Comics You Should Own – ‘Airboy’ #1-50

Yes, it’s kind of a dumb name. But that doesn’t mean the comic is bad!

Airboy by Chuck Dixon (writer except when otherwise noted), Timothy Truman (penciler, issue #1; layouter, issue #2; writer, issue #11; co-writer, Airboy Meets the Prowler), Micheal T. Gilbert (writer/penciler/inker, Airboy and Mr. Monster Special), Len Wein (writer, “Family Ties” in issues #38-40), Jim Longstreth (story/layouter, issue #45), Stan Woch (penciler, issues #3-10, 12-16, 33-37, 40-43, “White Lightning” in issue #15; inker, issue #45), Ben Dunn (penciler, issue #11), Bo Hampton (penciler, issues #17-18), Ron Randall (penciler, issues #19-24, 27-32), Tom Yeates (penciler, issue #25; inker, issue #1; finisher, issue #2), Gary Kwapisz (penciler, issue #26, 38, 44), Ricardo Villagrán (artist, issue #39; inker, issue #40-44, Skywolf #1-3), Mark Johnson (penciler, issue #45; inker, issue #25), Ernie Colón (artist/letterer, issues #46-49), Andy Kubert (penciler, issue #50), Larry Elmore (artist, “China Hands” in issues #9-10, Airmaidens Special), Bill Jaaska (artist, “I Don’t Need My Grave” from issues #11-12), Tom Lyle (penciler, “Queen of the Valley” in issues #13-14, “White Lightning” in issue #16, “Guatemala Busride” in issue #17, “MiG Alley” in issues #18-20, “Retreat From Hell” in issues #23-24, The Air Fighters Meet Sgt. Strike, Skywolf #1-3), Attilio Micheluzzi (artist, “The Winged Wolf” in issue #21), Dan Spiegle (artist, “The Winged Wolf” in issue #22, “Street of Dreams” in issue #27, “Hot Potato” in issue #34, “Lightning Strikes” in issue #35, “Bachelor Party” in issue #36, “Splt lvl, 2 bdrms, Glndle” in issue #37), Graham Nolan (penciler, “No Rest for the Wicked” in issue #25, “Under the Yellow Moon” in issue #26, “Idiot Box” in issue #29, “Cereal Hero” in issue #30, “Doom in the Sand” in issue #31, “Desert Fury” in issue #32, “The Wolf and the Rose” in issue #33), Carmine Infantino (penciler, “Family Ties” in issues #38-40), Alberto Maldonado (artist, “Home From the Wars” in issue #42, “Goin’ South” in issue #43, “Stand Off” in issue #44, “Tuxpan” in issue #50), Scott Pellegrini (artist/letterer, “The Terror of the Flying Flattop” in issue #45), Paul Gulacy (penciler, Valkyrie #1-3), Mark Pacella (penciler/inker, Airboy and Mr. Monster Special; inker, “Family Ties” in issues #38-40), John K. Snyder III (artist, Airboy Meets the Prowler), Brent Anderson (penciler, Valkyrie (vol. 2) #1-3), Enrique Villagrán (artist, Airboy Versus the Airmaidens; inker, Valkyrie (vol.2) #1-3), Willie Blyberg (inker, issues #3-6, 8, 17-18, 33-37, “Desert Fury” in issue #32, Valkyrie #1-3), Jeff Butler (inker, issue #7), Mark A. Nelson (inker, issue #9, 13-16, “MiG Alley” in issues #18-20, “Retreat From Hell” in issues #23-24, “No Rest for the Wicked” in issue #25, “Under the Yellow Moon” in issue #26, “Idiot Box” in issue #29, “Cereal Hero” in issue #30, “Doom in the Sand” in issue #31), John Nyberg (inker, issue #10), Hilary Barta (inker, issue #11), Kim DeMulder (inker, issue #12, 19-24, 26-32), Adam Kubert (inker/colorist/letterer, issue #50), Jeff Darrow (inker, “I Don’t Need My Grave” in issue #12), Romeo Tanghal (inker, “Queen of the Valley” in issues #13-14), Vern Henkel (inker, “White Lightning” in issues #15-16), Roy Richardson (inker, “Guatemala Busride” in issue #17), Jeff Albrecht (inker, “The Wolf and the Rose” in issue #33), Ron Courtney (colorist, issues #1-5), Steve Oliff (colorist, issues #6-7, 10-43, “China Hands” in issues #9-10, “I Don’t Need My Grave” in issues #11-12, “Queen of the Valley” in issues #13-14, “White Lightning” in issues #15-16, “Guatemala Busride” in issue #17, “MiG Alley” in issues #18-20, “The Winged Wolf” in issue #21, “Retreat From Hell” in issues #23-24, “No Rest for the Wicked” in issue #25, “Under the Yellow Moon” in issue #26, “Street of Dreams” in issue #27, “Idiot Box” in issue #29, “Cereal Hero” in issue #30, “Doom in the Sand” in issue #31, “Desert Fury” in issue #32, “The Wolf and the Rose” in issue #33, “Hot Potato” in issue #34, “Lightning Strikes” in issue #35, “Bachelor Party” in issue #36, “Splt lvl, 2 bdrms, Glndle” in issue #37, “Family Ties” in issues #38-40, “Home From the Wars” in issue #42, “Goin’ South” in issue #43, “Stand Off” in issue #44, “Tuxpan” in issue #50, Airboy and Mr. Monster Special, The Air Fighters Meet Sgt. Strike, Skywolf #1-2, Airboy Versus the Airmaidens), Air Rescue (colorist, issue #8), Moondoggies (colorist, issue #9), Reuben Rudé (colorist, issues #44-46), Mel Johnson (colorist, issues #46-49; “The Terror of the Flying Flattop” in issue #45), Julie (colorist, “The Winged Wolf” in issue #22), Sam Parsons (colorist, Valkyrie #1-3, Airmaidens Special, Skywolf #3, Valkyrie (vol. 2) #1-3), Julie Michel (colorist, Airboy Meets the Prowler), Tim Harkins (letterer, issues #1-12, 14-16, 19-34, 36-41, “China Hands” in issues #9-10, “I Don’t Need My Grave” in issues #11-12, “Queen of the Valley” in issues #13-14, “White Lightning” in issues #15-16, Airboy Meets the Prowler), Steve Haynie (letterer, issue #13), Bill Pearson (letterer, issue #17, 35, “Guatemala Busride” in issue #17, “MiG Alley” in issues #18-20, “The Winged Wolf” in issue #21, “Retreat From Hell” in issues #23-24, “The Wolf and the Rose” in issue #33, “Family Ties” in issues #38-40, “Home From the Wars” in issue #42, “Goin’ South” in issue #43, “Stand Off” in issue #44, “Tuxpan” in issue #50), Mindy Eisman (letterer, issue #18, Valkyrie #1-3, Airmaidens Special, Skywolf #1-3, Valkyrie (vol. 2) #1-3, Airboy Versus the Airmaidens), Wayne Truman (letterer, issues #42-45), Carrie Spiegle (letterer, “The Winged Wolf” in issue #22, “Street of Dreams” in issue #27, “Hot Potato” in issue #34, “Lightning Strikes” in issue #35, “Bachelor Party” in issue #36, “Splt lvl, 2 bdrms, Glndle” in issue #37), John Clark (letterer, “No Rest for the Wicked” in issue #25, “Under the Yellow Moon” in issue #26, “Idiot Box” in issue #29, “Cereal Hero” in issue #30, “Doom in the Sand” in issue #31, “Desert Fury” in issue #32), Ken Bruzenak (letterer, Airboy and Mr. Monster Special), and Kurt Hathaway (letterer, The Air Fighters Meet Sgt. Strike).

Published by Eclipse Comics, 64 issues (#1-50 of the ongoing, plus Valkyrie (volume 1) #1-3, Valkyrie (volume 2) #1-3, the Airmaidens Special, the Airboy Meets Mr. Monster Special, the Airboy Meets the Prowler Special, the Airfighters Meet Sgt. Strike Special, Skywolf #1-3, and the Airboy Versus the Airmaidens Special), cover dated July 1986 – October 1989.

Some very minor SPOILERS below, but nothing bad, I promise! Also: remember to click on the scans to see them in all their large glory!

Return with us to the halcyon days of the 1980s, when a conservative writer who unabashedly thinks Ronald Reagan is one of the country’s greatest presidents could work with a woman so opposed to the patriarchy that she eschewed capital letters in her name (capital letters are a male plot, don’t you know) and they could get along long enough to produce a high-adventure, politically-charged action comic for over three years without killing each other. Yes, it’s true! Dixon, who has gone pretty much around the bend these days, was, in 1986, a fairly generic conservative and very green comic book writer, while cat yronwode, who became Eclipse’s editor-in-chief in 1984, was a fiery liberal then and has gone even more around the bend that way in the years since. Dixon, who writes the introductions in the five-volume collection of Airboy that IDW published in 2014-2017 (which is where I read it), has a lot to say about yronwode (nothing bad, as he does seem to respect her a lot) and his time writing the series, and it’s very entertaining. Dixon went on to fame in the 1990s writing Batman and other DC characters, but I’m not so sure that Airboy isn’t his masterpiece. Let’s take a look!

According to Dixon, Dean Mullaney (the co-founder of Eclipse and later yronwode’s husband) and yronwode wanted to revive a character to build a series around, and they settled on Airboy, which was published by Hillman in the 1940s and ’50s. Dixon simply took the original Airboy, gave him a son, then killed him off, so that the son – Davy Nelson Junior – could take over the name. Nelson Senior had become a successful businessman, and that’s a big part of the book – young Davy realizes that his father sold munitions and warcraft to anyone who could afford them, and Davy begins to dismantle that part of his father’s empire because he thinks it’s immoral. Dixon re-introduces David Nelson’s love interest – Valkyrie, a German who defected from the Nazis when she realized how horrible they were – and through the magic of COMICS!, she’s still young in the 1980s, so she and Davy become a couple (yes, they discuss how weird it is, and no, it does not stop them eventually from knocking boots). Dixon does a pretty good job showing that Val has her own life – she does, after all, get two mini-series during this run, in which Davy figures hardly at all – as she moves to New York and becomes a fashion model, all while still finding time to go out and kick ass on her own. The two eventually get together, but it does take a while.

Dixon began the book with David Nelson’s death, of course, and Davy goes on a quest to find out why. This takes him to the South American country of “Bogantilla,” where it turns out that David was supplying weapons to the dictator who runs the country. The rebels fighting against the dictator took out David to cut off the source of the dictator’s weapons (which seems a bit simplistic, but, hey, it’s comics). Davy realizes that his dad might not have been as squeaky-clean as he thought, and he agrees to fight with the guerrillas, obviously as some form of penance for his father’s actions (Dixon never comes out and says it, but it’s very clear). This first story gives us that nice blend of “real-world” politics, action-adventure, and supernatural weirdness that the series did very well, as the dictator is being helped by Misery, a strange creature who feeds on, well, misery. Misery is an old foe of David Nelson’s, and it turns out he’s been keeping Valkyrie in a state of suspended animation for decades, down in a dungeon below the palace (hence the fact that she’s still young and nubile when she wakes up). Dixon also brings in the Heap, the “original muck monster” from the 1940s Hillman books, to assist Davy fight against Misery. By the end of the first 5-issue story arc, Valkyrie has been rescued, the dictator is dead, the rebels are in control of Bogantilla, and Misery has fucked right off. Yay, the good guys win!

Dixon has all his pieces in place, basically, so he can begin moving forward with what he wants to write. As I do occasionally with longer series like this one, I thought I’d break this down a bit by “story arcs,” even though, as is common for this era, each arc isn’t as cut and dried as the comics of today:

Issues #1-5: David Nelson is killed; Davy finds out about Airboy; he heads to Bogantilla and helps the rebels and frees Valkyrie from Misery.

Issues #6-10: Davy tries to clean up Nelson Aviation, but that gets him into trouble with some rogue executives; there’s a werewolf on the loose!

Issue #11: A one-off about Airboy’s plane, narrated … by the plane. Yep.

Issues #12-16: Airboy fights against a drug-running regime in the Caribbean.

Issues #17-18: Misery sends a World War II bomber loaded with an atomic bomb, suspended in time like Valkyrie had been, toward the Soviet Union in the hopes of starting World War III.

Issues #19-20: Giant, intelligent rats try to kill Airboy. Yep.

Issues #21-23: Davy and Skywolf head to the Arctic to find their friend (and Davy’s mentor), Saburo Hirota, who was on a plane that went down. Also on the plane is a Russian defector, so Soviet forces are also hunting the plane.

Issue #24: The Heap is in New Jersey, enraged by toxic waste dumping, and Davy talks him down before he can do any real damage.

Valkyrie #1-3: Val becomes a fashion model, and her new celebrity attracts the attention of Steelfox, a Soviet soldier who kidnaps her and puts her on trial for war crimes during the Second World War.

Issue #25: Airboy takes the Heap to northern California, where he helps a protestor angry about waste dumping in the Russian River.

Airmaidens Special: Valkyrie, along with two other female adventuresses, fight zombies. Like you do.

Issues #26-30: Misery resurrects an enemy killed in the first story arc and gives him an army of the sentient rats, and they wreak havoc at Airboy’s California home.

Airboy and Mr. Monster Special: Dixon isn’t involved in this story, in which a cartoonist contemplates suicide. It’s fun!

Issues #31-32: Villains are going to release a deadly virus over northern California, and only Airboy can stop them!

Airboy Meets the Prowler: A crossover with a character created by Tim Truman and John K. Snyder III. It’s a nice-looking book, but fairly incosequential.

