I’ve got four posts to write about items associated with #WarComicsMonth, which I finished reading and watching yesterday, and I want to start with what I was looking forward to the most this year, which was reading my way through the 1989 Blackhawk series that was written by Martin Pasko and Doug Moench (who wrote the last few issues) and picked up the threads that had started with Howard Chaykin’s prestige format series a year or so before.

Blackhawk was a comic that I had very little familarity with. I knew of the characters because I’d seen their mention in The History of the DC Universe among with other comics, but I’d only read an issue or two of the pre-Crisis series before I fished Chaykin’s book out of a quarter bin a few years ago. To me, the book seemed to be a lot like a number of war-oriented comics that began in the 1940s: lots of action and solid storytelling but with a number of cringe-worthy racial stereotypes, especially of East Asian people (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, etc.). I say that not to condemn the book or its creators or to be self-righteous. When I read such books, I understand the context in which they were written; I just try to avoid them in the first place.

But what of the post-Crisis series? Well, Chaykin’s book was phenomenal and I’d picked up an issue of this series as well as the annual earlier this year at my LCS’s spring tent sale; then, I saw the entire series on sale for about $30 at the Baltimore Comic-Con (less the annual for some reason, as I later found out, but I already owned that). I plunked down the cash and saved it until November.

Now I will say that I am still missing some of the overall post-Crisis Blackhawk story. I’ve been collecting every issue of Action Comics Weekly, but there are a number of holes I have to fill in that particular run, so I haven’t read that particular chapter; there’s also a Blackhawk special from 1992 writen by John Ostrander that I don’t have as well. But I didn’t want to let that prevent me from reading the series, so I took it out and stacked it up to read over what wound up being about a week.

It’s sad that this only lasted sixteen issues, because it’s outstanding. Like I said, it picks up from Chaykin’s series, which means that it’s not taking place in World War II but instead during the early days of the Cold War and the team is drawn into espionage missions by what eventually becomes the CIA. One of the major storylines that takes place over the course of the book’s first year centers around former Nazis infiltrating parts of the U.S. intelligence community and the identity-switching experiments conducted by a Dr. Mengele-type German scientist. The entirety of the series takes place between 1945 and 1951, so the Korean War has yet to start and we’re getting those early U.S./U.S.S.R. struggles.

Pasko was a writer whose work I had passing familiarity with his work through Superman and Marvel’s Star Trek series as well as a handful of comics I’d picked up over the years. My opinion was that his stories were always solid, so I had good hopes for this. It’s tightly written and he does a great job of handling a large cast as well as giving us a good story with every issue while also progressing a larger story for the title. While comics writers have been doing this for decades, I could tell that Pasko had experience writing for television because this feels like a television series. That works in the best way possible. And to his credit, Doug Moench–whom I, of course, know from years of Batman comics–picks up the book with issue #12 and writes a great last storyline that flows seamlessly out of Pasko’s work.

The art, though, is the star of the book for me, because it makes what are already very good stories really exciting to read. I’d seen Rick Burchett’s artwork over a number of DC Comics throughout the years–mostly Batman Adventures in the 1990s–and I always liked that it looked like it belonged in a comic book. That’s a dumb thing to say considering that he’s a comic book artist, but he always reminded me of Mike Parobeck and Mike Wiringo (two artists who were gone too soon, btw) who knew the mood and tone of their books but also kept their art fun to look at in an era of Image impersonators. Seriously, I don’t know if I would have been able to get through this book if it had looked like something out of the 1993 Bloodlines crossover. Burchett can do action, he can make each character look distinct, and he can do sexy without having to resort to wild proportions on the famale body. That elevates this book.

Unfortunately, it elevates the book to “hidden gem” status because it only lasted a year and a half and its final issue came out the same month as Spider-Man #1, Gambit’s first appearance in Uncanny X-Men, and in the middle of Rob Liefeld’s run on New Mutants (incidentally, this was also the month I started collecting comics with Detective Comics #618 and the first issues of Aliens vs. Predator and Aliens: Earth War). Those were the books that set the tone for at least the next few years of the comics industry, so a Cold War thriller drawn by someone with a slightly more comic/cartoony style that didn’t feature super-powered beings holding gargantuan guns, wielding big breasts, or wearing clothe entirely made of pouches was not going to sell (although I think the Blackhawks’ uniforms had pouches).

Anyway, I’m glad I found this all in one set and read it in one go. I still plan on tracking down the special as well as the Action Comics Weekly issues and I might do an entire reread to get the whole story one day.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep.