NEAR MYTHS: AIRBOY 1-50 (1986-89)

Of the many patriotic comics-heroes born in and around the WWII years, Hillman Comics' AIRBOY seems to be the only American character who survived long past the war's end. This may be because, even in the absence of a shooting-war, Airboy still appealed to young readers thanks to the appeal of having his own personally owned plane. Without having come close to reading all of the character's Golden Age exploits, I'd say that in general the art and writing was somewhat better than many comparable postwar series, and of course, I discovered a high level of mythicity in these three interrelated stories. AIRBOY's last issue appeared in 1953, the same year that Hillman quit publishing comics for good. Since I'm not aware that any of their titles were attacked during the anti-comics craze, it may be that the company simply decided that comics were no longer profitable enough to bother with.

I recently committed myself to re-reading the entire AIRBOY series from Eclipse, which I've long considered one of the company's best productions. I don't know if the Hillman properties had fallen into public domain or if Eclipse actually purchased rights from someone, but Eclipse was certainly devoted to creating a "Hillman-verse." Even from the first couple of issues in 1986, writer Chuck Dixon and his various artists not only created a modern-day legacy version of Airboy, but also brought  back some of the original heroes, some of whom were simply older (Sky Wolf) and some of whom had been transformed (the armored Iron Ace gets turned into a robot).

The new Airboy, David Nelson III, doesn't know anything about his father's heroic past, knowing him only as the head of an aeronautics corporation. The relative innocence of the youth (whose age isn't specified, though he doesn't look fifteen like the Golden Age version) is shattered, both when his father is slain and David learns that his dad was selling arms to a tyrannical regime in the made-up South American realm of Bogantilla. However, David also learns of his father's heroic deeds, and that his revolutionary airplane "Birdie" is still functional, so he dons his dad's old outfit and goes looking in Bogantilla for his father's slayers. There he and his allies (among them the aforementioned Sky Wolf) find out that David II was empowering the tyrants because their master, Airboy's old sorcerer-foe Misery, has extorted the former hero's obedience by threatening his old love Valkyrie, kept in cryonic preservation for the past forty years. The New Airboy avenges his father in part, though Misery escapes, and revives his father's former lover. However, since the new hero looks the same as the old one, Valkyrie is attracted to David. As for his reaction to her, this cover sums it up.

For the next forty-nine issues, Airboy and various allies-- not least the Heap, the original swamp-monster of comics-- alternate between fighting in relatively realistic paramilitary conflicts and fending off the plots of arch-enemy Misery. But the series' most piquant appeal was the "will-they-won't-they" romantic sparks between Airboy and Valkyrie. Clearly, even though Eclipse had designed David III to look just like his father, he wanted her to see him for himself, as opposed to being simply his father's lookalike. Valkyrie, even though she's been revived after the fashion of the Silver Age Captain America, seems to adjust to eighties America pretty easily, but she's got considerable ambivalence toward her potential swain. Little is ever said about the rocky Oedipal issues that  might arise when a son courts his father's old lover, except for a throwaway line that tells readers nothing about New Airboy's actual mother except that she, like Valkyrie, was a pilot. Only once or twice does Valkyrie put her ambivalence into words, as in a dialogue from AIRMAIDENS SPECIAL #1. After a female friend (specifically, a legacy version of Hillman's Black Angel) questions Valkyrie about the latter's feelings, Valkyrie says, "It's just that Davy's younger than I am. When I'm with him, I don't think about that. But when we're apart, I feel as though I 've picked someone up off the school yard. And his father and I..."

That's about all the Oedipal exploration seen in the fifty issues, though there's not much doubt that David III is of legal age. Chuck Dixon, in concert with such artists as Tim Truman and Stan Woch, always supplies dependable action-formula, though in the final issue editor Cat Yronwode remarked that even in the eighties it was a lot harder to do an aviation-series set in the real world than it had been during WWII.

Though the series' main appeal was the romantic soap opera, it did scrupulously follow up on some of the appeal of the early Valkyrie appearances. I remarked in the above cited review that there was an age discrepancy between the Golden Age hero and his femme fatale. There was also a brief flirtation with sadism, and this seemed again on display in this cover for 1988'S AIRBOY AND THE AIRMAIDENS.

I don't know how many comics-fans of the eighties were invested in seeing the Hillman heroes back, but I for one did enjoy the revivals of such interesting obscurities as the Bald Eagle and Rackman. However, the series didn't really ever establish a modern-day identity for New Airboy, perhaps in part because its makers were so preoccupied with building the Hillman-verse. Further, Dixon didn't introduce any interesting new villains for the hero, though he did a creditable job of making Misery into a master fiend worthy to stand alongside the best of the eighties arch-foes.

Only once does the series come close to the level of mythicity in the Golden Age Misery stories: in the final issue, done by Dixon and Andy Kubert, with Adam Kubert providing inks. Like his father before him, Airboy ventures into the supernatural domain of Misery and manages to end the villain's menace-- though, unlike his father, this Airboy vanishes from the sight of his allies, and so, even though Misery doesn't claim the hero, his disappearance carries the value of a "faux death." In the final issue's editorial Yronwode mentions the possibility of reviving the hero for an Eclipse graphic novel, but it never happened, though the Airboy franchise did surface again under the aegis of other publishers.

It wasn't the best ride of the eighties. But it was worth a try, nonetheless.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAIDEN AND THE DRAGON" (ALIEN WORLDS #9, 1985)

In the early eighties Pacific Comics marketed a pair of anthology-titles, ALIEN WORLDS and TWISTED TALES. The principal editor of both magazines was Bruce Jones, who had "made his bones," so to speak, writing stories, many horror-themed, for the Warren line of magazines. Jones was certainly aware that Warren's approach to anthologies-- that of combining punchy short stories with lush artwork-- was not exclusive to that company. The combination of deft storytelling and finely delineated visuals had, even in the 1960s, been made famous by the EC Comics work of the 1950s. I don't think I would be projecting to say that TWISTED TALES was Jones' parallel to the publishing strategy of EC's gore-met offerings, like TALES FROM THE CRYPT, while ALIEN WORLDS was Jones' emulation of the company's more outre material from WEIRD SCIENCE. When Pacific Comics folded, a few more issues of both mags, probably consisting of inventory material, were published by Eclipse Comics, including the issue considered here.



"The Maiden and the Dragon," however, does not deal with the science-fictional content seen on the cover, as it's a magical fantasy-tale, of the sort EC also dabbled in from time to time. The title immediately suggests the standard fantasy-trope of a helpless maiden requiring rescue from a rapacious dragon by someone, usually a heroic knight. However, in the tradition of EC twist-endings, there's a reason why the maiden gets top billing here.


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

The story begins in a fairy-tale Persian city, "Harran," ruled by a caliph named Haroon Asim.  Asim's problem is not with serpentine beasts, but with the devourer Time. He has four daughters who might succeed him after his death as ruler of Harran and its lands. He loves the three elder daughters, but doesn't like the youngest, Bachquet, because her birth brought about the death of Asim's favorite wife. Bachquet, to whom Asim has not shown love, is probably the best qualified to inherit the caliph-dom, but Asim just can't decide.

One day he meets an old woman at a well, and tells her his problem. The stranger proposes that Asim devise a test for his four daughters, to see which one of them has "the right stuff." On the woman's advice, Asim seeks out a witch-woman-- never seen in the story-- and has himself transformed into a gigantic dragon. In this form the transformed caliph waits until all four of his daughters take a summer day near the sea. The dragon-ruler lurches out of the sea-waters and tells all four women that they are his prisoners. Then he asks the oldest daughter to return to the palace and to bring him her golden riches, in ransom for her sisters. The first daughter escapes, takes her gold, and flees the country. The dragon repeats his deal with the next two daughters, and they too choose their own safety and wealth over the fate of their sisters.

Finally, Bachquet the youngest is left. Asim can no longer let her go with any threat to her siblings, but he tells Bachquet that if she returns with her own riches, he will reward her handsomely. Bachquet does come back, unlike her sisters. However, she comes back not with gold but with a sword, and uses the weapon to slay the dragon. The "twist ending" is that Bachquet arranged this whole scheme; that she posed as the old woman to put a bug in Asim's ear, and so that she could commit regicide upon her unloved father without anyone ever knowing. (Presumably if any of the other sisters ever came crawling back, they'd verify Bachquet's story about the dragon holding them prisoner, and perhaps Bachquet even blamed her father's absence on the monster.)

I don't imagine that Bruce Jones was trying to do anything more than craft a good "O.Henry" gimmick. Still, here he works with material a little more resonant than that of the average horror-SF short story. The idea of the ruler apportioning his riches to his daughters is likely to have been borrowed from Shakespeare's play KING LEAR, where the titular king chooses to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, as long as they all pledge to him their undying love. The division of the kingdom is a disaster in Shakespeare, and in Jones' story, even the division of wealth ends up sowing disloyalty in the three daughters who actually *may* have some feeling for the caliph.

In LEAR, two of the ruler's daughters tell him what he wants to hear, while the third, Cordelia, refuses to give her father such extravagant flattery. Ironically, by the end of the play, it's clear that Cordelia, the one who seems to withhold her love, is really the one who loves her father best. Bachquet is more in the tradition of the EC underdog, who avenges ill-treatment with a carefully laid-out (if improbable) master plan-- and in this case, the ill-treatment is that her father withheld love from her because of the mere fact of Bachquet's birth. Thus Asim reaps what he sows-- though he does at least leave his least-loved daughter with an intact caliph-dom.

I would not call this a "feminist" story as such.  But at the very least, it's an interested "twist" on the "tale" of Maiden and Dragon.