Issues #33-37: Airboy, Valkyrie, and Skywolf all return to Bogantilla, where the president (the former leader of the revolution) is beset on all sides. Are our heroes even on the same side?

The Airfighters Meet Sgt. Strike: This is a story of the original Airboy, set during World War II, as he and some allies try to stop the Nazis from launching a powerful new weapon.

Skywolf #1-3: It’s 1954, and Skywolf’s wife has left him, so he goes looking for adventure … and ends up at Dien Bien Phu.

Issue #38: Birdie crashed in the Bogantillan jungle, so Davy and Valkyrie go looking for it.

Issue #39: Davy goes to an air show. Adventure ensues!

Issues #40-43: Davy sells weapons to an Arab country, but he wants to make sure they’re used just for that country’s defense. Of course, they end up in Afghanistan, and Davy goes into the country to stop them being used nefariously. It does not go well.

Issue #44: Davy’s head of security visits his father (with Davy in tow). All is explained in the comic!

Valkyrie #1-3: Val tries to rescue a kidnap victim and is kidnapped herself. The culprit: an immortal dude who likes enslaving women. He bites off more than he can chew with Valkyrie!

Issue #45: Birdie is having mechanical problems, so Davy … takes drugs and goes on a psychedelic head trip to fix her? COMICS ARE AWESOME!

Issues #46-49: A flashback story, as we learn how Valkyrie ended up in Misery’s clutches.

Issue #50: After learning about his father’s past, Airboy confronts Misery in another dimension, and the series ends on a cliffhanger!

Of course, because this is a 1980s comic, the stories don’t fit into arcs perfectly. Dixon sets up future stories nicely in the current ones he’s telling, and some subplots – Davy and Valkyrie’s bumpy romance, most notably – are spread out in smaller portions throughout the series. But those are the major stories, and Dixon does a good job blending the supernatural with the “realistic.” Misery might be a major presence in the first arc, but there’s no shortage of tin-pot dictators in the world and revolutionaries fighting against them. Misery might have placed a World War II bomber carrying an atomic bomb into suspended animation and brought it back in the present day, but Dixon notes in his introduction to that volume that Truman did bluff the Russians with a threat of a bombing even though the U.S. didn’t have any others (in Airboy’s world, of course, the U.S. did have another one), and in the 1980s, American-Russian relations were tense, so a unauthorized bomber flying over Soviet airspace would be a problem. Both solo Heap stories are about environmental destruction, and sure, Alan Moore did it first, but that doesn’t mean Dixon’s stories about it are any less effective. Valkyrie might have been kidnapped by an immortal dude, but the story is still about trafficking and toxic masculinity (although Dixon, being a good conservative, probably hates that phrase). Not too many comics, then or now, do as good a job as using supernatural elements but still being very grounded in the real world. It’s impressive.

If we ignore the supernatural elements (which are fun, to be sure, but they’re still just fairly standard supernatural elements), Dixon does a marvelous job showing the complexities of the world and how difficult it is to navigate it and still come out a “hero.” Davy, naturally, is the hero of the book, but he’s certainly not adverse to getting his hands dirty. His companions are even less inclined to be nice, but Dixon never judges them, because in his world, some people need to be killed. However, within the stories, we often get far more nuance than we might expect from not only a comic book, but a comic written by a dude who, as noted, actually thinks Ronald Reagan is a great president. Hilariously enough, when we first see the dictator of Bogantilla, he has an autographed photo of Reagan on his wall, and Dixon is certainly not portraying the general as anything but a horrible leader. As I noted above, Davy heads to Bogantilla because the rebels killed his father, who was supplying the dictator with weapons. Davy wants revenge, but he also has to come to terms with what his father was doing. Later, when we return to Bogantilla in issues #33-37, Dixon shows that overthrowing a government is a lot easier than running a country, as the rebel leader, Guillermo, has become disillusioned by the revolution and is sliding into alcohol abuse, allowing special interests to run the country – one advisor wants to increase cocaine production to ease the national debt, one wants to seek aid from the Soviets because the Americans do not trust the regime, one wants to nationalize all industry – and ignoring the plight of the people he fought to liberate. When Davy and Skywolf arrive, they meet one faction who still believes in Guillermo but needs to remain in the jungle. Skywolf kicks their military advisor, a Cuban, out of the camp, pointing out (rightly) that if they accept any aid from Communists, the Americans will be their implacable enemy (even if the rebels say they’re a “buncha Republicans,” he points out), and they’ll be forced to go to the Cubans and Soviets (although Skywolf – and Dixon – naïvely believe that American aid comes with no strings attached). Valkyrie, meanwhile, is protecting Guillermo, and she doesn’t know if Davy and his new friends want to help or hurt the president. The situation in Bogantilla is messy, and Dixon doesn’t try to paper over it with simple “good guys-vs.-bad guys” storytelling.

