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According to Kane, in a 1978 Comics Journal interview: "I got a call from Ron Goulart, who told me he'd been having some talks with Flash Fairfield, who is the art editor of the comics at [the newspaper syndicate] NEA, and they wanted to see me about going to work on that strip. I met with them at that time. Ron had done about two weeks of material, but it was very far from where we went with it. So we reworked the material, and I'm very strong ... on romance and lyricism, and I started to advance the cause of that kind of material and make it less satirical and more of a classic[-style] adventure strip. [For the hero,] originally I had James Coburn in mind. ... The hero's friend, Chavez, was modeled after a bald-headed Victor McLaglen."
The format the team pushed for was unique for newspaper syndication: the daily strip was laid out in two tiers. Each daily was twice as deep as a normal daily strip. This format allowed artist Kane great flexibility in his layouts, but it did hinder NEA's efforts to sign on papers to carry the strip. The strip ran daily and Sunday for three and a half years, for a total of 1,252 strips - in the end, the dailies had gone to a standard single-tier format, and the writing had been taken over by the great Archie Goodwin, who also wrote the Star Wars newspaper strip (as well as a million other things).
My local papers didn't carry the strip in the 70s, but I did pick up the two paperback collections published by Ace/Tempo in 1980/81, and read many of the installments in the 80s when Hawks was reprinted in early issues of Amazing Heroes magazine. I love Kane's depiction of the series universe and the stories are fun and fast-paced.
I know that Hermes Press has reprinted the entire run of the strips in a single volume, Star Hawks The Complete Series
, but according to the customer reviews on Amazon, the art reproduction may not be as good as it could be, and I'm hesitant to shell out for the (rather pricey) book, if it doesn't look very good - especially as Kane's art is what I love best about the strip.
I have an innate love for any setting where the hero has a sword in one hand and a ray gun in the other.
ReplyDeleteVery Nice! Great find! Thanks for this!
ReplyDeleteWow, I never got to see this either. I would have LOVED it! The only science fiction strip that aired in my local papers was the Star Trek one, which started right after The Motion Picture. I didn't see Goodwin's Star Wars strip, but I did enjoy his run on the monthly SW comic from Marvel.
ReplyDeleteThis looks really, really awesome. I love the splashy cover of the Comic Reader, he really looks like James Coburn!
Thanks for post...another cool thing to try and track down!
Gordon Long
I had two issues of the Star Hawks comic book, which was essentially reprinting the daily strips in color. But then, I've always enjoyed Gil Kane's art.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Christopher. As much as I love this type of stuff I've never been familiar with Star Hawks, aside from some brief coverage in Starlog when I was a kid. (Btw, Howard Chaykin's Cody Starbuck--a tad earlier but kinda similar--might make a good topic for a future post.)
ReplyDeleteI have been a Star Hawks fan from Day 1. I truly think it was some of Gil Kane's most creative work. The amount of thought and detail he put into each daily strip was truly amazing. I have the Hermes hardcover and must agree that it did not live up to it's potential. They insisted on publishing the entire collection in one volume, thereby running each strip in too small of a format. I would have gladly paid twice as much to have them split it into two volumes and double the size of each strip. Get it if you can buy it at a discount, but don't pay full price.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone have the Blackthorne Star Hawks reprints? Do you know the dimensions of the books and page counts? And how many strips per page (and dimensions)? I'm trying to figure out if those books print the strips larger than the Hermes Press or Ace/Tempo editions.
ReplyDeleteThere were 4 BLACKTHORNE editions of STAR HAWKS, the first of them released in 1985. Format was two strips per page, 80 pages per issue. They wre great! So at a convention where Ron Goulart was in attendance, I got him to autograph these books, and he told me that he had never seen them- in fact- the strip was being published without permission, and no arrangement for these reprints had been authorized... sad to say, I'm the reason the Blackthorne editions disappeared!
ReplyDeleteHappy to report now, of course, that new editions of STAR HAWKS are available!!