Nazi-Punchers BLACKHAWK "Coward Dies Twice"

Last Week We Brought You Russkie-Smashing Blackhawk and his team...

...this week we bring you his younger self...when he and his crew were first organized to do some serious Nazi-Punching!

Added bonus: the first appearance of their distinctive aircraft, the Grumman Skyrocket!

Scripted/laid-out by Will Eisner, and penciled/inked by Chuck Cuidera, the second appearance of Blackhawk, from Quality's Military Comics #2 (1941) clears up a number of aspects, including the fact the team isn't operating openly as a part of the Allied forces!

(America hadn't entered the war at this pre-Pearl Harbor point in history,)
Besides the core group, we're introduced to Boris (Ukrainian/Russian) and Zeg (country unknown) along with numerous other unidentified personnel.
Zeg appeared several more times during the Golden Age, but Boris disappeared after this issue, popping up again in the Bronze Age as a one-shot villain seeking vengeance against the Blackhawks!
Trivia: Though this was the only appearance of the split-tail Skyrockets in the Golden Age strip, when the Blackhawks made their debut in the animated Justice League series in "The Savage Time", an episode set in post D-Day Europe, the original version of the aircraft was front and center!
(DC's 1980s revival of the WWII version of Blackhawk restored the split-tailed version to pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity, helping to define which WWII stories were Earth-One and which were Earth-X)!

Director/Animator Dan Riba even constructed a custom maquette of the Skyrocket and sent it to the Korean animation house for reference in animating aerobatics with the distinctive ship properly!

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Blackhawk

by William Rotsler

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Russkie-Smashers BLACKHAWK "Nightmare Cruise"

We're Winding Up a Month of Russkie-Smashing with the Busiest Russkie-Smashers of All...

...awww, you guessed!

Scripted by Robert Bernstein, penciled by Dick Dillin, and inked by Chuck Cuidera, this never-reprinted story from Quality's Blackhawk #105 (1956) showed no matter what environment (air, land, or sea), nothing stops the Dark Knights (yes, they were referred that way long before a certain Caped Crusader) from defending democracy!

Next Week: We're Back to Nazi-Punching...with Blackhawk and his team!
(He was around a loooong time!)

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Blackhawk

by William Rotsler

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Russkie-Smashers PLASTIC MAN "Incredible Sleep Weapon"

 Though the Villain of This Tale is Named The Sandman...

...the foul fiend doesn't use sand or knockout gas, as DC's Golden Age hero did!

So, the one-shot Sandman, who used hypnosis, from Quality's Plastic Man #51 (1955) was a sandwoman!

Such a gender-swap has been a moderately-common trope in comics, usually detectible by any or all of the following...
A) villain wearing bulky or shapeless costume.
B) villain using voice-altering mask/filter.
C) villain usually not performing any sort of hand-to-hand combat.
In this story, written by Dick Wood, pencilled by Charles Nicholas, and inked by Chuck Cuidera...it was all three!

Nazi-Punchers HIT COMICS "Ghost of Flanders in 'SpyMaster Sheink Steals the Secret Scouting Plane!' "

He's the Comic Character James Gunn Rescued From Obscurity in the Recent Superman Movie...

...and he's doing what he did best, kicking Nazi asses on the Home Front!






And, that's it!

No "The End" or epilogue.

Another story began on the very next page in the comic!

That's just how things rolled in the Golden Age.
Written and illustrated by George Brenner using the "Wayne Reid" house pseudonym, this never-reprinted tale from Quality Comics' Hit Comics #19 (1942) is straightforward about the concept that spies and saboteurs didn't deserve the niceties of the Geneva Convention!
And, though they didn't show it, it's implied the stolen scoutcraft was recovered.

Ghost of Flanders Will Return!

Nazi-Punchers HIT COMICS "Ghost of Flanders in ' Who He Is and How He Came to Be"

Thanks to #JamesGunn 's Easter Egg in the new #Superman movie...

...specifically, this image on a multi-character mural at the Justice Gang HQ of a costumed hero with a World War I bi-plane overhead and a field of red poppies at his feet, we see that the head of the DC Cinematic Universe has plans for a certain obscure character who never appeared in a DC comic called Ghost of Flanders!

His strip ran for eight issues in Quality Comics' Hit Comics 18 thru 24 (1941-42).
Keeping in mind that this 1941 story (published before Pearl Harbor) appeared only 23 years after the end of World War I (considered the War to End All Wars) and taught extensively in American schools, and you might understand the significance of his nom du guerre.

Note: Though the costume design remained the same throughout the character's series, the coloring changed several times.
The color scheme seen in the mural is something of a compromise!

1) Why is the red poppy so frightening to German spies?
It ties in to Flanders Field as explained HERE!

2) How, you may ask, did Ghost of Flanders end up at DC?
DC purchased all of Quality's assets when the company folded in 1956.
They continued publishing Blackhawk without interruption thru 1968 (as we showed HERE), but held off on using any of the other characters until they revamped/revived Plastic Man in 1966 as we showed HERE.
In the 1970s, with the development of the 100-Page Super-Spectacular format, they began reprinting some of Quality's Golden Age characters including Quicksilver (renamed "Max Mercury" since Marvel had a super-speedster named Quicksilver since 1963), Black Condor, The Ray, Doll Man, and Phantom Lady, among others.
This led to a revival of the Quality characters in an annual JLA-JSA "Crisis on..." story involving "Earth X", where the Nazis had won World War II...and killed the Blackhawks and Plastic Man (and, presumably the rest of the Quality heroes and heroines except for these six!)

Art by Nick Cardy

This led to the featured Quality heroes coming to Earth-One and receiving their own title!

Art by Ernie Chua/Chan

Since then, post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, almost all the Quality heroes and heroines have been inserted into whatever the DC Universe currently is, largely thanks to Roy Thomas' integrating the Golden Age Quality/Fawcett/Fox characters into the All-Star Squadron!
But Ghost of Flanders didn't even make it to a group shot in any of those stories!

Ghost of Flanders Will Return!