Lost Crossovers: AIRBOY v3 #12

Airboy was one of the more popular and long-lasting series of the Golden Age of Comics. Created by Charles Biro in the pages of AIR FIGHTERS COMICS #2, Airboy was young Davy Nelson, the heir to a robotic batwinged plane named Birdie developed by his late father, who used it to fight the Axis in World War II. The series was so successful that, at the end of the war, the magazine was rechristened AIRBOY COMICS and continued to run until 1953. Along the way, Airboy aged–not quite in real time, but closer than most. By the end of the series, it was a little bit awkward to be calling this blond young man Airboy.

Airboy was only one of the features in the pages of AIR FIGHTERS COMICS, a title dedicated to brave and colorful aviators of all stripes. For the most part, the characters in the assorted strips didn’t interact with one another. But there was one exception, released in this issue, AIRBOY v3 #12 (for whatever reason, published Hillman numbered their releases like magazines, without a serialized issue number. If numbered that way, this would have been issue #35). In this extra-length two-part story, Airboy and his enemy-turned-ally Valkyrie met and teamed up with Sky Wolf and his small crew of Blackhawk-like aviators.

The funny part about all of this is that, with the war over and the public’s tastes changing, AIRBOY COMICS was beginning to phase out all of the other fliers in favor of more horror-tinged material such as the Heap as well as generic self-contained one-off stories with no central protagonist. In fact, teh final Sky Wolf story had seen print two issues prior to this. Pretty clearly, it’s the fact that this story was already in the production pipeline that prevented it from getting axed along with Sky Wolf, and it does represent the wolf’s final Golden Age appearance.

The entire story was written by Dick Wood and illustrated by Fred Kida, and it’s a fairly good representation of teh strip in the midst of a tone shift. After the war, Airboy most often wound up getting involved in situations centering around fantasy or horror or supernatural situations, often with larger-than-life antagonists. It wasn’t a super hero series so much as it was an adventure strip in the mold of Terry and the Pirates, just bigger and broader.

Valkrie made her debut in the Airboy strip early on as a femme fatale, the leader of a ruthless band of all-women fighter pilots who fought for the Nazis. Valkyrie proved to be popular with the readers, though, and so after a couple of appearances, the Veronica Lake-inspired pilot wound up changing sides and becoming an ally of Airboy’s. As such, she became a recurring character, not in every Airboy story, but popping up from time to time to goose audience interest. (She also backslid at least once into being depicted as a villain by a writer who seemingly wasn’t up to speed on her reformation. Continuity wasn’t all that tight in the Golden Age.)

Birdie was a big part of the appeal of the series. The aircraft was somewhat anthropomorphized–not to the extent of giving it thoughts or a voice, but enough where it was treated as more than just another high-tech aircraft. If anything, it was maybe akin to Lassie. Airboy could control it remotely with a small device hidden under the collar of his coat, but Birdie routinely did things that made it seem as though it had more of a mind of its own than might be suspected at first glance. And, of course, Airboy talked to the plane constantly.

These throwback Vikings are a good example of the kinds of enemies and situations that Airboy routinely encountered after the way.

The story plays things a little bit coy about just who Airboy is dispatching Birdie to summon to come help him and the other trapped people.

The second chapter was fairly clearly originally designed to be a Sky Wolf story intended for teh same issue, but since Sky Wolf had ceased to be a going concern, his masthead was stripped off of this splash page and instead it was simply labeled “Skywolf Chapter…”

Airboy, Sky Wolf and Valkyrie would all be revived in the 1980s in a series released by Eclipse. That title focused on the son of the original Airboy, now a young flier himself, but Sky Wolf and Valkyrie were the same versions as their Golden Age incarnations.