Worst Cover Ever: When Reboots Go Horribly Awry

The comics of the 1940's were home to a legion of two-fisted, axis-smashing patriots. Although many wore colorful costumes and possessed impressive superpowers, others, like the Blackhawk Squadron, had only their bravery and bravado. Ace pilots of various nationalities, the Blackhawks flew the skies of World War II, gunning down enemy planes as they shouted their war cry of "Hawkaaaaaaw"...eventually becoming so popular, they earned their own radio series and movie serial.

However, as always, things changed and the Blackhawks (and other World War II characters) gave way to new genres. Most of the displaced war characters faded away entirely, but others...like the Blackhawks...continued on by awkwardly conforming to whatever fads breezed through the 1950's pop cultural scene. As horror and science fiction comics became all the rage, the hapless Blackhawks found themselves battling an absurd parade of Lovecraftian monsters, flying cavemen, or giant Communist robots.

The final indignity of the Blackhawks came in 1967, when it appeared that superhero comics were here to stay and the nation was in the campy grip of the Batman TV series. In a desperate, last-ditch effort to save the flagging Blackhawk title, the once-proud WWII aviators were transformed into a team of astonishingly lame superheroes on the cover of Blackhawk #230....a cover that instantly became the poster child for every ill-advised, half-baked reboot before or since.

Mocked as "out-of-date has-beens" by Batman (!) and (then) President Lyndon Baines Johnson (!!!), the Blackhawks decided to get with the times by becoming a team of superheroes...all of whom looked more like badly-drawn adults heading to a Halloween party than anything cool-meisters Batman and LBJ would approve of. And, yes, those are tiny ears adorning the costume of Chuck "The Listener". Ironically, the only character to come off well on this otherwise dignity-free cover would be "Dr. Hands", a.k.a. "Chop Chop", the Blackhawks' sidekick who'd previously been portrayed as an offensive Asian caricature.

Mercifully, the "New Blackhawk Era" lasted only a handful of issues, allowing the Blackhawks to once again revert to their original uniforms and take to the skies...if only for a mere two issues before the title was finally cancelled for good.  

But at least they went out on their own terms.  Hawkaaawwwww!

Comments

[Pat Curley]

It's an oddity, because the artwork on the cover isn't all that bad (aside from Chuck's pajamas), but at the same time, it just screams, "This is going to suck!"

The sad part is that DC probably missed out on an opportunity to place the Blackhawks back in the WWII era in the early 1960s, when nostalgia for that era was very high. They did do some backup features (I think they were called "War Diaries" that placed the individual members back in WWII, but the main stories were generally the monster of the month club.

[suedenim]

It's curious how the Blackhawks, as one of the few Golden Age features to survive more or less uninterrupted well into the Silver Age, suffered for that in the end.

It seems totally natural *now* that you'd want to set a Blackhawk feature in WWII. But at the time, of course, Blackhawk wasn't a "period" feature at all....

[rob!]

What a sad, sad moment for a fine bunch of heroes. Thank God Evanier and Spiegle got a chance to do the Blackhawks right many years later.

That said, I wish Underoos had made a "Listener" set--jammies with big ears on 'em!

[greenblade]

Some of them don't look that bad.
Two of them have an armored look which might
go over OK.

Two other ones look like paramilitary/mercenary types, not exactly an unknown modern concept.

Marvel had two leaper characters, Toad and Batroc (although both were bad guys), and the Hulk jumped around.

The guy with the ears, though...

[David E Martin]

Olaf's superball-equipped shoes got my fellow 11-year-olds and I wondering how we could make them for ourselves. Unfortunately / fortunately none of use could figure out how to make rigid slip-ons with hemispherical pits in which to glue the superballs.