Flight of the Airboy (Part 2)

Airboy took off into the stratosphere during the 1980s with a new pilot at the stick.

Airboy flew off into the ether after Hillman folded it’s comics division. Normally what would happen in that case was that DC comics would swoop in and buy up the now fallow IPs  like they did for Captain Marvel (but made a serious goof on the trademark, which was a separate issue). 

Regardless, Hillman had other publishing ventures and possibly had an eye toward getting back into comics one day. That day never came, and Hillman got out publishing entirely in 1961.  Today someone would have scooped up the copyrights on general principle but without any computers to keep track of things like that, Airboy and company were quietly left in a corporate attic to be mostly forgotten about. 

I suspect there was general disinterest by then anyway as the Silver Age of comics was well underway.  An old fly-boy title from the War Years was probably thought of as not being worth putting back into production. Particularly one with a great many supernatural elements that would never pass inspection with the Comic Book Code, to say nothing of a main heroine with her boobs hanging out.

Now there were plenty of people in the comics industry that loved the old Airboy comics like Jim Steranko. Swamp Thing and Man-Thing both appeared in 1971 and were obviously the Same Thing and that thing was The Heap. 

But, Airboy and friends remained in the attic until 1982, when Cat Yronwode was editing a reprint collection named Fred Kida’s Valkyrie! 

During her due diligence, she noted that the entire Airboy universe would slip into the Public Domain in four years unless the copyright was renewed.  Then, Cat surreptitiously slipped that note under her desk calendar and took it home that night.  

1986 began without the IP current owner being any the wiser, which meant Davy Nelson and company were now available for anyone to use.  Anyone meaning Eclipse Comics.

Now something to be remembered about Public Domain characters is this, if you use them as they are, so can anyone else.  However, derivative works based on Public Domain characters are a different matter altogether. 

Classic example: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The work was already in the Public Domain when MGM made the Wizard of Oz, so they didn’t have to pay Baum’s estate royalties. 

Darklings: Does that mean I can make my own Wizard of Oz story?  

Dark Herald: Sure, you can!

Darklings: With Ruby Slippers and everything.

Dark Herald: Oh, hell no! Amazon will sue the skin off your back if you even think of using the Ruby Slippers. You can’t use the songs either and the costumes are also protected. For that matter so is the Wicked Witch of the West’s green skin.  Those were all elements that MGM introduced, creating a legally distinct derivative work that could be (and definitely is) copyrighted.

Which is what had to happen to Airboy the moment Eclipse started publishing him. The story would take place in a contemporary setting (1986).  All of the Air Bros were in their twenties during 1940s, so just aging them up 40 years made them legally distinct from the original creations. A bigger problem was Davy and Valkyrie.  They both needed to be young and sexy if the title was going to sell to Gen X.

It turned out that Davy Nelson II had a son born about 1966, and was in deference to filial piety named Davy Nelson III. That took care of Davy but what to do about Valkyrie?  She was very likely to become an instant fan favorite with Generation X…

Good call!

… And would likely move a lot units based on her covers alone.  But how to introduce her?

One look alike with the same name was acceptable but two would have been ridiculous.  Besides Davy II and Valkyrie had been quite the item, was Davy III and Valkyrie Jr. supposed to be brother and sister? So much for romance in that case.

Luckily for Eclipse Comics they had assigned Tim Truman to be the editor, and he mentioned that The Air Fighters was about to takeoff again to Chuck Dixon who immediately freaked out over the idea.  He loved Airboy!  He had an extensive collection of Airboy comics both vintage and bootleg reprint.  In The Legends' own words he’d “Rather have written Airboy than Spider-Man”, he wasn’t even joking.  

Okay, that took care of the writer but what to do about Valkyrie?  Dixon was adamant, it to be the original Nazi aviatrix turned good guy and love interest. Her story just wasn’t interesting without her baggage and bringing her to the 1980s brought even more baggage to the party.  Suspended animation was decided on, but how to utilize it?  Found in a block of ice would get Eclipse sued by Marvel.  But there was an easy solution to that; Misery.  Airboy’s seriously weird revenant arch enemy had plenty of sorcerous powers to begin with.  His air tomb where he stored the souls of dead pilots had room for one more.  And a supernatural explanation lets you hand wave away any real world objections to suspended animation.  It’s magic dumbass, just accept it!

