Airboy Archives Vol 1 Preview

$ 2 9 . 9 9 • W W W. I D W P U B L I S H I N G . C O M
Cov e r by
Timothy Truman
O r i g i n a l Se r i es E d i ts by
Timothy Truman
Co l le c t i o n E d i ts by
J usti n Ei si n ge r and
A lo n zo S i mo n
Co l le c t i o n D e s i g n by
G i l b e rto L a zc a n o
A I R B OY # 1
A I R B OY # 2
A I R B OY # 3
A I R B OY # 4
o n w i n gs o f d e ath
the wolf and the phoenix
m isery loves com pany
assault on villa miserio
J U LY 1 5 , 1 9 8 6
PAGE 8
J U LY 2 9 , 1 9 8 6
PAGE 22
AUGUST 12, 1986
PAGE 36
AUGUST 26, 1986
A I R B OY # 9
A I R B OY # 1 0
A I R B OY # 1 1
A I R B OY # 1 2
b o dy co u n t !
to oth a n d c l aw
i am birdie
g o n e to te xas
P A G E 12 0
NOVEMBER 18, 1986
PA G E 14 4
DECEMBER 1, 1986
P A G E 16 8
DECEMBER 15, 1986
NOVEMBER 4, 1986
ISBN: 978-1-61377-900-2
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IDW founded by Ted Adams, Alex Garner, Kris Oprisko, and Robbie Robbins
PAGE 50
P A G E 19 2
17 16 15 14
Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher
Greg Goldstein, President & COO
Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist
Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief
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AIRBOY ARCHIVES, VOLUME 1. FEBRUARY 2014. FIRST PRINTING. Airboy © 2014 Chuck Dixon. © 2014 Idea and Design Works, LLC. The IDW logo is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IDW Publishing,
a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe St., San Diego, CA 92109. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes,
none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Printed in Korea. IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork.
Originally published by Eclipse Comics as AIRBOY issues #1–16.
A I R B OY # 5
A I R B OY # 6
A I R B OY # 7
A I R B OY # 8
m isery takes a holi day
SEPTEMBER 9, 1986
bac k i n th e u . s . a .
pa rt y t i m e
d own i n the dark ness
PAGE 64
SEPTEMBER 23, 1986
PAGE 78
OCTOBER 7, 1986
PAGE 92
OCTOBER 21, 1986
A I R B OY # 1 3
A I R B OY # 1 4
A I R B OY # 1 5
A I R B OY # 1 6
tag-te am
a barrel full of sharks
caribbean rampage pt1
carribean rampage pt2
P A G E 216
JANUARY 27, 1987
PAGE 240
FEBRUARY 10, 1987
PAGE 264
FEBRUARY 27, 1987
JANUARY 12, 1987
PA G E 10 6
PAGE 288
Wh y A i r b oy ?
It was the Eighties and the direct market was blowing up. Comic book
shops were popping up everywhere in strip malls and main streets and
malls. Sales were humming and not just for Marvel and DC. Dozens of
independent companies were rising. It was a growing boom and
competition, real competition, was fierce.
Eclipse Comics was unique even among the crowded field of start-up
publishers. They’d been around longer having practically created the
independent market in 1978 with Sabre, the first graphic novel ever
published in the USA. Eclipse was a throwback to an age of comics
when redundant publishing was practiced. Simply put, redundant
publishing is finding something that sells and printing the hell out of it
before the trend dies and then jumping onto the next trend. Eclipse was
adverse to no genre. Horror, science fiction, funny animals, detectives,
good girl art, adventure, westerns and mixes of the all the above were
grist for their mill. The only proviso was that the material not be stale
re-treads. There had to be a twist in the tale, a fresh hook or unusual
outlook. The house style was no style. Wild and wooly was the only
rule. They published avant garde material but it was without pretension
or posing. This was a publisher that was as at home with Reid Fleming
the World’s Angriest Milkman as it was with their own Ninja Turtles
knock-off (Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters).
