Comics I Sold: Blackhawk #244 - Introducing The Disco Era Blackhawks.

 Here is a comic I recently sold on ebay. I am pretty sure I bought it long after the fact, although I do remember seeing it on the stands.

When last we saw the Blackhawks they were - well, I dunno. Can't say I have read a lot of Blackhawk comics in my time except that Howard Chaykin series. The last time we saw them before this the Blackhawks were probably in crappy super-hero mode, a laughable last ditch attempt to make them relevant in the 1960's.

But now they're back! In swingin' seventies sporting disco-era chest-baring outfits and a swell cover by Joe Kubert. These disco uniforms are a lot better than their superhero costumes and some of their other 1960's uniforms. If Blackhawk would spring for some shirts they would be fine as heck.

The actual comic is written by Steve Skeates and drawn by one-time EC artist George Evans. This isn't his best work, and kind of swings between terrific and not-so-terrific in terms of quality. No inker is listed, which is probably for the better. In the 1970's a lot of DC's inkers were super heavy handed. While George Evans' art here isn't great it is certainly better than it would be if it were inked by an unsympathetic inker. It’s not hard for me to fault an EC guy for later artwork than isn’t up to the EC standards. By the 1970’s, not much comic art was.

From the indicia, we can see that this is Carmine Infantino era DC, or National Periodical Publications. N.P.P. is the sort of name you could give to your comics company if you were ashamed of publishing comics.

As for the story, we find the Blackhawks finishing a mission for a mysterious "Robinson" who talks to them over a two way TV installed in Blackhawk's jet. However, there's a missing piece to the puzzle - they recovered the plans for a MacGuffin, but not the MacGuffin itself. Mission accomplished, the Blackhawks jet off to their respective hideaways in their respective countries

Except for Hendrickson, who lives on Blackhawk Island. There, he is surprised by a redhead with an eyepatch wearing a bikini. Which I would be, too.

The redhead is Duchess Ramona Fatale, apparently a sometimes friend and sometimes foe of the Blackhawks. She needs their help.

The big bad in this issue is Anton Vibrax, who has a super vibrating hand. I guess name dictates destiny in this case. He can straight up murder people with it. No word as to whether the ladies like this super feat or not. Except Duchess Fatale who is definitely not impressed.

In these issues, the former embarrassing Asian stereotype Chop-Chop is now called Chopper and he is the best pilot in the group whose name is not Blackhawk. He also does not speak in any sort of racist dialect this time around.

Duchess Fatale wins my admiration for her bravery in walking into a firefight wearing nothing but a bikini and a jacket.

Oh, and an eyepatch.

Poor Anton Vibrax gets vibrated to death! Which is kind of ironic?

And it turns out there's MacGuffin relating to the very beginning of the story, with Blackhawk leaving Lady Fatale high and dry.

It's an OK start to a new Blackhawk series. None of the characters save Blackhawk or Lady Fatale get a lot of page time, but it sets up the series for new readers pleasantly enough with the Blackhawks living around the world and coming together in their jets whenever they are needed.

Not sure where, say, Andre parks his jet in Paris but I am sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

As a kid who read the hell out of the Steranko books the Blackhawks should have been manna from heaven for me. Not sure why I skipped it the first time around, except I probably didn;t have twenty seven cents (cover price + sales tax) with me when I needed it.

Speaking of manna from heaven for kids who read the hell out of the Steranko books, here is an ad for this comic and for the return of All-Star Comics featuring the Justice Society. I bought the hell out of that comic, and the next issue. Then I don’t think I ever saw one again on the newsstands. The struggle was real in the 1970’s kids.

Whither Larger Comics?

 Why did American comics always go with the cheapest possible package? Why did they devolve from 64 page anthologies to 32 pages including ads?

I guess the long term answer is ‘sales’ and 'costs'. Cheap funnybooks probably sell better than more expensive ones. The main audience for comics was traditionally kids. Kids generally do not have access to a lot of money. More expensive comics might have meant more profit per unit, but fewer units in sales. 

There were occasional thicker comics in the 1940’s, but given that comics started out at 64 pages (and then shrank) there were not a lot of them.

EC comics managed to put together a larger (both in size and in page count) comic by transitioning Mad to a black and white magazine. Warren’s magazines followed a similar format. Later on Marvel ran with magazine sized comics for around ten years. Magazine sized comics never really stuck in the US, except for Mad.

Some of the upstart publishers in the 1960’s went with a larger (more pages) comic for a quarter instead of the then-standard 12 cent comic. Tower Publications did this with T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and I know there were others. If I keep blogging maybe I can document some of them.

Marvel and DC both went to 48 pages (advertised as 52 pages because covers and because business people are deceptive) for a quarter in the early 1970’s. Marvel stuck out the format for maybe a month. DC stuck with it longer and Marvel at 20 cents finally overtook DC in sales for pretty much all eternity.

In the 70’s both DC and Marvel did various oversized things. Marvel had some Warren style magazines, Treasury Editions and Giant-Size squarebound comics which included the wonderfully named Giant Size Man-Thing.

DC had various treasury sized comics, pretty much skipped the Warren style magazines and had various Giant sized comics in the 1970’s. My favorite were the 100 Page Super-Spectaculars, which were awesome comics with generally a regular comics worth of new stuff and tons of reprints. As a kid who obsessed over Steranko’s History of Comics those reprints were a godsend.

On the other hand, those 100 pages were really 96 pages + covers. Business people, as I have mentioned before, are deceptive. 

DC premiered their Dollar Comics in the late 1970’s. At the time, proper newsstand magazines like Time or Newsweek sold for around a buck or around 3 times the cost of a regular comic. The Dollar Comics had a lot more pages than a regular comic, 80 at first although this shrank to about 48 over time as inflation took its toll. This was a pretty cool package.

Alas, it was a package doomed to fail. A $1 price point meant that the package would get slimmer and slimmer as time went on. And the reliance on anthologies in the Dollar Comics format made them unpopular in the direct market.

Too bad, it was a cool experiment, and something we will see a few more times at different price points over the next couple of decades.

And, it turns out, the best way to package comics in a thicker and more profitable package in the good ol’ graphic novel. But that’s getting ahead of the game.