The original Blackhawk comics debuted way back in 1941 and revolved around the missions of an eponymous air squadron battling against the Axis powers during World War II. In typical comics fashion, though, the concept kept getting reinvented every generation or so. I’m actually quite the fan of Howard Chaykin’s reboot in the 1980s (which was also set in WWII, but with a more iconoclastic retrospective outlook), including the follow-up series by Martin Pasko and Rick Burchett – all in all, those comics were a down-and-dirty mix of politics and pulp adventure that both paid tribute to the original and subverted the hell out of it (even if the plotting got a bit messy after a while).
That said, the most radical of all reboots took place in 2011, as part of DC’s overall ‘New 52’ revamp, which dropped the nostalgia angle and relaunched the Blackhawks as a clandestine UN force fighting the most cutting-edge technological threats.
These were all new characters and there weren’t continuity links to previous incarnations, but, intertextually, the use of the name and of a similar logo essentially framed emergent, out-of-control technology as a new fascist-like enemy. And, sure enough, 14 years later, those two threats now seem increasingly connected, which makes this an interesting comic to revisit.
The premise of a whole military unit specialized on waging war against unchecked scientific progress (a literal rage against the machine!) may sound reactionary and luddite, even if you bear in mind that this short-lived series (it only lasted 8 issues, collected in the trade paperback The Great Leap Forward) was operating with outlandish fantastic sci-fi, including tech from the DCU’s extraterrestrial worlds. Looking back at it from the point of view of current debates about AI singularity, powerful social media algorithms, and posthumanism, however, Blackhawks seems to have been ahead of its time, fictionalizing today’s alarmist zeitgeist, as authorities all over the globe have come to realize how destructive and weaponizable cybernetic technological development has become (not to mention the existential debates within the comics industry itself).
To be fair, rather than simply taking skepticism for granted, the series did face the issue head-on in a few instances, addressing the ethical implications of the team’s mandate:
(Presumably, the paperback’s Maoist title was a more subtle allusion to these themes, evoking a history of mass-scale tragedy in the name of rushed progress…)
Except for the sequence above, though, Blackhawks dealt with moral dilemmas in the form of snappy exchanges rather than drawn-out debates. Mike Costa is a pretty smart writer, but one who privileges spectacle and adrenaline over contemplation or introspection.
Here, Costa didn’t go so far as in God Is Dead, where he pushed his style almost to the point of abstraction – that bloody, profanity-laden series (with awesome Jacen Burrows variant covers) kept relentlessly escalating the stakes and suddenly shifting the narrative in new directions (at one point jumping forward over a hundred years) while constantly killing off and replacing the protagonists (and only sometimes bringing them back to life), which suitably created the feel of an unfolding mythological saga of epic proportions. With Blackhawks, Mike Costa wasn’t allowed to develop something this radical: rather than nihilistic destabilization, what we got was still much closer to the reassuringly liberal optimist end of the spectrum typical of mainstream American comics (especially compared to their British counterparts).
Who knows what bold directions the series could’ve taken in time, but the handful of issues that did come out nevertheless delivered some damn cool combat sci-fi. The action-driven storytelling came across as both fearful and enchanted with the wild possibilities of transhumanism and cyber-, nano-, and whatever-else-have-you technology. Like in the comics of Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, much of the main sense of fun derives from mind-bending kickass lines like: ‘Through technology, we have transcended. We are not made of flesh, we are made of choices.’
Science fiction is a genre that can be as much about exciting aesthetics as about revolutionary ideas, so I love comics that make the most out of the medium’s very materiality, pulling off stuff that you really couldn’t do in cinema or in a prose novel. This approach has given us plenty of critical darlings, like Matt Kindt’s Revolver, Jeff Lemire’s Trillium, or Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana, which cleverly put every aspect of the books in the service of their concepts, from non-linear page layouts to the very design of the page numbers or chapter breaks…
Blackhawks was never as daringly experimental, which may explain its short duration and absence of lasting impact. For a comic about innovative threats, its visuals weren’t *weird* enough to be memorable, which is not to say that we didn’t get some neat futuristic vistas bursting with breakneck energy and wonder along the way… In the character designs by Ken Lashley and Jim Lee, in the initial layouts by Graham Nolan (with finishes by a host of other artists), in the BIT-inked pencils by CAFU (who would then get to work on a more awesome version of this type of material over at Valiant), not to mention in the lettering and in Guy Major’s colors, the priority, apparently, was not to project the strangeness of emergent technology, but to capture its slickness – urgently acknowledging that we are already living in the future, that whatever is coming to destroy us will take a form that has already become recognizable and perhaps even familiar, Blackhawks put the emphasis on dynamism, visually as well as narratively:
Although the central appeal of Blackhawks does lie in its pace and spirit, the reason I haven’t brought up any of the multinational cast members or specific plot points so far isn’t because the series lacked solid characterization or engaging storylines. It’s just that the run was so brief, overall, that those never took the titular great leap forward from clichéd-yet-functional archetypes into something more unique and special.
This is a shame. Mike Costa clearly had plans for a wider saga involving some sort of alien conspiracy within the DC Universe (I can just picture the inevitable crossover with the various cyborgs and robots, not unlike the recent ‘Elementary’ arc of World’s Finest). At least he got to wrap up the first couple of tales and to end on a hopeful note – and, who knows, perhaps the renewed topicality will mean someone will soon pick up where this comic left off. Still, given the speed of change in the last few years, I’m curious about how Blackhawks would have evolved if DC had allowed Costa to fulfill his ambitions and to tackle the full potential of such a promising setup.
Also: there were talking dogs.