This is also evident when Davy gets trapped in the Arctic. The Soviets are clearly the bad guys, and they will kill the defector on the plane and anyone who stands in their way, but they’re also soldiers, and they fight honorably and retreat gracefully (and reluctantly, it’s true) when they’re beaten. When Davy goes to Afghanistan, Dixon tells us in the introduction to volume 5 that he and yronwode argued more about this arc than any other, as Dixon believed that the Afghans were noble freedom fighters trying to free themselves from the Soviet yoke. They were trying to do that, of course, but not necessarily because they believed in freedom (Dixon admits that yronwode was right about that in the intro). Still, he manages to show the sordid side of freedom fighting, as the Afghans get their arms from Davy’s company through a third party, a workaround that Dixon hints could be used nefariously (as it eventually was). Even in a cut-and-dried story like this (in Dixon’s mind, anyway), things can get complicated. In Valkyrie’s first solo story, Steelfox is clearly maniacal, but he has a point: Valkyrie flew missions for the Nazis and can be, possibly, charged with war crimes. Supposedly, she destroyed a village with hundreds of women and children in it just to terrorize the rest of Russia, and naturally, she should be punished. Even though Valkyrie clears her name, someone is held accountable, and it’s not someone we would necessarily think is capable of that sort of thing. Dixon doesn’t make it easy on us.

If anyone knew what Dixon was about back in the 1980s, they might find it unusual that he gives us two “environmental disaster” stories in this run, but I guess he was, in that regard, more like a Teddy Roosevelt conservative, in that he wanted to “conserve” land. That’s part of what makes this run so great: Dixon is hard to pin down, from the dictator who was Reagan’s buddy to Davy and the Heap taking on polluters to Dixon seeing the Afghans are freedom fighters rather than just another group trying to take away freedom (even in the 1980s, people in the Reagan/Bush government knew arming some of the rebel groups was a bad idea) to Davy literally taking drugs and Dixon seeing it as a good thing … his “classic conservatism” (basically, the less government interference in individuals’ lives, the better, but also Save the Planet!) makes him an interesting writer and Airboy a fascinating comic. Dixon doesn’t like Communists … except when they’re fighting against occupiers, like in the Dien Bien Phu story. He thinks rebels certainly ought to be armed … but maybe not by Davy’s company. The Soviets are bad … but they certainly don’t deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on them. Dixon does a very good job keeping the focus on the realpolitik he’s writing about, and it makes the book occasionally zag when we’re thinking it’s zigging, but it always follows the way the characters have been created and what they think about the world. They might learn some hard lessons, but they act according to their natures.

While the book is chock full of action and adventure, part of the reason it resonates is because of the relationships Dixon builds as he’s writing the series. Davy and Valkyrie’s romance is front and center, of course. When Valkyrie is rescued at the end of the first story, she’s obviously disoriented, but she quickly tries to seduce Davy, in a ploy that Dixon implies is simply a way for her to reconnect with the past. Davy isn’t interested, and the next time we see Valkyrie, she has moved to Manhattan to start a new life. They realize that they are attracted to each other, but Davy, in issue #12, tells her he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to get involved, because she’s holding onto the ghost of his father. She keeps trying to figure it out, but she also keeps getting sucked into Davy’s adventures (and having her own). She overreacts to Davy being in her apartment when the giant rats attack, as he took her roommate, Marlene, out on a date (and Marlene kisses him very pointedly, even though he doesn’t show much interest in her), and then she has some solo adventures for a time. When Davy is injured during the assault on the monastery in issue #30, Valkyrie shows up at the hospital, and they finally seem to be moving in a romantic direction (they actually kiss, which is a watershed in their relationship). However, Davy gets kidnapped by the dudes who steal the deadly virus, and they take alone his nurse as well, so when Davy saves the day, she kisses him on live television, which Valkyrie sees. In a pique, she accepts the job protecting the president of Bogantilla, which, of course, means her path crosses Davy’s once more. As it often does in this kind of fiction, a brush with death makes them realize they really do love each other, and in issue #38, they finally hook up. Dixon doesn’t do too much with them after that – they head off to an air show in the next issue, then Davy zips off to Afghanistan. Valkyrie has her own adventure with the immortal trafficker, and then we get the weird issue where they take drugs to fix Birdie (it sort of makes sense!), and then the final issues are the flashback to World War II. In issue #50, Valkyrie can’t go with Davy to Misery’s realm, because she suffers from too much PTSD from her imprisonment there, which makes sense. So, while they’re a couple for the final 12 issues of the run, Dixon doesn’t move their relationship forward too much. Presumably he would have if the series had continued.