This was the Eighties, remember? And superheroes were the only genre
that mattered. And Eclipse entered that game with Miracleman, originally
a UK title, that proved as successful for them as it was outrageous. They
also had Mr. Monster, a retro pastiche about a masked muscleman
slaughtering vampires and werewolves by the bushel load.
They wanted to add to their stable with a title of their own. Wisely, I
think, Dean Mullaney and Cat Yronwode decided that just creating a
brand new hero from scratch was a non-starter. The superguys with the
big sales had all been around a while with long legacies and ties to
the Silver and Golden Ages. Batman, Spider-man, X-Men, Teen Titans
and the rest of the cape and boots crowd went back decades. Sure,
there were new super characters being created but few of them were
catching fire, with the notable exception of Nexus by Mike Baron and
Steve Rude.
For whatever reason, Cat and/or Dean chose to resurrect Airboy, a
long-running costumed adventurer published by Hillman Comics
through the ‘40s and into the ‘50s until they threw in the towel rather
than publish under the new Comics Code Authority.
Airboy! He was the perfect fit for Eclipse. An adolescent who built a
miraculous airplane with the help of a Franciscan monk in California’s
Napa Valley (not far from Eclipse’s HQ!) and then flew off to fight the
Axis to a standstill. The series was preposterous, funky, sexy, weird and
violent with strong horror undertones and the strangest cast of villains
ever to appear in a comic book. In other words, it was practically an
amalgam of everything that made Eclipse special.
Davy Nelson was actually no superhero. He wore a colorful costume
but no cape or mask. His only power was the intuitive ability to fly the
hell out of Birdy, his crazy bat-winged fighter plane. But all the
trappings of the genre were here; a ridiculous origin story, a femme
fatale, wicked recurring villains and fantastic settings.
Cat and Dean certainly saw all this in the series. They also knew they
wanted an earnest portrayal. There would be no snark or tongue-incheek or retro chic. Airboy would be revived intact with all the
imponderables and silliness retained and presented for a new audience.
That’s where I come in. Well, actually, Tim Truman came in first.
Tim was producing Scout for Eclipse; his apocalyptic epic, under his own
studio set-up under the 4 Winds banner. Cat approached him about
putting together an ongoing Airboy comic for them, acting as editor and
packager. I’m not sure if he had decided on taking it up or not when he
happened to mention it to me. I was relatively new to writing for comics
and had submitted scripts for Tales of Terror, Eclipse’s horror anthology.
So, Cat knew my work as she’d edited all of my stories.
My reaction to hearing about Airboy probably took Tim back. I LOVED
Airboy! I found out about him in Jim Steranko’s comic book history
and managed to hunt down a fair collection of his comics in bootleg
reprint form. Back when I thought I might want to be an artist I even
drew sample pages featuring Airboy and the cast of Air-Fighters
Comics. I wanted to write this book. I HAD to write this book. I’d
rather write Airboy than Spider-man. Fan-geek enthusiasm took over
from there and I think I left Tim really no choice. He didn’t really want
to see some big bearded lug crying in his studio. Tim convinced the
folks at Eclipse that I was the man for the job and we went to work.
Everything about Airboy leant itself to being published by this
particular outfit. Chief among these elements was that, in his original
run in Airboy Comics and Air-Fighters Comics, Davy Nelson was
featured in topical adventures. He fought the Nazis and Imperial
Japanese to victory then gassed up Birdy to go hard at the commies. It
was a natural fit to drop him into the battlefields of the 1980s; Central
America, Afghanistan and the drug wars of south Florida.
And what about that crazy plane? I was concerned that, of all the
impossible things in the series, Birdy was the hardest to swallow. Tim
told me that I was dead wrong. Birdy was the key to the series. The
goofy bat-winged airplane was like the Batmobile or, more accurately,
the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver. Birdy was a character as important as
Airboy to the story. To change her to some sterile jet-powered
contraption was to leave the heart of the thing behind. I wasn’t sure
then but I bowed to his instincts.
