Number 852

Blazing Death!

I don't know if any story drawn by Basil Wolverton could ever be considered routine, but this Spacehawk episode from Target Comics Volume 3 Number 3, 1942, seems like a standard superhero vs. mad scientist story. Still, it's Wolverton...and even routine Wolverton is better than most other stories of this era. His artwork is so distinctive he hardly needed to put his name on it.

Spacehawk's early adventures were freeform science fiction set in outer space, on other worlds with bizarre aliens and are usually what we remember about the feature. Then someone, the editors or Wolverton himself, decided to put Spacehawk on earth fighting on the side of America during World War II. So Spacehawk lasted just seven more issues of Target Comics after this and was gone. I don't know how long Spacehawk would have continued if the original premise of the strip had been kept. We can only speculate, but Spacehawk was fairly interesting, even in his later earthly adventures. He had the power of anti-gravity, he lived in his spaceship cruising through the stratosphere, and had a pal named Dork. I showed another story of Spacehawk and Dork a year ago in Pappy's #637.