Dixon writes this romance fairly realistically, which is nice. (I mean, as realistically as you can write a romance between an ex-Nazi who’s been in suspended animation for 40 years and who used to love her romantic interest’s father and is now digging the son, and there’s a whole quasi-incest thing going on, as Valkyrie could have easily been Davy’s mother if not for the aforementioned suspended animation caesura in her life. But let’s move past that, people!) True love, in this case, never runs smoothly. Valkyrie wants Davy because he represents stability (as I noted above), but she understands that and realizes she can’t use that to build a romance. Davy, for his part, is attracted to her partly, it feels, because it’s a way for him to connect to his father, which Dixon doesn’t push too hard (because it gets back to that weird incest undertone that no one in mainstream comics was interested in exploring). Valkyrie is clearly written as “older” than Davy (yes, she’s much older in absolute years, but she didn’t “age’ in the traditional sense for several decades), and he doesn’t have much experience at all with women (he basically admits he’s a virgin, as we can see below), so there’s that “Mrs. Robinson” vibe going on with Valkyrie. (Neither Davy nor Valkyrie is ever given an actual age, but it seems like Valkyrie was born around 1919-1920, so she would have been about 26/27 when she was taken by Misery – so not that much older than Davy, but still a not insignificant gap, considering how much she had lived before her disappearance.) Dixon never makes it easy for them, because they do have other things going on in their lives and they do have to work through their feelings, and part of the brilliance of the writing in Airboy is how Dixon does allow the romance to move slowly, with many fits and starts. He never pushes it, so by the time the two do get together, it feels well-earned.

Another thing that makes the book so good is the back-up stories. The back-ups begin in issue #9 and continue for most of the run, and they’re very keen. Dixon writes most of them, and he fills in the backstories of some cast members, most notably Skywolf. Larry Wolfe was another old Hillman character that Dixon resurrected, and after bringing him back early in the series to help Davy (he appears in issue #2, when we learn he’s been keeping Birdie, David Nelson’s semi-sentient plane, safe for him), he uses him for a while as Davy’s ally before filling out his life post-World War II in the back-up stories. Dixon begins in 1948, with another Hillman creation, Link Thorne, in a Nationalist Chinese prison because he was delivering food to starving Communists. The American government doesn’t care to rescue him because the Nationalists say he was running guns to the Communists, so Riot O’Hara, another old Hillman character, enlists Skywolf to help her break him out. They rescue Link (he shows up in the “regular” series as well), and Dixon continues to chronicle Skywolf’s adventures, usually with Riot. He fights opium dealers in Tokyo, he encounters yetis in Tibet, and he fights the Klan in East Texas. He gets in a gunfight with Communists in Guatemala and gets shot down over Korea, ending up in a North Korean prison camp before escaping and fighting at Chosin. He reunites with Riot in Hawaii and fights gangsters, and it’s in this story that he finally hooks up with the fiery beauty. This is a significant moment in Skywolf’s life, as Dixon gives him something else to care about besides the adventure. Still, he goes to California and finds out a television studio is using his likeness (because it’s not copyrighted). He goes to Istanbul and teams up with treasure hunter Jack Gatling (who got him involved in the Tibetan escapade), with whom he flies to the Arabian desert looking for the Colossus of Rhodes. Of course he ends up in the middle of a war! He goes back to Korea in 1953 with Riot and is tasked to smuggle an atomic bomb out of the country before the Communists get it. At the end of this story, he asks Riot to marry him, and she says yes. The next few stories are completely different in tone, as Skywolf has a bachelor party and then settles into suburban life in Glendale, California. It appears he’s having trouble adjusting to a life without adventure, but when he decides he’s all in and suggests children, it’s Riot who abandons him and disappears. This leads to the Skywolf miniseries, in which he drowns his sorrows with Jach Gatling before Gatling convinces him to forget about Riot by going on another treasure quest … in Vietnam. In 1954. Yeah, it’s a bad idea, and Skywolf ends up at Dien Bien Phu, where Jack is killed and Skywolf has to fight alongside an old enemy, a Nazi villain who has tried to kill him several times in the past (Skywolf ends up in yet another prison camp in this story, too). He’s back in the U.S. the next time we see him, recuperating in a veterans’ hospital (and Dixon, interestingly enough, throws in some social commentary about the way the government treats its veterans), and he goes home with his mother (who, in the “present” of the main book, is a hilariously cantankerous old lady who takes no shit from anyone). While he’s working on his mother’s farm, he chases bank robbers into Mexico (they shot his plane out of the sky, so he’s a bit peeved at them). That’s the last we see of him in the back-up stories, and when he re-appears in the 1980s, he’s living on an isolated Florida Key. Dixon never brought Riot back, and I wonder if he would have had the series gone on. What’s interesting about the back-up stories is not only does Dixon show us a man changing as he gets older, but he never allows the reader to be comfortable with their ideas of right and wrong. Skywolf lives in a complicated world, and Dixon doesn’t shy away from that. Even if Dixon was a staunch conservative, Link delivers food to starving Communists and the Nationalists, the allies of the U.S., imprison him unjustly. The Communists in Vietnam might be a bit bloodthirsty, but Dixon makes it clear that the French and the mercenaries they employ have no business being in the country, and Skywolf is clearly disgusted by the entire thing. He gives us a well-done female character, Riot, who defers to no man but is also unable to imagine a life where she might have to compromise. It’s too bad that Riot was never seen again after her brief domestic dalliance, because she makes quite an impression even though she’s not in the book all that much. The back-up stories might be short, but Dixon packs a lot of action and character development into them, and they’re a nice treat to go along with the main story. (Dixon doesn’t always focus on Skywolf. There’s a story about his dad, fighting for Pancho Villa in 1915, while Len Wein and Carmine Infantino do a story about the Heap – his origins and how he helps his family out through the years. There’s also an odd one-off set in World War II that is supposed to be somewhat of a parody of actual 1940s comics, complete with somewhat racist depictions of the Japanese. It’s … bizarre.)

