In the early decades of the 20th century, readers might easily have confused fighter pilots with what we have come to call “superheroes.”
Men who flew through the air, engaging in individual combat in the sky? Fantastic!
And in the case of World War I aces, true.
The connection between aviators and superheroes is long-standing, representing a weird cross-pollination of fantasy and reality. You’ll believe a man can fly, as the 1970s ads for Richard Donner’s Superman movie said. You sort of have to believe it, because they actually do.
Something new under the sun, the airplane, entered the war in 1914 as a means of observing enemy activity. The war’s first pilots sometimes fought by exchanging fire with their handguns and rifles and — in one case — by throwing an empty revolver into the spinning propeller of an enemy plane.
On April Fool’s Day of 1915, French pilot Roland Garros took off in an airplane armed with a machine gun that fired through its propeller and, on his first flight, shot down a German observation plane.
It’s not difficult to trace a popular cultural line between these celebrated flying champions and the arrival of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Superman a few years later. Some of the real pilots even acquired superhero names.
In 1927, the brave, boyishly handsome Charles Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic to land in Paris in 33 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds. Newspapers breathlessly dubbed Lindbergh “The Lone Eagle.”
Lindbergh was one of this new breed of idols who possessed powers and abilities far beyond anything that had gone before, heroes who could fly. Lindbergh himself wrote that “No man before me had commanded such freedom of movement over earth.”
Aviation was in the air, so to speak. “The airborne heroics of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, the endeavors of aviator-inventor Howard Hughes, the growth of commercial aviation, the popularity of stunt pilots and advances in aerial photography all fueled what seemed and insatiable appetite for movies about flying,” noted author Emily W. Leider.
“Well before Wings, the 1927 Best Picture choice, filmmakers and moviegoers carried on a love affair with aeronautic feats and the skilled and daring pilots accomplishing them.”
And when King Kong attacked New York, it would be heroic fighter pilots who brought him down.
Just imagine the possibilities! Pulp writers certainly would. With the Depression frightening the nation, pulp magazines offered the fantasy of freedom from poverty, despair and even gravity for those who could scrounge up a dime.
The single-character pulps began in April 1931 with Street and Smith’s The Shadow, and other publishers soon followed suit with their own hero pulps.
One of them was Henry Steeger, who married the Shadow concept to the mythos of the World War I ace and came up with a flying spy.
“Why not, Steeger reasoned, add a super hero of the air?” wrote magazine historian Don Hutchinson in his book The Great Pulp Heroes. “The publisher discussed the idea with top air writer Robert J. Hogan and they quickly restyled the mundane Battle Aces into G-8 and His Battle Aces.”
Hogan deftly combined three or four genres into an unique, appealing recipe — combat aviation, the mysterious master of disguise and the supernatural horror and science fictional elements pioneered in pulps like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories.
“Featured in 110 stories in just over a 10-year period, G-8 and His Battle Aces, while being essentially normal men doing exceptional things, came into conflict with terrors that no real soldier in World War I ever confronted,” noted the Radio Archives blog.
“G-8 was literally America’s Master Spy, a man without a given name through his entire pulp series. Obviously a skilled pilot, G-8 proved in every story to be as skilled in espionage as he was in aviation. A master of disguise, a skill he learned from his manservant appropriately named Battle, G-8 often undertook missions that took him deep into enemy territory, literally at times into the den of the beasts he fought.”
In October 1933, G-8 faced his first adversary, the appropriately Halloweenish Bat Staffel. The flying spy fought foes as outlandish as any that later heroes would face in comic books.
Hutchinson ticked off a few of them: “Flying dragons. Legions of defrosted Vikings. Death rays. Robot soldiers. Invisible monsters. Tiger-men. Zombies. Hordes of giant, man-carrying bats from the Mato Grosso. Nothing, simply nothing, was too fiendish or gruesome for the Kaiser’s mad scientists.”
Operating from an airdrome near Le Bourget just outside Paris, the sandy-haired, gray-eyed G-8 and his handful of Battle Aces took on several recurring super villains, battling the Fu Manchu-like Chu Lung eight times and fighting the Dr. Doom-like Stahlmaske nearly a dozen times.
And the flying spy went a record 27 rounds with Herr Doktor Kreuger.
“Introduced in the first chapter of the very first G-8 adventure, he immediately disclosed his modest plan to murder every man, woman and child from the Rhone to Paris by means of giant, poison-breathing bats,” Hutchinson noted. “Foiled in that initial endeavor, he returned the following month with a scheme to enlist captured Yank airmen, their faces turned to a ghastly purple, in leading savage suicide attacks against their own men.”
In 1966, G-8 made a single appearance in his own Gold Key comic book title with a script by Leo Dorfman, pencils by George Evans, a handsome painted cover and special features on “G-8’s Favorite Planes” and “G-8’s Disguises.” The story, about a giant bird-like Zeppelin dropping self-propelled bombs on American forces, actually seems more restrained than the pulps.
Any number of aviator comic strip heroes and superheroes followed in G-8’s prop wash, among them Captain Midnight, Blackhawk, Steve Canyon, Buz Sawyer, Airboy, Jetboy, the Phantom Eagle, the Phantom Falcon, Rocketman, the Rocketeer, Skyman, Smilin’ Jack, Sky King and Sky Captain.
In fact, “aviator” ranked right up there with “journalist,” “wealthy playboy” and “scientist” as a preferred occupation for superheroes.
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