By Ron Goulart & Gil Kane, & various (Hermes Press)
ISBN: 978-163140-397-2 (HB)
In the later 20th century, comicbook publishers worked long and hard to import their colourful wares to the more popular and commercially viable shelves of bookshops, until the eventual acceptance of the hybrid form we know now as graphic novels. Newspaper strips (and episodic humour magazines like Mad), however, had been regular fare since the 1950s.
By dint of more accessible themes and subjects, simpler page layouts and just plain bigger core readerships, comedy and action periodical serials easily translated to digest-sized book formats and sold by the bucketload to a broad base of consumers. Because of this, the likes of Peanuts, B.C., Broom Hilda, Flash Gordon, Mandrake and many others were an entertainment staple for cartoon-loving, joy-deficient kids – and adults – from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Comedies and gag books far outweighed dramas however. By the TV-saturated 1970s the era of the grand adventure strip in newspapers was all but over, although there were still a few dynamic holdouts and even some few new gems still to come.
One such was this astonishingly addictive space opera/police procedural which debuted on October 3rd 1977. The strip was created by novelist, comics scripter and strip historian Ron Goulart slightly in advance of the science fiction revival and resurgence sparked by release of Star Wars (and later continued by the legendary Archie Goodwin who all-but-sewed up the sci-fi strip genre at that time by also simultaneously authoring the Star Wars newspaper serial which premiered in 1979)…
Star Hawks was graced by the dazzlingly dynamic art of Gil Kane and blessed with an innovative format for such strips: a daily double-tier layout that allowed far bigger, bolder graphics and panel compositions than the traditional single bank of three or four frames.
The core premise was also magically simple: in our future, man has spread throughout the galaxy and now inhabits many worlds, moons and satellites. And wherever man goes there’s crime and a desperate need for policemen and peacekeepers…
As revealed in his picture and photo-packed Introduction ‘In at the Creation’, Goulart began with the working title “Space Cops†but that was eventually editorially overruled and superseded with the more dashingly euphonious and commercially vibrant Star Hawks. He goes on to describe the resistance the strip suffered from its own syndicate, the delays that meant it only launched after Star Wars set the world on fire and how he was ultimately edged out of the creative process altogether…
A brace of mass-market digest paperbacks were released whilst the strip was still running, and at the end of the 1980s, four comicbook-sized album collections were published by Blackthorne, but these are all now out-of-print and hard to acquire, so let’s be thankful for this first sturdy hardback archival edition…
This stirring tome is printed in landscape format with each instalment fitting neatly onto a page: thus the black and white art (almost original publication size) is clean, crisp and tight as Book 1 steams straight in with the premiere episode from October 4th 1977 by introducing the villainous Raker and his sultry, sinister boss child-of-privilege Ilka, scouring the slums and ruins of alien world Esmeralda for a desperate girl plagued by dark, dangerous visions…
Enter Rex Jaxan and burly Latino ladykiller Chavez: two-fisted law-enforcing police officers on the lookout for trouble, who promptly save the lass from slavers only to become embroiled in a dastardly plot to overthrow the local Emperor by scurrilous arms merchants. Also debuting in that initial tale is the cops’ boss Alice K. Benyon (far more than just a sexy romantic foil for He-Hunk Jaxan, and an early example of a competent woman actually in charge), the awesome space station “Hoosegow†and Sniffer, the snarkiest, sulkiest, snappiest robo-dog in the galaxy. The mechanical mutt gets all the best lines…
Barely pausing for breath, the star-born Starsky and Hutch (that’s Goulart’s take on them, not mine) are in pursuit of an appalling new weapons system developed to topple the military dictatorship of Empire 13 – the “Dustman†process (beginning on November 15th 1977). Before long however the search for the illegal and appalling WMD develops into a full-on involvement in what should have stayed a local matter – civil war…
The next sequence (running from March 17th to June 19th 1978) opens with the pair investigating the stupendous resort satellite Hotel Maximus, with Alice K. along to bolster their undercover image. On Maximus every floor holds a different daring delight – from dancing to dinosaur wrangling to Alpine adventure – but the return of the malevolent Raker heralds a whole new type of trouble as he is revealed to be an agent of the pan-galactic cartel of criminals known only as The Brotherhood.
Moreover, the Maximus is the site of their greatest coup – a plot to mind-control the universe’s richest and most powerful citizens. So pernicious are these villains that the Brotherhood can even infiltrate and assault Hoosegow itself…
Foiling the raiders, Jaxan and Chavez quickly go on the offensive, hunting the organisation as a new epic begins on 20th June (which frustratingly leaves this initial collection paused on a tense cliffhanger). The hunt takes them to pesthole planet Selva: a degraded world of warring tribes and monstrous mutations, where ambitiously dogged new recruit Kass seeks to distinguish himself, even as on Hoosegow the Brotherhood is deadly and persistent and new leader Master Jigsaw has a plan to destroy the Star Hawks from within…
Wrapping up the starry-eyed wonderment is the first part of Daniel Herman’s biographical assessment ‘Gil Kane: Bringing a Comic Book Sensibility to Comic Strips’…
The Star Hawks strip ran until 1981, garnering a huge and devoted audience, critical acclaim and a National Cartoonists Society Award for Kane (1977 Story Comic Strip Award). It is quite simply one of the most visually exciting, rip-roaring and all-out fabulous sci-fi sagas in comics history and should be part of every action fan’s permanent collection. These tales are a “must-have†item for every thrill-seeking child of the stars and fan of the classic space age
© 1977, 1978, 2017 United Features Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.