naval facilities as well. Were the Blackhawks initially going to have a more comprehensive military presence?

UPDATE 1941