Space Hero Saturdays SPACEHAWK "and the Creeping Death from Neptune"

How could you not want to read a story with a title like that?

Plus: story and art by the unique (to put it mildly) Basil Wolverton!

This premiere appearance from Novelty's Target Comics V1 N5 (1940), written and illustrated by Wolverton, was just the tip of the iceberg!
SpaceHawk "unmasked" a couple of issues later, but the legend was already well-established, and the fact he was a "mere" human who could take down aliens several times his size and strength only made him even more fearsome to his foes...

BTW, you may have noticed a change in our sub-head to "Space Hero" rather than "Space Force".
That's because we're switching over to the lone wolves of the spaceways as they battle against those who would dominate or destroy the universe!
Since the response to Basil Wolverton's Space Patrol strips has been...dare we say...stellar, we decided his best-known strip, SpaceHawk will be the "anchor" strip every two weeks, with other characters popping up for limited runs!
Who are the "other characters"?
Be here next week to find out the first one!

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Reading Room: SPACEHAWK "Moon Justice"

Basil Wolverton really enjoyed doing SpaceHawk...

...and even took a crack at writing a short text story starring the character, as seen in this tale from Target Comics #15 (1941)

The same issue this prose piece appeared, the SpaceHawk strip's format was changed in a direction Wolverton was not happy about; moving the hero from outer space to Earth to use his advanced technology to battle threats from thinly-disguised surrogates of the Axis powers.

(This was pre-Pearl Harbor, and we weren't at war at the time, so the stories were still set in the future!)

Once America entered the war, SpaceHawk was actually transported thru time to the "present day" (1942) to fight the real Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, and their minions.

So you might consider this text story to be Wolverton's last try to convince the editor to keep the strip in deep space.

It didn't work.

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Reading Room SPACEHAWK "Pirates of Uranus" in 3-D!

Get those 3-D glasses out kiddies (red lens on the left, blue lens on the right)...

...as we look in on one more version of what many believe to be the prototypical SpaceHawk tale...

Ray Zone did a magnificent job converting Wolverton's art to 3-D in 3-D Zone #18 (1989).

We hope you enjoyed this Halloween treat, and follow us for the rest of the week as we present more goodies during this most sacred of holidays.

Reading Room SPACEHAWK "Pirates of Uranus"

If there was ever a space adventurer who experienced Halloween ever day of his career, it was...

...with aliens and monsters that even today's special effects would be hard-pressed to match!

If this story from Novelty's Target Comics #10 (1940) looks a little odd, there's a good reason for it.

Archival Press released a SpaceHawk trade paperback in 1978.

Though the book itself featured b/w line art interiors and a color cover, Archival made a deal with Marvel to provide Epic Illustrated a SpaceHawk story in color to accompany an article by Ron Goulart about Basil Wolvertont.

Unfortunately, Epic only gave them 8 pages, so the 10-page story had to be edited to fit the page count.

Be here Monday to see the original longer version of the story.

BTW, the hand-coloring, which was photographically-color separated (they didn't have scanners then), was done by Rick Veitch.
It has a wonderful "organic" feel computer coloring just can't match.

Basil Wolverton's SpaceHawk

Proving the adage that most "Golden Age" science fiction was just Westerns with ray guns instead of revolvers and spaceships instead of horses, the comic series SpaceHawk featured a lone gunslinger wandering the universe righting wrongs and defending the weak in areas where (ray) gun law ruled.

Though the stories were pedestrian rewrites of Old West potboilers, they were brought to dynamic life by legendary illustrator Basil Wolverton.
Best known for his work on MAD and PLOP, Wolverton had a truly unique art style especially-suited to science fiction / fantasy, not for his "heroic" characters (who were pretty standard), but the amazing monsters and alien environments he illustrated.

SpaceHawk never had his own title in the Golden Age, but inhabited the back pages of Target Comics from V1#7 thru V3#10, appearing on the cover only once during the entire run.
(Nonetheless, he consistently drew more mail than any other single strip in the book!)

We at Atomic Kommie Comics™ have included SpaceHawk in our Solo Heroes section of Lost Heroes of the Golden Age of Comics™ line, where characters with only one cover available hang out awaiting your shopping pleasure.
Stop by and visit SpaceHawk. He's the new kid on the block. Make him feel welcome! ;-)