Tomahawk started out fighting redcoats and ended up battling frontier dinosaurs, frontier supermen, giant gorillas, Indians who flew giant eagles, Lilliputian Indians, volcano Indians, alien Indians — and invisible Indians.
“For me, Tomahawk was a weird blend of TV’s Combat and Daniel Boone,” Salvatore Marlow recalled. “The weird odd space monster was standard comic book fodder. You only have to look over the spinning rack. Two Gun Kid and/or Batman battled the occasional alien too. Why not have the frontier man meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Frankenstein monster or the Invisible Man?”
In that, Tomahawk and his young friend Dan were really no different than Batman and Robin, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, the Sea Devils, the Challengers of the Unknown, or any of the other DC features that featured bizarre and absurd menaces month after month.
As a kid, I liked them all. Plausibility need not apply. A world of silly, colorful melodrama suited me just fine.
“The character was created by writer Joe Samachson (who also scripted the first J’onn J’onzz, Manhunter from Mars story) and artist Edmond Good (whose work also appeared at Quality and Fox) — but the man most closely associated with his development was Fred Ray, a cartoonist who was also a Revolutionary War buff,” noted comics historian Don Markstein.
“Tomahawk got his name from the fact that he was raised by Indians, thus absorbing their lore — a definite asset in the forest-based guerilla warfare he carried on against the British — combined with the fact that his name was Tom Hawk.”
Tomahawk was therefore a direct descendent of one of the first American fictional heroes, James Fenimore Cooper’s Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, introduced in Cooper’s 1841 novel The Deerslayer.
A cross-cultural figure, this highly skilled and courageous “Hawkeye” was a son of white parents who grew up among Delaware Indians and was educated by Moravian Christians.
But unlike Hawkeye or even Batman, Tomahawk was born in 1947, into the age of the atomic bomb. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that science-fictional elements began to flavor the series.
For example, Tomahawk 62 (May-June 1959) offered Raids of the Invisible Braves with art by Bob Brown. The braves have access to an invisibility fluid created by a now-dead “paleface medicine man,” and Tomahawk and Dan take a bath in it to turn the tables on them.
The pulp superhero Doc Savage also ran into an invisible gang in The Spook Legion (April 1935), and similarly overcame them.
The Tomahawk feature began in Star Spangled Comics 69 (June 1947).
“The original stories were very well done and pretty accurate historically, given the constraints of comic book plots and story lengths. It survived the demise of Star Spangled Comics, which the Robin solo stories did not,” Jim Kosmicki recalled.
“Star Spangled was converted to a war book rather than an adventure/superhero book. Tomahawk was very popular — he fit in naturally with the (Davy Crockett) craze that happened later but was popular well before Disney’s series.
“More Fun was basically shifted whole into Adventure, Sensation was turned into a female-centered book, then a suspense book. All-American and Star Spangled were converted — All-American into a Western book first, then War, and Star Spangled as war from the initial conversion.
“Other than the big three characters, DC/National pretty much purged their hero books, even before the Comics Code appeared. Sales just weren’t there, although Roy Thomas has found some sales figures that he published in a recent Alter Ego issue that show that All-Star did NOT sell better as a Western than it did with the JSA in it.”
“Son of Tomahawk at the End of the Run was one of the strongest western series DC ever did, but it was too little, too late. Nobody was paying attention to DC’s new stuff by then, and they certainly weren’t paying attention to Tomahawk.
“Disney’s Swamp Fox limited series made me a student of the Revolutionary War,” wrote F-Michael Dunne. “So Tomahawk was a must-read for me as a youngster.”
“Following trends, the series underwent a few more disjointed transformations throughout the Silver Age (as did many DC publications) culminating with the western Son of Tomahawk books,” noted Tomahawk aficionado Vincent Mariani. “The Neal Adams and Joe Kubert covers were great and Frank Thorne did some interesting artwork on the book, but the original concept of Tomahawk and Dan Hunter as a frontier ‘Batman and Robin in buckskins!,’ contending in the wilderness with Revolutionary Era British troops, spies, renegades, and hostile Native American foes, was long gone.
“In addition to Batman and Robin, Green Arrow and Speedy, and Tomahawk and Dan Hunter, there was the bizarre ‘team’ of Congo Bill and Janu the Jungle Boy. Maybe Jimmy Olsen comics would loosely fit in with these series.”
“I preferred the earlier frontier stories, but surprisingly, even in the 1950s there were several sci-fi/monster tales,” Mariani observed. “Comics may have always been moving towards an inevitable and total dominance by a superheroic trend that was undetectable in the years of more diversity in publications.
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