When the Stan Lee Foundation gifted EAA with the character of Aviore, a Young Eagle-turned-superhero whose stories are meant to inspire the next generation of pilots, builders, and enthusiasts, we knew we weren’t going to be the first to use comic art to tell flying stories, only the latest.
Some of the first comic-style images of aviation predate the airplane itself. In about 1899-1900, German and French food and candy companies gave away trading cards with fanciful predictions of life in the year 2000, many of them aviation related. The French Avenue of the Opera shows an aerial traffic jam, while the German Flugmaschine in Jarhe 2000 depicts the kind of personal flying machines we’re still dreaming about today. While these early examples weren’t necessarily telling a story, they certainly showed that, even then, kids were fascinated by flight.
One of the first mainstream comic series focused on flight was Tailspin Tommy. Tommy Tompkins, the young titular hero, was a kid who was obsessed with aviation. First published as a newspaper series in 1928 — when the world was still gripped with flying fever after Lindbergh’s flight — Tommy’s aerial adventures with Three Point Airlines ran for 14 years, and were later reprinted as a series of comic books. Like so many comic book heroes today, Tommy even found his way to the big screen in two 12-episode movie serials that were released in 1934 and 1939.
In 1933, a writer and artist introduced us to The Adventures of Smilin’ Jack, written and illustrated by Zack Mosely. The hero, Jack Martin, was a pilot and adventurer who fought criminals and solved problems, inspiring young readers through a comic strip that had a remarkable near-40-year run. One of those readers was our own “smilin’” Jack J. Pelton, EAA CEO and chairman of the board, who listed the series as a favorite in his June 2018 column in EAA Sport Aviation magazine. Jack especially liked that his fictional counterpart flew GA types in many of their adventures.
“You’d be just as likely to spot a Grumman Goose or a classic Bellanca or Stinson as you would those sleek Army ‘pursuit ships,’” he wrote.
Around this same time, characters like Scorchy Smith and the surprisingly progressive Flyin’ Jenny, a young female test pilot, began to appear, as did comics like Skyroads, which focused more on aviation in general rather than a singular central hero and included “Wing Tips” sidebars that taught short aviation lessons. Of course, by the 1940s, the tone for aviation comics changed along with everything else as the world was embroiled in war.
Not surprisingly, with the advent of World War II, a lot of aviation comics shifted their focus to true stories, or at least stories that were inspired by true events. A favorite from my personal collection is issue No. 1 of an anthology series called True Aviation Comics Digest, which promises the “best true aviation comics from leading true comic books.” Published in August of 1942, it opens with a letter from no less than the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces himself, Lt. Gen. H. H. “Hap” Arnold.
“It is essential that American youth be given an opportunity at an early age to become acquainted with the basic principles and fundamental significance of modern aviation,” he wrote.
We at EAA couldn’t agree more.
That first issue of True Aviation Comics Digest tells the story of the Doolittle Raid, with some details still classified, and features lengthy segments about Jackie Cochran and a flight instructor named Peggy Lennox, along with several other tales of aviation derring-do, both in combat and in pre-war peacetime. Over the years, the title morphed into True Aviation Pictures and Stories and then True Aviation Adventures and Model Building.
This era spawned several aviation-related comics as fictional characters did their bit to inspire the youths on the home front. Bill Barnes America’s Air Ace fought the bad guys in standalone comics, novels, and in special segments in the well-known Air Trails magazine. Wings Comics introduced us to square-jawed heroes like “Suicide” Smith the Blitzkrieg Buster, while Blackhawk, created in part by comics legend Will Eisner, and his squadron mates flew their Grumman XF5F Skyrockets in action-packed stories that, at their peak, outsold everything but Superman.
While Blackhawk stayed in regular publication until 1984, and the character remains part of the overall D.C. Comics universe, with a Spielberg film in the works, a lot of the wartime comics wound down through the mid-and-late-1940s. There were a few standouts in the era, though, including titles like Bruce Gentry, which spawned a movie serial, and Steve Canyon, the weekly story of an Air Force pilot that ran for more than 41 years. Steve Canyon, written and illustrated by the famed Milton Caniff, also inspired a TV series that’s a cult favorite among aviation enthusiasts.
The late 1940s and early 1950s brought the short-lived but still much-loved Aces High, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future in the U.K. and an explosion in popularity for the long-running Adventures of Tintin in Belgium. Tintin wasn’t always aviation-centric, but airplanes and, later, spaceships, frequently played a significant role. Even the U.S. Air Force got into the act, using their character, Major Rex Riley, Aircraft Accident Investigator, to preach safety, though all branches of the service had used comic art for training purposes for years.
While Smilin’ Jack and Steve Canyon soldiered on, the next big thing in aviation comics came along in 1982, when a gifted artist and writer first introduced The Rocketeer, a Gee Bee pilot who finds himself with a jet pack, fighting Nazi saboteurs in late-1930s Los Angeles. Dave Stevens published a handful of stories, and worked extensively on the 1991 Disney film adaptation. After Stevens’ death in 2008, the character lives on in multiple limited-run comic book series. Another notable contemporary entry into the genre is a series of graphic novels by Romain Hugault, including a series called Angel Wings. Hugault’s attention to detail is exceptional, though the subject matter is occasionally a pretty serious PG-13.
And now it’s our turn.
The first issue of The Adventures of Aviore will be included with the August issue of EAA Sport Aviation magazine, and individual copies will be available around the grounds during EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2018. With this first issue, we’ve done our best to honor — and, with luck, maybe even reinvigorate — a long-standing tradition. Like his aviation-oriented predecessors, Aviore wasn’t born on a dying planet under a red sun, dosed with gamma rays, or bitten by a radioactive spider. His superpowers are things like intelligence, initiative, curiosity, and his network of friends.
Obviously, Aviore won’t be the next Superman, in terms of powers or popularity. But we do hope that he might learn a thing or two from characters like Smilin’ Jack and Tailspin Tommy and do his part to get today’s young people excited and inspired by the rich and colorful reality of aviation.
After all, it never hurts to have a superhero on your side.
This piece only just scratches the surface of the long and rich history of aviation comics. If you have a favorite aviation-related comic book or graphic novel¸ let us know by leaving a comment below.