#Dan Spiegle

[diabolikdiabolik]

Who framed Roger Rabbit - comic adaptation, 1988

[nerds-yearbook]

The Nemesis (Tom Tresser) first appeared in Brave and the Bold 166#, cover date September, 1980. He was created by Cary Burkett and Dan Spiegle. ("Batman and Black Canary: Requiem for 4 Canaries", and "Nemesis", Brave and the Bold 166#, DC Comic Event)

[pulpsandcomics2]

Dan Spiegle

[cantsayidont]

October 1982 to November 1984. Among the segments of DC's voluminous archives that they ought to properly reprint but probably never will is this early 1980s revival of aviator hero Blackhawk by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle. Created by Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera for Quality Comics back in 1941, the Blackhawks were a multinational paramilitary squadron, with vaguely kinky black leather uniforms and special aircraft they operated from their own secret private island. They fought the Nazis during WW2 and later branched out into anticommunism and international supervillains. The original series was for years defined by excellent artwork (in particular by Reed Crandall), broad characterization, exaggerated ethnic accents, and some egregious racism (much of it directed at the Blackhawks' Chinese cook/mascot, "Chop-Chop"). In the late '60s, there was a brief, ludicrous attempt to turn the characters into superheroes, which hastened the demise of the original book, but the Blackhawks still had their fans — including Steven Spielberg, whose interest in developing a BLACKHAWK feature film occasioned this revival.

Probably the best word for this 23-issue run is "solid." It returns the characters to their original WW2 milieu, dials down the racism (the Chinese character eventually even gets a proper uniform), and offers some very competent storytelling from Evanier and Spiegle. The individual plots are seldom outstanding, but there are only a few real duds, and it's significantly more consistent than most monthly books of its era. Evanier and Spiegle were a good team, as further evidenced by their charming creator-owned CROSSFIRE series, launched through Eclipse toward the end of this run, although it wasn't enough to keep the BLACKHAWK book alive after Spielberg's interest lapsed.

The 1987–1988 Howard Chaykin miniseries (later collected as BLACKHAWK: BLOOD & IRON) is flashier and more fun, although it remains controversial. Chaykin made Blackhawk (whom Chaykin named Janos Prohaska, after a real-world Hollywood stuntman best known today as the guy who played the Horta on the STAR TREK TOS episode "The Devil in the Dark") an abrasive dick, and sidelined most of the rest of the group in favor of a new Lady Blackhawk, a brassy American Communist named Natalie Reed. (Chaykin did at least give "Chop-Chop" a real name — Weng Chan.) The Evanier/Spiegle series was not intended to reinvent the characters so much as to present a palatable median version that could provide the foundation for a feature film, so while it's not as dynamic or as stylish, it's also much less confrontational. For some, that makes it the definitive modern treatment of this venerable franchise.

[acmeoop]

Cartoon Actors, HA! Lunatics, If You Ask Me… “Who Framed Roger Rabbit Comics Adaptation” (1988)

[browsethestacks]

Original Art - Saga Of The Swamp Thing #02 Pg 25 (1982) by Dan Spiegle

[pop-art-sixties-seventies]

Dan Spiegle, 1971.

[artphotographyofmen]

Magnus, Robot Fighter by Dan Spiegle

[dirtyriver]

"Hair Apparent!" in House of Mystery #292, May 1981, written by Gerry Conway, original art by Dan Spiegle

[tomoleary]

Dan Spiegle “The Beauty of the Beast” The Phantom Stranger in The Saga of Swamp Thing #3 (1982) Source

Colors by Adrienne Roy

[balu8]

Crossfire #12: The Twenty-Fourth Annual Death of Marilyn Monroe

by Mark Evanier; Dan Spiegle; Jo Meugniot and Carrie Spiegle

Cover by Dave Stevens

Eclipse

[comicbooksaregood]

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends

Volume: 1

Issue: 1

The Triumph of the Green Goblin

Writers: Dennis Marks

Pencils: Dan Spiegle

Inks: Vince Colletta

Colours: Bob Sharen

Covers: John Romita Jr., Al Milgrom

Marvel

[nerds-yearbook]

The origin of Nemesis was revealed in the anthology Brave and the Bold 167#, cover date October, 1980. ("Batman and Blackhawk: Ice Station Alpha," and "A Name Writ in Blood", Brave and the Bold 167#).

[pulpsandcomics2]

Dan Spiegle

[onlylonelylatino]

Green Arrow vs Clock King by Dan Spiegle

[cantsayidont]

March through May 1988. While the Evanier/Spiegle BLACKHAWK revival was prompted by Steven Spielberg's interest in doing a BLACKHAWK feature film as a follow-on to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, this controversial Howard Chaykin miniseries feels a fair bit like RAIDERS: a slick, stylish, rather cynical adventure story about a square-jawed heel and a saucy, two-fisted dame who save the world from fascism when they're not too busy bickering, in a nostalgia-bait setting full of visual allusions to '30s and '40s advertising and propaganda art.

