Part of my fascination with comic book house ads is seeing what was inside the titles I did not get to buy, but only caught intriguing glimpses of in advertisements.
For example, what was the Blackhawk team doing fighting a huge theropod dinosaur on the cover of Blackhawk 143 (Dec. 1959), and how would they manage it? They didn’t have superpowers, after all (except every now and then).
The answer to the dilemma in The Time-Monsters involved a steam shovel and a giant spool of telephone cable, as it turned out.
In the issue’s other two stories, we learned that Lady Blackhawk had a rival in Queen Penelope of the island Kingdom of Xenovia, and how Olaf and Hendrickson found themselves in a feud.
“As I got older and I read those older monster and alien issues, I now realize how far Blackhawk had strayed from his original roots,” recalled Paul Zuckerman. “My friend’s brother had collected Blackhawk in the early ’50s and in the mid-’60s. My friend sold me an issue or two for a buck each. What a revelation! The team were true cold war warriors, but it felt so much more organic to the character as freedom fighters. Every issue seemed to have another Eastern European country with a strange name with a threatened Communist takeover, and every issue the Blackhawks would thwart the Reds. DC quickly ejected those storylines from the book when it acquired the strip from Quality.”
Bruce Kanin observed, “I always enjoy reviewing the evolution of DC’s comic books in the ’40s-’60s, especially in that many followed the same path, i.e., solid tales revolving around their time period and nature of the heroes; gradual introduction of fantastic elements like big gorillas, dinosaurs and, er, blobs; aliens arrive; new costumes; Neal Adams arrives (heh); back to gritty, realistic stories before cancellation.
“That applies more or less to Blackhawk, Sea Devils, Challengers Of The Unknown, Doom Patrol and Tomahawk — perhaps others.”
About Author
