Superheroes Behaving Badly XIV: Blackhawk

Sometimes heroes behave badly because writers find themselves in a corner and don't know what to do with them (hence cases like Obsidian, Hawk, and Hal Jordan). In other cases, the writer may intend to use their malfeasance to make some point or to provide a platform from which to describe the essential human condition (hence corruptions like those of Speedy and the Golden Age Ray).

In other cases, a writer may elicit corrupt behavior from a hero to build that character's credibility, or because the logic of the character compels or suggests a potential for such corruption.

In the case of Blackhawk, during his tenure in the short-lived Action Comics Weekly anthology title, writer Mike Grell acted from a combination of the latter two motives. Grell asked the question "What becomes of a larger-than-life World War II fighter pilot when he runs out of wars?"

Grell answered this question with another Superhero Behaving Badly.

Grit and Credibility

The aftermath of the Marvel Revolution in comics left DC with a stable of aging properties with a credibility problem. Perhaps unfairly, observers might describe almost any of DC's heroes as "overgrown Boy Scouts," "too perfect," "aloof," or "not realistic" (just how realistic can you make a man who flies, anyway?)

As a result, comics in general began making superheroes more vulnerable, more troubled, and often downright neurotic. This "bringing-down-to-earth" of heroes served as the normal superheroic model in the seventies. In the eighties it would accelerate.

For DC, in the post-Crisis years, a superhero might behave very badly indeed. Consider, for instance, that it considered and used Green Lantern Guy Gardner as a hero but involved that stalwart in fights with dozens of other superheroes, conflicts that originated not from mind control or other formulaic pretexts for making heroes fight, but the simple abrasiveness of his personality and his rich portfolio of other character flaws.

Into such an environment did Mike Grell create his vision of DC's inherited hero Blackhawk.

A Soldier Between Wars

Note in the illustration below that Blackhawk bears the stigmata of drunkenness and lack of sleep; his face sags; a smile that does not include his eyes looks a bit like a snarl.

Nor does his behavior do much to commend him as a hero. Instead, it provokes the reader to wish a hero would appear and club him senseless, although this would not, in Blackhawk's sad state, require too much. The object of his insult took care of the matter herself, as demonstrated in the panel, above, where Blackhawk lies on his back on the floor, yet continues to abuse the woman.

Thus does a hardboiled version of Blackhawk respond to a female's request for help.

Grell's storyline asked a question: What does a war hero do without a war? Grell himself flew planes in the Viet Nam War before taking on art assignments for DC Comics, and this experience shaped Grell pieces like Warlord in the mid-seventies. Some of what he gave to his take on Blackhawk may have reflected what he saw in the culture of pilots in the seventies, a culture that probably hadn't changed much since the forties.

Post-Viet Nam history records a number of pilots who failed to adjust to a civilian life that offered few thrills or other rewards. Some fighter pilots, ill-suited to a civilian's life, took to high-risk professions like smuggling, a profession where a pilot could continue to fly and even occasionally skirmish with hostile air power (though now the DEA would offer a more likely enemy than a foreign power).

The fall of the Nazi empire that had spawned Blackhawk and his similarly-attired peers left him in similar straits. Blackhawk, therefore, had taken to an adventurous life that included such sidelines as smuggling. Between assignments, the character coped poorly with the granddaddy of leisure problems, and filled the idle hours with booze, geishas, hookers, and the occasional fight.

Drunk, Nude, and Brawling

Early in Grell's Blackhawk sequence, one encounters Blackhawk, thoroughly sozzled, in his hotel room with geishas attempting to bathe him. Some player who objects to his activities sends goons to deal with him; the resulting scene portrays Blackhawk, in his hat and his holster and nothing else, cracking some heads in a foreign hotel suite.

Such a version of the character would not have appeared in the comics Dick Dillin drew in the sixties. The Comics Code Authority would not have let any such thing pass; one would have difficulty getting a movie for adults into a theater if it contained such a scene.

Nonetheless, such events constitute the tall tales of aging pilots and therefore provide optimal material for a post-Chaykin vision of Blackhawk. Where veterans wish to impress each other or shock outsiders, they often relate a few formulaic tales, sometimes involving fighting, but more often dealing with classic themes like The Ugliest Hooker You Ever Woke up with Who Seemed Beautiful the Night Before.