Although Chaykin was certainly familiar with the Blackhawks (and had done covers and a couple of backup stories for the Evanier series), he indulges in some obligatory late '80s revisionism, dismissing or discarding some familiar elements of the feature (for instance, the characters laugh off the possibility of a Blackhawk Island, a staple of the earlier series) and tinkering with some details. Perhaps his most significant move was to reaffirm that Blackhawk was Polish, as shown in the first Blackhawk story in MILITARY COMICS #1 (by Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera) back in 1941. Later versions of Blackhawk's origin had claimed he was American and had merely been flying for the Polish Air Force at the time of the 1939 Nazi invasion, but Chaykin was having none of that: The Blackhawk of this series is Janos Prohaska (a name borrowed from a veteran Hollywood stuntman who'd worked on STAR TREK and other movies and TV shows), a broad-shouldered, left-leaning (and, this being a Howard Chaykin story, Jewish) schlub from Krakow who spends a lot of the story under fire for "premature antifascism" from a Red-baiting Southern senator who's also a secret Nazi agent.

(Special note needs to be made of the exceptionally creative lettering of Ken Bruzenak, without which this series would be much less than it is, and also the effective color work of Steve Oliff.)

Exactly when this story is supposed to be set is a little vague. One of the pastiche magazine covers suggests that it takes place in June 1941, about the time MILITARY COMICS #1 went on sale, but the story concerns the theft of an American atomic bomb, and the U.S. already seems to be at war, so who knows! Chaykin is not Roy Thomas, who would undoubtedly have sweated such details.

The villain is none of Blackhawk's past opponents, but rather a newly created character, British fascist and disgraced Hollywood star Sir Death Mayhew, a very thinly veiled pastiche of Errol Flynn, obviously informed by Charles Higham's muckraking 1980 bio ERROL FLYNN: THE UNTOLD STORY, which alleged that Flynn was a Nazi spy. Other biographers have challenged Higham's evidence and conclusions (although even the most generous accounts of Flynn's life are pretty seamy), but by the '80s Flynn was long dead, this was after all a comic book, and Mayhew is a pretty effective (and thoroughly risible) villain. Probably the biggest disappointment is that we don't ever actually see Mayhew's earlier encounter with Blackhawk, who he says had previously exposed him as a Nazi spy, and there's never really a clash between the Blackhawks and Mayhew's fascist White Lion squadron (which ends up basically carrying the water for Mayhew's mad plan to give himself "a Viking funeral").

The original BLACKHAWK series eventually introduced a Lady Blackhawk, blond adventuress Zinda Blake, but Chaykin creates his own version: a feisty American-born Communist expat, Natalie (Gurdin) Reed. She's a flight engineer as well as a pilot, although her primary function is to spar with Blackhawk. It's not hard to envision this scene with Harrison Ford as Janos and Karen Allen as Natalie:

One of the biggest complaints levied against this series is that the other Blackhawks get short shrift: They don't show up until well into the story, one of them is killed off-handedly, and they don't have much to do other than be exasperated with their boss.

Nonetheless, this was, believe it or not, the first time in their long history that all the Blackhawks actually got full names, including "Chop Chop" (Weng Chan), who subsequently became a supporting character in the John Ostrander/Graham Nolan HAWKWORLD series in the early '90s.

Your reaction to this series will likely depend on how you feel about the Blackhawks. If you'd never heard of them beyond perhaps glancing past their WHO'S WHO entry, it's a pretty good time — the story has some missed opportunities (including surprisingly little aerial action), and marginalizing the rest of the team is definitely a flaw, but it's entertaining in its slick '80s way, and it's more cohesive than a lot of Chaykin's other work from this period (e.g., AMERICAN FLAGG!, THE SHADOW, BLACK KISS, TIME²). Hardcore Blackhawk fans (and I guess there are still a few) generally hate it, and certainly for purists, the Evanier/Spiegle series is likely to be far more satisfactory. Also, Chaykin's particular schtick is something of an acquired taste, and if you're not a fan, his customary abrasive cynicism may be a bit much. However, you can tell he was having fun, which counts for a lot. He even manages to work in the Blackhawks' "HAWKAAAAA" battle cry at the end, though not their jaunty theme song:

This miniseries, originally released in what DC used to call its "Prestige Format," apparently didn't sell as well as anticipated; for a long time, you could find copies in comic shop bargain bins for a fraction of the cover price, which is how I first read it. However, in 2020, DC finally, miraculously, reprinted the series in trade paperback (as BLACKHAWK: BLOOD & IRON), also tossing in the 1989 SECRET ORIGINS entry (by Marty Pasko, Grant Miehm, and Terry Beatty), which attempts, with fair success, to square Chaykin's version with the original Eisner/Cuidera story, and the now hard-to-find ACTION COMICS WEEKLY Blackhawk serial by Mike Grell, Rick Burchett, and Pablo Marcos, which is set after the war and is basically a straightforward pastiche of the early years of Milt Caniff's STEVE CANYON newspaper strip. I actually find the ACTION COMICS WEEKLY serial significantly more cynical and abrasive than the Chaykin series, although Burchett's art is nice. DC hasn't bothered to reprint the short-lived BLACKHAWK ongoing series of 1989–1990, by Pasko (and later Doug Moench) and Burchett, which is just as well: Also set in the late '40s, it follows on from the ACW serial, but is a pretty much unmitigated disaster, full of puzzling creative choices, including some bizarre (and misogynistic) abuse of Natalie Reed. The art is fine (although the interiors never live up to Burchett's excellent covers), but it can't save the muddy, mean-spirited storyline, which is often confusing and intermittently preposterous in a way that clashes with the intended gritty tone, making it highly missable even for completists.