Number 2590: Super Blackhawks in the secret dimension

In the '60s I had disdain for the Blackhawks. Jack Schiff, editor, had changed the characters into one of those teams challenged by some science fiction creatures. Going back over a batch of coverless and poor condition comics I got years ago for a couple of dollars, including early '60s issues of Blackhawk, I have a different attitude. The stories are wild and oftentimes just silly, but nowadays, with my brain burned out by what seems like a million comic books that are wild and silly, I have at least decided to recognize Schiff by giving him something of a pat on the back. (Schiff is deceased, so it's symbolic at best.)

In this story four of the Blackhawks end up in the “Secret Dimension,” but I must’ve missed the reason it is secret. Those Blackhawks are given super powers. The Blackhawk crew  would later get themselves some super powers, but this story came out a few years before that happened.

Story by Dave Wood, art by the team of Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera. From Blackhawk #186 (1963):

 

Number 2547: “There's a Starman, waiting in the sky...”

 

The impetus for showing this Starman story is the David Bowie son, "Starman," which is now an earworm due to a television commercial. I am hoping posting this will make the earworm go away. The story, which is the last Starman story, is from Adventure Comics #102 (1946). Superheroes were being cancelled after the war, because many of them were out of favor with readers. Oh well...Starman was a filler feature anyway. 

Art is credited to Emil Gershwin.

Number 1994: Tomahawk in flight

In the early years of his comic book appearances, Tomahawk, the frontiersman, and his young pal, Dan, traveled early America, heading off trouble with Indians and scheming white men. At least two of the three stories from Tomahawk #4 (1951) fit that description. But Tomahawk is a DC comic, and DC comics had to have a gimmick on the cover to lure readers. So the cover shows Tomahawk in flight, using a pair of wings designed by none other than Leonardo Da Vinci.

In later times Tomahawk went on to wilder and wackier adventures, including one with a giant gorilla (see link below). But the strip itself started off as a kind of Lone Ranger and Tonto or Batman and Robin adventure series set in the frontier of colonial America. Any resemblance to anything truly historic is immediately quashed by “The Flying Frontiersman.” I won’t even go into why this contraption strapped to Tomahawk would not work, because it is in a comic book, and in comic books stuff like that worked.

Nothing wrong with fantasy, but they should have labeled it as such. Maybe Tomahawk could have stumbled across a patch of mushrooms he mixed into a salad, and hallucinated the whole thing. But no, not in this comic book. Even for such straightforward 1951 balderdash, editor Jack Schiff, with his assistants Murray Boltinoff and George Kashdan, got even wilder and more off the wall as the decades advanced.

There is no guesses in the Grand Comics Database as to who wrote the story, but the art is credited to Bruno Premiani.

One of my favorite over-the-top Tomahawk tales. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 1476: Interplanetary Robinson Crusoe

Writers and aspiring writers, take note if you have problems finding plots for your stories. Just steal. Or if you prefer, call it “homage.” Like this shorty from My Greatest Adventure #24 (1958), written by a fan of author Daniel Defore. It saved a lot of trouble by just taking some incidents from Defoe’s work and transplanting them to a science fiction adventure. Not only that, but it created instant reader identification because Robinson Crusoe is a work so well known it’s practically imprinted on our brains at birth.

I like the artwork by comic book journeyman Jim Mooney, and I got a kick out of the hero finding raw diamonds that look like cut stones lying on the ground. It may have had something to do with editor Jack Schiff telling Mooney to make it obvious to their young readers that the stone were actually diamonds, because the kids might not recognize them as such in their uncut form.