The setup was that Misery was using his magic to keep Valkyrie in suspended animation and used that to force the OG Airboy to do his bidding.  Mostly in terms of supplying arms to people American Lefties hated during the 1980s (put a pin in that one). Misery also used his magic to keep Davy the Second at arms length.  However, that spell did not apply to Davy the Third. When David Nelson II is murdered, his son, the new Airboy goes after those ultimately responsible for his father’s death.  Valkyrie was reintroduced in pretty short order putting her derivative under copyright protection.

Of all the characters in Chuck Dixon’s Airboy, Valkyrie is the most intriguing.  A woman born in Weimar Germany, who became a Nazi ace, then abandoned her country for a man she loved.  Then she awakens from a forty year slumber to find the world changed into something she can barely imagine.  Consider a twenty year old Reaganite, Generation X girl hurled from 1985, to 2025. Think about explaining to her how the world has become what it is now. She’s young enough to make some big cognitive adjustments but how does she wrap her head around the whole of it? 

Then there is the weirdness of the love of Valkyrie’s life being dead but his son is a carbon copy of him in every way possible. All good romance is built on conflict and that’s an intriguing one. Valkyrie can’t look at the new Airboy without seeing the man she loved and lost.

She needs him but is also repelled by him.  Davy’s problem is less complex but more distasteful, he’s got the screaming hots for his Dad’s old girlfriend. The woman who would have been his mother if things had been different. 

I don’t know whose idea it was to make Valkyrie an Eighties supermodel.  I’m not sure Chuck knows either.  He describes the production of Airboy as being in a constant blur.  It was a punishing production schedule of one issue every two weeks. But she needed to be doing something between missions, and being a supermodel gave her an excuse to be in a lot of good girl art.

Somewhere along the line, Tim Truman was replaced as Chuck’s editor by Cat Yronwode. Chuck was a Reagan voter and Cat was a hardcore Sixties radical who still practises witchcraft on the side.  Today it would be impossible for people like that to work together but back then it was not only doable but the friction between the two created views of Latin American revolutionaries, the drug war, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan that were often oblique rather than just Left or Right. It was a more grownup way to look at things. 

Airboy continued on through the eighties while Eclipse began reprinting the original Hillman Airboy comics.  Other characters were revamped and updated.  The Air Maidens were reintroduced with an Eighties diverse cast, Black Angel for instance was now actually black.  However, as demand for Chuck Dixon’s work grew his output for Airboy necessarily decreased.  This was followed by Eclipse’s financial troubles that I have documented elsewhere. Production sputtered to a halt with Airboy #50 long before Eclipse folded.

Todd McFarlane bought up Eclipse’s remaining IP rights in 1995 but it turned out they were less extensive than was thought. Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman had an ownership stake in the derivative works by Eclipse. So the only Airboy properties available were the original Public Domain characters. 

In 2007 Moonstone ran a five issue mini-series written by Dixon featuring the Golden Age characters.

In 2013, Antarctic Press ran another five issue mini-series with the Golden Age version of the Air Fighters in Airboy: Deadeye. Penned by Chuck Dixon.

It’s Alive Press was the most recent attempt to revive Airboy with a crowdfunder. Airboy #51 picked up where things had ended in 1989.  Sadly it only got as far as Airboy #52 before It’s Alive Press was shuttered in 2022 by the death of Drew Ford.

Today, people would be instinctively leery of a revival of a long moribund title like Airboy. Understandably so, there are two major problems that the long established intellectual properties have when they are revived in the current year; Skinsuiting and Fraudulent Creativity.  Skinsuiting is when a character is revived as that character in name only, it’s really a new character with an old name and it is then used to prop up left wing political statements disguised loosely as entertainment.  Classic example: Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. Fraudulent Creativity is a bit more insidious, the character is revived almost as a zombie version of its former self. The Fraudulent character repeats its actions from previous appearances to serve up memberberry pie to the audience. Again, it is a hollow character. An empty wax figure replica that claims to be the real thing but it isn’t.  Classic example: JJ Abrams Star Trek.

What made Chuck Dixon’s Airboy so special was that it wasn’t these things at all. These were the same characters from the War Years.  They had moved on with their lives, while remaining who they had always been and Dixon was able to capture these same people but at different points in these same lives.  Something that would be pretty much impossible today.

Unless Chuck Dixon was doing it. 

Are you hoping for a return of Airboy and (more importantly) Valkyrie?

Discuss in the comments below.