Bedhopping, Smuggling, and Other Hobbies

Since in this sequence Blackhawk did not play the role of Evil Overlord in a summer megacrossover event (perhaps as "Dark Blackhawk"), we can assume - with a small stretch of the imagination - that he still plays the role of hero. Thus, even though he might have taken to smuggling stolen goods, illegal liquor, materiel, and other contraband, he probably stops short of such goods as opium and human slaves for bordello usage. Nonetheless, the role disturbs; even if the task requires the same skills, smuggling whiskey to bloated Asian tyrants does not ring heroic in the same sense as smuggling guns to overthrow Nazi tyrants in Europe.

Similarly, his sometimes-relentless tail-chasing grows tiresome rather quickly here, just as watching the corresponding behavior in real-world males does, becoming entertaining only when it gets them into trouble.

The Never-Ending Come-on

One can attribute to heroes the trait of persistence, and Major Janos Prahaska, known also as the Blackhawk, refused to quit harrying the Axis until it lay in ruins. The same trait, however, endears somewhat less when Blackhawk persistently and vulgarly made unwanted advances to his mysterious blonde client.

A shipment of misplaced temple treasure - containing confiscated statuary and specie siezed by the Japanese from Vietnamese Buddhist temples and Catholic churches - required the services of a potential smuggler of legendary prowess, and Miss Cynthia Hastings dragged a sorry drunken wreck of the Blackhawk out of a Singapore cathouse to transport such contraband to Burma.

Sleep, sobering up, and a shave did little to incline Blackhawk to give up on his attempts to seduce the woman, evidently on the premise that a True Fighter Pilot should fear not to fly every plane he encountered, nor to bed every female he met. In anachronistic language, Blackhawk invited Miss Hastings to join the "Mile High Club," yet once again found his come-ons particularly unwelcome and unstylish.

Adducing from Human Nature

Even through all the vulgarity, pompousness, and goatlike advances, however, Blackhawk remains shrewd. His sexual advances seem mainly to fill the boring moments between wars the same way that boozing and brawling do, each in its turn.

Blackhawk contrives to transport the precious contraband in spite of the wishes of the Red Dragon, a red-haired Vietnamese smuggler of considerable power, ruthlessness, and beauty, by a combination of ruses, including playing of the jealousy of her paramour, allowing her to take liberties with his perpetually-randy self, more fussing, fighting, and the convenient use of an incoming monsoon for cover.

Miss Hastings manages to sneak in a back-door insult in her acknowledgment that Blackhawk indeed understands the strengths and weaknesses of drunks here while discussing part of Blackhawk's original plan, involving the offloading of a shipment of bootleg hooch. Said hooch, so he hopes, will invite potential pursuers to drink themselves into a worthless condition by the time Hastings and Blackhawk begin their escape.

Happy Endings All Around

A combination of circumstances, including Red Dragon's slaying of her henchman/consort, a convenient lightning strike, and a ten-seconds-past-the-last-minute arrival of the rest of the Blackhawks combine to get Cynthia and Blackhawk himself out of the Indochinese trap into which they allowed their own capture to gain access to the temple treasures.

All works out well, making this piece an Aristotelean comedy (a story where the characters get better than they deserve), since, though Blackhawk never does get to bed Miss Cynthia Hastings, his honor as a seducer remains unimpugned by the revelation that Miss Cynthia normally harkens to the name Sister Cynthia. Hastings, after all, belonged to the numerous body of supermodel-quality nuns that must have populated the forties like roaches populate tenements.

A Minor Apologia

Outside of comics, such lurid tales have a tradition, though this comes from prose potboilers, pulp novels, Spillane pieces, and many other variants. Grell's Blackhawk intends more to incline the piece towards such traditions than (say) to turn a World War II comics hero toward a life that belongs in some as-yet-unpublished William R. Burroughs novel.

Again, some characters exist in environments that do not endure. Given Blackhawk's traditional origin relating to the formation of a fighter squad composed of pilots from countries occupied by the Nazis, his adventures in this role could logically only span those years from the invasion of Poland (the triggering event) to the fall of Berlin. Thus writers using a character 44 years later might recognize the exhaustion of his original setting, project from his core concept, and arrive someplace similar to the lurid domains in which Blackhawk found himself at the end of the eighties.

Nonetheless, one can't help wishing heroes would test their hearts and backbones more than their livers (or other organs even less central to heroism).