Brand Echh: Airboy #1

Eclipse had established itself early on as one of the most creator-friendly alternative comics on the burgeoning Direct Market scene. They began publishing in 1978 with the issuing of Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy’s graphic novel SABRE. Publishers Jan and Dean Mullaney had been huge comics fans throughout the 1970s, and as the tastes of the marketplace changed, their imprint became a home for many of the most respected creators of the period to produce creator-owned material that would go beyond what was permissible under the auspices of the mainstream Comics Code Authority. In addition to McGregor and Gulacy, this included Steve Gerber, Gene Colan, Marshall Rogers, Steve Englehart, P. Craig Russell and many others.

As the decade of the 1980s rolled on and the Direct Market began to crystalize, it became apparent that what the audience was craving wasn’t so much the sort of high-minded and expansive projects that had captured attention in the 1970s. Rather, the readers of the Direct Market were largely attracted to books that looked like mainstream Marvel and DC fare but that were more permissive in terms of content. By a certain point, in order to keep their company in business and thriving, Dean Mullaney and his editor Catherine Yronwode made toe decision to launch a series of traditional color comic books, in a format similar to that of Marvel and DC, and with the same emphasis on costumed action and adventure. This was in addition to their more personal fare, an attempt to bring in some steady revenue and underwrite some of that more idiosyncratic material.

Eclipse made its outreach in this arena with a number of titles. First among them was MIRACLEMAN, the first American release of Alan Moore, Garry Leach and Alan Davis’ updating of the classic 1950s UK character which had originally been serialized in black and white in WARRIOR Magazine in England. Initially, MIRACLEMAN was priced at 75 cents in an attempt to compete head-to-head with Marvel and DC. At around the same time, Eclipse also decided to launch two other titles, both of which would be priced at 50 cents but contain half as many pages as a typical release. These books were THE NEW WAVE, a forgettable super hero team title, and AIRBOY, the revival of a classic Golden Age character. Both books would ship on a biweekly basis–in essence, readers would get the same amount of material, just delivered in smaller increments.

The Golden Age Airboy had debuted in AIR FIGHTERS COMICS in 1942, the creation of the prolific and talented Charles Biro with Dick Wood and artist Al Camy. Airboy was an instant hit for publisher Hillman, and the series was even renamed AIRBOY COMICS after the war. It ran until 1953, a great run for a series in this period, outstripping any number of popular super heroes of the era.

Airboy was an aviator hero, who possessed a remote-controlled plane, Birdie, that was virtually anthropomorphic. (It had started out in the strip as a bat-plane, but the name was changed to bird plane after a complaint from DC. Despite this, Birdie maintained batlike wings all throughout the run.) The strip was bold and dramatic, battling the Axis menace during the war and then veering into postwar plots heavily laden with supernatural and suspense themes. Among the characters introduced in the Airboy feature were the Heap, the first regular swamp monster featured in comics, who grew so popular that he graduated to his own strip and occasionally was even given the cover spot, and Valkyrie, a femme fatale who became so popular that she reformed and became a recurring player in the stories. One other novel fact was that, more or less, Airboy aged in real time. Only 13 in his first adventures, he grew into his early 20s by the time the title ceased publication.

The origins of the Eclipse version came about when the company decided to do a reprint collection of all of the original stories featuring Valkyrie, figuring that the cheesecake nature of the character would prompt sales. But while putting that volume together, Cat Yronwode discovered that the characters would all enter the public domain just a few years later, in 1986. Keeping that information quietly to themselves, Yronwode and Mullaney silently waited out the clock, planning to introduce a new version of the character once the rights lapsed–which they did. The new Airboy would be the son of the original, with many of the elements from the Golden Age books carried over, including the stars of other strips in AIR FIGHTERS COMICS, including especially Sky Wolf, who was cast in the new series as a tough, leather-wearing, grizzled fighter.

To produce the material, Mullaney and Yronwode turned to artist Tim Truman, with whom they had worked with on SCOUT, among other projects. Truman took on the project, bringing in his friend Chuck Dixon to write the series. Truman only produced artwork for the first two issues, but he stayed on as the defacto editor of the series thereafter. But it was Dixon, along with artist Stan Woch, who became the guiding lights of the series.

In Dixon’s hands, AIRBOY became a contemporary adventure series, grounded in realism despite a number of larger-than-life fantasy touches, none more so than Birdie herself. The book was something of a cross between the sorts of war titles that DC had largely spun down on producing and the sort of men’s adventure fiction that was crowding paperback book stands of the period. The experiment to make the series 50 cents wasn’t financially feasible, and only lasted for 8 issues, and eventually the title was cut back to a regular monthly release schedule as well. But AIRBOY remained one of Eclipse’s most popular and reliable titles throughout its run.

Additionally, piggybacking off of the popularity of the main series, Eclipse published a spate of spin-off material, including reprints of the earliest issues of AIR FIGHTERS COMICS from the 1940s as well as limited series dedicated to Valkyrie and Sky Wolf, and crossovers with other properties such as MR. MONSTER, STRIKE and Eclipse’s line-wide company crossover project, TOTAL ECLIPSE.

One of the factors that led to the end of the AIRBOY series (though not the only one) was the difference in political leanings between Dixon and his publishers. Airboy’s adventures were set against the Cold War of the era, and Dixon wasn’t shy about incorporating thinly-disguised real-world politics into his stories. There were apparently some occasional complaints, and Mullaney and Yronwode also became increasingly uncomfortable with the slant of the series, though not a lot of this was spoken about in public. Given how hard right-wing Dixon has become over the years, it’s easy to see how his approach would conflict with the sweeping liberalism of Mullaney and Yronwode.

In the years since the Eclipse version of AIRBOY ceased publication in 1989, a number of other publishers have tried their hand at projects featuring the character, either in his original Golden Age incarnation or the modern form. Dixon himself crowdfunded a pair of issues that continued the storyline from where the final Eclipse issue, #50, had left off.