The only question left for us after that was Valkyrie, the femme fatale
of the original series who was a sometimes foe and sometimes love
interest for Davy Nelson. Valkyrie was the sexiest character of Golden
Age comics bar none. A cross between a Milton Caniff siren and
Veronica Lake, she was a stone Nazi and Hitler’s favorite pilot. Say
what you want about the Third Reich they were equal opportunity
employers when it came to war. There were many famous German
aviatrixes who flew for the Luftwaffe even if just for propaganda
purposes. But Val was a tigress, a one-woman flying death squad in
her jodhpurs, riding boots and a neckline that plunged low enough to
show the boys that this fascist she-wolf flew commando. Her many
recurring appearances in the Hillman comics and her slinky seductive
appearance demanded that she play a big part in this new book.
Okay, simple enough to resurrect her. I mean, I wanted the original
Val; the reformed Nazi bitch with all her baggage intact. Easy to
concoct a device where she’s been in stasis all this time. The problem
was, what would her relationship be to this new character who was
Davy Nelson Jr. the son of the original Airboy. Would Val awaken and
have the hots for this young man who looked and sounded and was
the same age as the lover she left behind before her decades-long
nap? And how would Davy Jr. react to hooking up with his dad’s
girlfriend? It all seemed pretty damned perverse. It also seemed pretty
damned cool. Tim and I realized that we might just have lightning in a
bottle here. It was so comic booky, so twisted and so Eclipse that there
was no question of how to go. After all, Val and Davy’s relationship
was pretty weird to start with. We doubled down on it.
I’m not sure who came up with the idea of Hirota, a former Zero
pilot modeled after Japan’s top ace Saburo Sakai, who served
kind of like Alfred to Airboy’s Batman. It strikes me as Tim’s sense
of irony, thinking back.
Tim’s other big contribution to the longevity of our run was, fellow AirFighter, Skywolf’s new costume. We were in agreement that his
original outfit was pretty cool but a guy wearing a wolf’s head for a
flying cap was a conceit that was too much even for a comic as retrowild as this one. The other consideration was that the wolf cowl could
look awesome when drawn by one artist and really stupid when drawn
by another. To protect the character from this potential ridicule, Tim
designed a functional leather flying tunic and mask that, frankly, looks
awesome. The mask leaves Sky’s lower face revealed as well as his
graying hair. He updated the character’s look to give us that
superhero glitz we needed on covers and promos without sacrificing
the original’s coolness factor one iota.
The rest of Charles Biro’s original creation we kept. Misery and his
flying graveyard was unchanged from the WWII years. The Heap (the
original swamp monster) shambled in looking as he did in his last
appearance more than thirty years before. The infamous man-eating
rats returned only now they were man-sized and riding Harleys. We rebooted the series without re-inventing it.
The rest, for me, is delirium. I dove into this book and wrote the leads
and back-ups in a fever. It was my first ongoing so I threw everything
into it never knowing when it might end. It was all crazy fun and pure
comics. I had a marvelous cast of characters to draw from and no
story was too outlandish to explore. Cat Yronwode took over as editor
after Tim and she pushed me even harder to keep the book unique
and fresh. To say that Cat and I were diametrically opposed politically
would be a gross understatement. From those differences the book
took on a controversial tone that managed to offend people at either
extreme of the political spectrum. More on that if they let me write
another intro in a future volume. And Dean was always there cheering
me on each time we spoke. Dean even produced an Airboy coffee
mug just because he wanted one for himself. Their level of enthusiasm
for the whole project spoiled me and I’ve only experienced that same
camaraderie between editorial and creator a few times in my career.
And the artists! I can’t name them all here. But first Tim and then Cat
reached out for anyone I requested for the pencils and inks. Dean
even contacted Frank Robbins, retired down in Mexico, about
contributing a cover or two. Stan Woch, Graham Nolan, Ben Dunn,
Tom Lyle, Ron Randall, Bo Hampton, Dan Spiegle and that colossal
50th issue featuring art by two generations of Kuberts. I have to thank
Beau Smith for wrangling Joe, Adam and Andy for that one. Okay, I
said I couldn’t name them all so I’m going to stop there before I
offend anyone by omission. Too late, right?
Keep ‘em flyin’!
Chuck Dixon
Tampa, FL
Cover by Timothy
Truman and Stan Woch
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