The art on the book goes a long way to making this as good a comic as it is, as well. Before Image shifted the paradigm, the stereotype about independent comics was that they were a bit rough, art-wise. This stereotype is ridiculous, as we all know (just in this series, admittedly a very small sample size, we find Dreadstar, which started at Marvel before moving to First; Elementals; Grendel; The Maze Agency; and Zot! … and those are just comics I own in single issue format, because I have plenty more examples coming down the pike), but it nevertheless persists. These companies didn’t always get the top names, true, because those people went to Marvel or DC, but they got a lot of very talented artists who wanted to hone their skills, some of whom had worked for the Big Two, but in somewhat minor capacities. Eclipse and the other indies gave them opportunities to hone their skills and work on longer-form storytelling, and yronwode and Mullaney (and possibly Dixon, although I don’t know how much input he had) were able to assemble a very strong group of artists. After Truman worked on the first two issues, Stan Woch came on board, and his work on the book might be the best of his career. Woch, who was in his mid-twenties when he started on the book, had worked for DC for a couple of years and drew a few issues of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, but he certainly wasn’t a star. He drew 22 issues of Airboy, and it’s very impressive stuff, especially when Blyberg inks him. Woch gives us terrific attention to detail, and his and Blyberg’s lines are beautifully brushed so that there’s a softness to them, which adds nice nuance to the drawings even when Woch is drawing action scenes. Inking is fun to look at, because it can subtly change the penciler’s work, so when Nyberg inks Woch, the lines are a bit harder-edged, which, ironically, is when Dixon is writing his werewolf story, so the wolf’s fur looks a bit too bristly under Nyberg’s harder inks (Blyberg does ink the werewolf in a few panels, and it’s interesting how much lusher his fur looks). Woch also made Valkyrie drop-dead gorgeous and far too classy for Davy, which played nicely into the tension that Dixon wrote into their relationship. Truman first drew Davy and made him look fairly young, and Woch ran with that. Woch, however, was the first artist to draw Valkyrie (Truman drew her in one panel, but she’s still in suspended animation), and he gave her a slight world-weariness in her body language to imply that she’s older than Davy, and it’s a nice touch. It’s also interesting to compare Woch’s pencils in the Afghanistan story, when Villagrán is inking him, as the lines are much harder and Woch’s figures look just a bit stiffer. I don’t know if Blyberg was working on something else or if Dixon wanted Villagrán because the Afghan story requires more of an edge, but the inks do fit the story a bit better than Blyberg’s probably would.

Woch was the closest thing the book had to a regular artist, but the many other artists did excellent work, too. Randall has a lot of fun with the giant rats, which he gets to draw in two different stories. He and Kim DeMulder bring a slightly more grounded feel to the book, and both Randall’s pencils and DeMulder’s inks are a bit more meat-and-potatoes than Woch and Blyberg’s work. Kwapisz gets to draw the issue in which Davy and Valkyrie finally have sex, and his two-page sequence is stunning – he uses delicate lines and lots of spot blacks to set a quiet mood, while Steve Oliff colors it in the softest light possible, making it a beautiful idyll in the middle of a generally wall-to-wall action comic:

