Spacehawk - Softcover

Wolverton, Basil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606995502 ISBN 13: 9781606995501

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2012

Synopsis

The complete collection of Wolverton's legendary costumed crusader!

Basil Wolverton is one of the greatest, most idiosyncratic talents in comic book history. Though he is best known for his humorous grotesqueries in MAD magazine, it is his science-fiction character Spacehawk that Wolverton fans have most often demanded be collected. The wait is over: Spacehawk features every story from Spacehawk’s intergalactic debut in 1940 to his final, Nazi-crushing adventure in 1942.

Spacehawk is the closest thing to a colorfully-costumed, conventional action hero Wolverton ever created, yet the strip is infused with Wolverton’s quintessential weirdness: controlled, organic artwork of strangely repulsive aliens and monsters and bizarre planets, and stories of gruesome retribution that bring to mind Wolverton’s peer, Fletcher Hanks. Spacehawk had no secret identity, no fixed base of operations beyond his spaceship, and no sidekicks or love interests. He had but one mission in life: to protect the innocent throughout the Solar System, and to punish the guilty. He was a dark ― yet much more visually playful ― counterpart to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Spacehawk also includes the character’s final and rarely seen Earthbound adventures. As the U.S. became involved in World War II, Spacehawk returned to 20th Century America to join the United States’ efforts in defeating fascism, which he does by patrolling the Earth’s stratosphere, looking for wrongdoing.

Back in print again featuring newly designed covers.

Full color throughout

About this title

About the Authors

Basil Wolverton was born near Medford, Oregon in 1909 and died in 1978. His Fantagraphics-published books include Basil Wolverton's Culture Corner and The Wolverton Bible, and his work is featured in Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941.

Monte Wolverton is a syndicated editorial cartoonist (whose style is reminiscent of his father's) and managing editor of Plain Truth magazine―where many of the illustrations in The Wolverton Bible originally appeared.

Reviews

Although Wolverton is best known for his eccentric, zany humor comics, early in his career, he wrote and drew some 30 stories featuring the deadly serious Spacehawk, a no-nonsense dispenser of intergalactic justice. Debuting in 1940, the science-fiction hero battled Martian space pirates, mercenaries from Mercury, and other grotesque aliens, occasionally finding the time to romance the queen of Neptune. But by 1942, in his final adventures, Spacehawk had turned, as had many of his superhero brethren, to fighting Nazis and Japs back on Earth. The harsh treatment Spacehawk metes out to evildoers and Wolverton’s blunt, blocky graphic style are reminiscent of the naive, loopy approach of his contemporary, Fletcher Hanks—if Hanks had known what he was doing. Spacehawk’s stories may be absurd concoctions of primitive space opera and already-established tropes of the nascent superhero genre, but Wolverton’s solid, elemental drawings—already evincing his distinctive use of stippling—combined with his intuitive design sense have a raw power that is rare among comic books of the era and impresses even today. --Gordon Flagg

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606995502
• ISBN 13: 9781606995501
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272