Number 1866: Enter Spacehawk

Last Friday I showed you a Carl Burgos story from Target Comics #5, and today the story that makes the issue so valuable. Basil Wolverton’s Spacehawk is introduced.

“The Creeping Death from Neptune” has been reprinted several times (I have three or four of the reprints in my own collection), but these are scans from the original, which appeared on newsstands in mid-1940. Spacehawk’s mask didn’t last for long, and when it was gone readers found Spacehawk to be a guy who looked a lot like many other comic book heroes of the age, even if in the strip in its early days the creatures Spacehawk encountered — besides a few pretty Earth girls — were as alien as Wolverton’s incredible imagination could make them. In its entry on the character, Toonopedia mentions letters to the editor from parents upset by their children seeing such grotesquerie. While Spacehawk eventually was brought to Earth to fight the enemies of America, the aliens Wolverton drew didn’t get any handsomer.

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