Colón brings his more angular line to the book for the World War II flashback, which is not a bad idea, as he makes David look a bit older than Davy (which he would have been) and Valkyrie a bit edgier, as she’s only recently decided to stop being a Nazi. Colón draws a terrific Misery, too, which is nice, and he always seems to do a good job creating ugly, evil men, which helps when you’re doing a story about Nazis. In issue #50, Eclipse managed to rope in the Kuberts, who weren’t quite the stars they would be soon, and Adam’s inks and colors over Andy’s pencils are a treat, as we get a hardened Valkyrie who’s still gorgeous but has been through more wars than she’d care to remember, plus a Davy who has aged since we first saw him but is still youthful enough to be optimistic about facing Misery alone. The Kuberts’ pencils and inks are a bit rougher than we’ve seen on the book so far, so Misery’s realm is a dirty and depressing place, plus the monsters are pretty creepy. It’s just another example of Eclipse getting a good artist (or, in this case, artists) just when they’re on the cusp of something bigger, but they still need seasoning.

Impressively, the artists on the back-up stories are quite good, as well. For quite a while (through issue #32, in fact), Airboy came out every two weeks, and the main stories weren’t that long (although, as it came out twice a month, the page counts for the main stories were usually about what you’d get from a regular monthly comic). So Eclipse added back-up stories beginning in issue #9 (when they raised the price of the comic from 50 cents – for just the short main story – to $1.25), and they lined up some very good artists. Larry Elmore, Bill Jaaska, Tom Lyle, Graham Nolan, and Alberto Maldonado all do good work, but the highlights are Dan Spiegle’s stories and Infantino’s Heap story. Spiegle has excellent storytelling skills, and his thick, bold inks give the stories powerful heft. He draws the story in which Skywolf and Riot get together, and his beat-up Skywolf is excellent, as is the tenderness Riot shows him while she’s patching him up and when she asks him to stay the night. He also draws the story in which Riot leaves Skywolf, and his thick inks make our hero’s despair look all the more real. Infantino, who was in his early 60s when he drew the Heap story and was out of fashion in the comics art world, packs his panels with wonderful details and corpulent Nazis, while his Heap looks shaggier than most of the artists who draw him, turning him more into a creature of the swampiest parts of the world. Pacella’s strong inks and Oliff’s colors add more depth and roughness to Infantino’s art that I’ve usually seen, which fits the story very well. Meanwhile, the Airboy specials and ancillary mini-series have people like Gulacy, with his dead sexy women making him a good choice to draw a Valkyrie mini-series; Anderson, whose smooth, flowing lines fit into the wild adventure Valkyrie goes on in her second mini-series; Snyder, whose manic style works with the action-packed story of Airboy meeting the Prowler; and Villagrán, whose grittier style is good for morally murky story in Airboy Versus the Airmaidens. There are only a few places where the art doesn’t look quite up to snuff, but they’re few and far between.

Airboy went on hiatus after issue #50 – in that issue, apparently, yronwode wrote in the letters page that it was going away for a bit for the usual reasons: finding an artist, falling sales, and controversial stories (the Afghanistan one, it seems). Colón was supposed to be the artist going forward, I guess, but he had been too slow drawing issues #46-49, so that was that. Of course, not too long after the series went on hiatus, Eclipse itself went away, so the point became moot. Dixon revived the title a few years ago and managed to put out issues #51 and #52, but it was a far cry from the book’s heyday and it doesn’t seem like more is coming. Obviously, anytime a comic that ends without a good resolution due to external forces, it’s frustrating, and that’s what we get with Airboy, but Dixon did, after all, have 50 issues plus the spin-offs to tell a long story, and he did a superb job. Airboy is a thrilling adventure story, a pretty darned good romance, and a comic that isn’t afraid to examine the world as it is and maybe come to some interesting conclusions. Despite Dixon’s (and yronwode’s) political leanings, he’s a writer first, and he never really lets his politics get in the way of a good story (you could argue he does just a little in the Afghanistan story, but not egregiously). He and the cadre of good artists who worked on this book bring this world to life wonderfully, and while Airboy is always an exciting read, it will also make you stop and think a bit, which is never a bad thing.

I mentioned up the top that I bought the trade paperbacks that IDW put out in the mid-teens, and those are very nice … but they appear to be out of print. You can find them digitally, though, on Amazon and possibly elsewhere, too. It’s a shame – the IDW productions are well done, with Dixon’s introductions (which maybe are included in the digital editions?) and very nice, thick and creamy paper stock. But if you need to read them digitally, that’s fine too, because it’s all about the reading experience! Eclipse put out some very good comics back in the 1980s, and while this might not be its crown jewel (they published a little thing called Miracleman, after all), it’s still a fantastic comic. Would I steer you wrong?

Hey, take a look at the archives! You know you want to!