Number 1539: Blackhawk and the hatchets of Hongo

This is day two of our Week of Quality, today featuring Quality’s long-running and successful leatherboys, Blackhawk and his gang.

Sinister “orientals” who use hatchets for murder (shades of the lurid tales of Tong wars and hatchet killers from tabloids and pulps of the first half of the twentieth century!), and who extort honest silk dealers are the villains. But unlike the grotesque stereotype of Chop-Chop, the comedy relief of the Blackhawk team, these Asians are at least presented as looking human. Or at least more human than Chop-Chop (or the stereotyped Connie or Big Stoop from Terry and the Pirates.) The Chop-Chop caricature was later toned down, but when this story was published in Blackhawk #15 (1946), he was a clownish and freakish little fat man speaking pidgin English. My apologies to those among you who may be offended.

The Grand Comics Database credits Harry Harrison for the pencils, but doesn’t make a guess as to an inker.

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Number 1288: Island in the sky

I like the idea of a “sky island,” a platform hovering high over earth, like a space station, only inside Earth's atmosphere. Others did too, because the motif shows up in science fiction plots, including stories featuring characters as disparate as Mickey Mouse and Flash Gordon. Here the characters are the Blackhawks, and the villain with the sky island is the Corsair, who uses Zeppelins to support his flying city.

That idea I can accept, or at least suspend my disbelief for a moment; it's the idea that the Blackhawks, in their private aircraft, are delivering supplies to a country in Indo-China I can't accept. So where in those aircraft are they putting said supplies? Ah, those comic book plots...

Bill Woolfolk is given credit by the Grand Comics Database for the writing, and the art is credited to Harry Harrison, of all people. That is a surprise to me. I haven't seen enough penciling by Harrison to be able to tell, although as usual in Quality Comics, pencils can be often nearly buried under an inker’s style, and that artist isn't identified.

The subject of identifying comic book writers and artists gives me a chance to give a plug to a deserving blog. I've learned quite a bit about identifiers for several writers and artists from Martin O'Hearn in his Who Created the Comic Books?. Martin is certainly knowledgeable, and I recommend his entertaining and informative blog.

From Blackhawk #15 (1947):

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Number 1100


One thousand Pappy posts ago


In Pappy's #100, posted on February 27, 2007, I showed one of the printings of this story, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I scanned the Strange Suspense Stories version published by Charlton in '54, which was actually the third printing (by the third publisher) of the same strip in five years. Read my original comments at Pappy's #100 to see the unusual publishing history of this story.

The version here comes from Startling Terror Tales #10 in 1952. If you don't want to ruin your eyesight on my crappy 2007 scans, you can see much better scans of the Strange Suspense Stories version at The Horrors Of It All for part 1, and here for part 2.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is drawn by Wally Wood, and I believe it's inked by Wood collaborator Harry Harrison, who once bragged about how fast he could ink a page. This does have a hurried quality to it, but that could be because it was drawn originally for publisher Victor Fox, who was notorious for being late on payments, if he paid at all. Maybe Wood and Harrison didn't want to give it the full treatment because of that. The first few pages have more detail than the last pages, for instance. But despite that it has come down to us as a really interesting and vintage horror comics version of the classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The cover is by L. B. Cole.

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