Written and Illustrated by Basil Wolverton
Introduction by Monte Wolverton
Published by Fantagraphics Books
Monte Wolverton’s introduction to the new Fantagraphics collection of Spacehawk compares his father’s strip from Target Comics to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon but to my mind he’s more like Fletcher Hanks’ Stardust the Super Wizard.
In fact, if one were to compare Wolverton’s art to any other comic book artist, Hanks might well be the best fit but in actuality, Wolverton had a style so unique that there was really no other comics artist like him, before or since!
Basil Wolverton is quite rightly best remembered for his humor art, a staple of early 1940s comics for several companies and later associated with MAD (despite the fact he actually did very little work for MAD).
He also famously created the contest-winning look for Al Capp’s Lena the Hyena in Li’l Abner.
The Spacehawk is known as the “Lone Wolf of the Void,” and “The Superhuman Enemy of Crime.” In the earliest stories, our seemingly all-powerful interstellar hero is all done up for the icy cold of outer space, with his comfy-looking green space sweater and his matching yellow mittens and space boots. He even wears what appears to be a lightweight knitted facemask at first.
Ironically, when Spacehawk does eventually remove his mask, at the request of a beautifully drawn young human woman, he’s handsome, too, almost pretty! Not at all what one might have expected from Basil Wolverton! Some of the panels clearly indicate that the artist was using photo reference at times so I wonder if he used models or photos for the human characters as well.
Other than his crazy humor strips like Powerhouse Pepper, science fiction was the perfect genre for Wolverton, as his bizarre style worked overtime on some of the most bizarre-looking aliens ever seen in comic books! One example is the vaguely p*nis-shaped aliens with their long thick necks growing out of their rounded hairy bodies. And let’s not even mention our hero’s phallic rocketship. Uh…yeah. As Dr. Wertham later wrote, “There are pictures within pictures for children who know how to look”
Along with aliens and rockets, you get all the usual accompaniments one finds in space opera—scantily clad space queens, robots, spacesuits, and death rays. About a third of the way through the book, though, Spacehawk leaves deep space for the planet Earth, where he spends most of the rest of his comics career fighting German and Japanese soldiers and warlords, all of whom are way tougher to defeat than the scaly aliens. The strip is actually retitled, Spacehawk, Defender of America.
To his credit, Wolverton, king of the ugly visages, manages to steer clearer when caricaturing and stereotyping the Japanese than many of his fellow comic book artists did. Exaggerated, yes, but not non-human.
In the Earth stories, he fights tanks, rockets, fifth columnists, spies, and black marketeers. Spacehawk even gets a recurring villain in Dr. Gore as well as a sometime sidekick, an old alien friend named Dork. There are still lots of cool machines, many of them flying machines, and not all of them belonging to the good guys. I don’t believe Wolverton gets enough credit for his drawings of machinery.
In fact, the reader can actually see and appreciate the artist becoming more confident in drawing pretty much everything as the strip continues on. Although often thought of by fans as merely a cult favorite, this book makes it clear that he was miles ahead of about 90% of the other Golden Age comics artists. At the same time, he was not just drawing his stories but writing and lettering them as well. I’d be willing to bet he was behind the coloring, too, as Spacehawk looks nothing like any other comic book hero of the WWII era.
I’ve been a fan of Basil Wolverton for 55 years now, and I’ve enjoyed the several recent collections of his humor work, but it’s Spacehawk, from Fantagraphics, that has given me a whole new respect for the artist’s “straight” comics.
Booksteve recommends.
