Review: ‘Spacehawk’ Is The Best Spacefaring Crime-Buster You’ve Never Heard Of
by Tito W. James
Summary
Lovers of the truly bizarre and unique art will find a new favorite in Basil Wolverton’s ‘Spacehawk’.
Wolverton’s vividly colorful and often disconcerting imagination is brought to life in a prestige format.
Overall
8/10
Spacehawk by Basil Wolverton is best described as Flash Gordon’s dark, weird, creepy brother. The artist is best known for his grotesque caricatures for Mad Magazine and his idiosyncratic talent is on full display within the adventures of Spacehawk.
The fantastic technology and planetary palaces are designed like candy-colored play sets. All the alien creatures look like toys you’d be too scared to play with as a child. It’s this interplay between a child’s fantasy and something more sinister that gives Spacehawk it unique atmosphere. While conceived as pure escapist entertainment, many aspects are unintentionally avant-garde. This is one of the few Golden Age comics that is compulsively readable.
The stories take a turn as editorial edicts demanded Spacehawk stop patrolling the galaxies and start supporting America during WWII. Gone are the colorful planets populated by bizarre creatures; instead, the title character fights against Nazi analogues and degrading caricatures of Japanese soldiers. While there is a kitschy fascination with these transparent propaganda comics, they lack the otherworldly imagination that made the early space adventures so exciting.
Wolverton does his best to meet editor demands and creatively combines WWII warfare with Spacehawk’s fantastic weapons. Many of those designs are like prototypes of the dieselpunk subgenre. We’re treated to underwater tanks, fish-shaped submarines, and air-fights between spaceships and warplanes.
Spacehawk would not be a comic that I would recommend to every reader. Nonetheless, if you have a love for the bizarre imagination of the Golden Age and a soft spot for characters like Stardust the Super Wizard, then Spacehawk will be well worth your time. The oversized presentation Fantagraphics has delivered makes each of the character’s adventures come alive as if seen on the silver screen. Wolverton is an underappreciated talent that more comic readers should know, and comic creators should learn from.
Spacehawk is now available from Fantagraphics.
