Flight of the Airboy (Part One)

Flight of the Airboy (Part One)

Airboy by Chuck Dixon was one of the biggest titles of Eclipse Comics during the age of glories and atrocities that was the 1980s comics boom.  I wasn’t interested when it was first published because I thought it looked like a hokie Rocketeer ripoff. I knew nothing about the character’s history. However, the subtly shaded and complex character of Valkyrie won me over completely.

Cover by (you guessed right) Dale Stevens

Dale Stevens had started Rocketeer at Pacific Comics then moved the title to Eclipse. Then moved it again.  I’ve heard that there were disagreements regarding production which could mean anything but probably meant that Eclipse wanted to cut his printing budget, because that title was kind of expensive to publish.

Whatever the reason, Eclipse needed to fill the hole in their release schedule that Dale Stevens had just made and the publishers discovered the old Airboy title from the 40s and 50s had drifted into public domain. It would be a little more accurate to say that Rocketeer was a ripoff of the original Airboy than the other way around. 

The funny thing is that the original Airboy from the forties wasn’t all that original either.  Its most famous elements came from an all but forgotten comic strip called Terry and the Pirates, which in its day rivaled Dick Tracy in popularity.  

In 1934 Milton Caniff was hired by the New York Daily News to write a new juvenile comic strip with instructions to “make it something about China.”  Caniff did as much research as 1930s public library materials could let him and learned about China’s long and vigorous love affair with piracy.  The result was Terry and the Pirates.  A boy adventurer in the “Orient” Terry Lee and his older pal and mentor Pat Ryan had many adventures battling the various pirates of the Far East. Like Airboy (and Peter Parker come to that) Terry aged chronologically each year the comic was in print. When the US entered WWII, Terry was old enough to serve so he joined the Army Air Corps.  Terry did have love interest by then…Who no one cared anything about because everyone was focused with laser like intensity on that comic strip’s sexy menace, the pirate queen known as The Dragon Lady. 

Dragon Lady was quite influential in her own way.  She was the strong, “Oriental Villainess.” Seductive but still powerful in her own right. And she had a pretty serious interest in the hero’s mentor, Ryan. She was kind of a Lillith type of character in that regard.  Dragon Lady became a trope that was popular for about 40 years and was seen in everything from Star Trek to Buck Rogers to the Indiana Jones ripoffs of the 1980s. 

Dragon Lady was the prototype for Valkyrie including the enemies-to-lovers thing.  She had always wanted Ryan but since she was totally evil, that was a (somewhat reluctant) NO. 

Until the Rape of Nanking.  When every fictional Chinese character in America (to include Fu Manchu) began fighting the “Filthy Japs.”  Dragon Lady went to war with the Japanese empire making her a good guy worthy of a hero’s romantic interest. Although, the racial thing was still a problem.

However, Terry and Pirates remained a strip for its entire run and by WWII the real money was in comic books. 

America spent the first few months of 1942 losing in the Pacific and frankly, losing in the Atlantic too. 

It seemed that every week the papers were bringing fresh word of a new disaster.  The Philippines fell, Guam fell, Wake fell. So much tonnage was being sunk each month it looked like we were going to run out of ships.  It was becoming a critical morale problem for the American public. Getting our asses kicked everywhere wasn’t good for our self-esteem.  And flatly contradicted the country’s self image as ferocious if frequently reckless, blast through Hell’s locked gates, heroes. 

But in April of 42 something very much in keeping with that image happened.  ‘The hold my beer I’m gonna try something’ attitude of the Doolittle Raid gave the American public a story to believe in.  Sure, we aren’t doing well on the ground YET, but our daring flyboys can keep the enemy at bay long enough to get the American war machine rolling.  In broad strokes there was some truth to it.  The Battle of Midway supported the notion that we could have Victory Through Air Power.

I’m not going into all the reasons that was wrong because it doesn’t change the fact that there was suddenly a big market in comic books for pilots that were going to “Smash the Axis.” Turnstyles were flooded with titles like Wings Comics, Sky Fighters, and Captain Midnight. The Black Hawk Squadron routinely out sold Superman 

America had been at war for almost a year when Hillman Periodicals published Air Fighter Comics #2. Featuring Airboy on the cover.

Air Fighter was an anthology but the adventures of Davey “Airboy” Nelson II quickly became the star attraction. The reason is simple, as Chuck Dixon himself put it, Airboy was a superhero.  Granted more in the Batman mode since he didn’t have any powers but he fit the rest of the trope just fine.

Airboy was created by Charles Biro and Dick Wood with art by Al Camy.  No, I don’t think those last two were real names either. However, people with real names took the reins in 1943, with Tony DiPreta and Fred Kida. Airboy was selling too well to leave to the second string by then.

Davy Nelson II, was the son of WWI fighter ace Davy Nelson Sr. Despite his tender years Davy II was an expert pilot, a brilliant mechanic and skilled at hand to hand combat.  This is standard superhero stuff but what set Davy apart was his ride “Birdie.” Davy’s friend, a Franciscan friar and inventor (just rolling with it) Brother Francis Martier created an ornithopter, (vertical flight was still difficult to do reliably back then).  Birdie had twin maxim gun and bird claws suitable grabbing Nazis; it could also be summoned by radio.  Birdie appeared to be sentient and possibly sapient as well. 

When Brother Martier died in an accident Davy inherited Birdie and set off fighting Nazis. What made Airboy unique was that there were more than just be-monocled, mustache twirling, heel kicking krauts among Airboy’s bad guys. 

Superheroes are defined in part by their enemies, and Airboy’s were flat freaking weird. There was the mysterious Misery – whose mould-encrusted Airtomb imprisoned the souls of dead pilots. Zzed a horrifically deformed CroMagnon Nazi fanatic and occultist (let’s not leave that ou0t. And The Heap, a concept that DC and Marvel both ripped-off with Swamp Thing and Man Thing respectively.  In this case, The Heap was a WWI German ace who crashed in a swamp, was brain damaged and is now, for whatever reason, covered in slimy moss which makes him super strong. This isn’t even the weirdest of them.  My favorite was the Deathless Brain, an Imperial Japanese officer that worked out of a jar.  Yes, the Deathless Brain had tentacles, he was Japanese, what did you expect? 

Davy’s best enemy was of course the whip wielding, softcore dominatrix fantasy, Valkyrie leader of the Air Maidens.  

They had quite a few battles but when her girls were going to be executed for hiding that total Chad, Davey, Valkyrie and her girls changed sides. She was too popular to be a bad guy and Davy needed a girlfriend by then.

It was also rather prescient, there would shortly be an urgent need for “Good Germans.” With WWII over Airboy started battling godless Communism. 

Airboy continued his run up until 1953 when he ran into the one enemy he could not defeat: Fredric Wertham. Seduction of the Innocent hit Hillman pretty hard and the company stopped publishing comics altogether.

This was not the end of Airboy and Valkyrie but this is the end of part one.

Discuss in the comments.