Blackhawk #1

History

After the previous Blackhawk ongoing series was cancelled with issue #273 in November 1984, DC left the character dormant for roughly three years before tapping Howard Chaykin — then riding the critical momentum of his creator-owned American Flagg! at First Comics — to revive the franchise in the new Prestige Format. Chaykin served as sole writer, penciler, inker, and cover artist across all three issues, with coloring by Steve Oliff; the squarebound, spine-bearing, ad-free format gave him room to pursue the dense visual storytelling and period design work that had become his signature. The mini-series functioned as the character's first post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity reset, discarding Silver Age nationality retcons and returning Blackhawk to his Quality Comics roots as a Polish national while thoroughly revising the personalities and backstories of every supporting cast member. DC had originally planned to collect the series in a single trade volume, but that edition was cancelled before publication; the issues finally reached collected form for the first time in a 2020 hardcover titled Blackhawk: Blood & Iron.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Written, drawn, and covered entirely by Howard Chaykin; colored by Steve Oliff — Chaykin holds sole creative credit across all three issues.
• Published in DC's squarebound Prestige Format: 52 pages, stiff covers, a spine, glossy paper, and no advertisements — one of the format's more ambitious uses at that time.
• Cover-dated March 1988; the series ran for three issues (March, April, May 1988), each subtitled — Book One: 'Blood and Iron,' Book Two: 'Red Snow,' Book Three: 'Blackout.'
• Marks the first post-Crisis DC continuity appearance of Janos Prohaska as Blackhawk's canonical name, restoring his identity as a Polish aviator after decades of Silver Age retcons that had made him American.
• First appearance of Natalie Reed (born Natalie Gurdin), the second published character to hold the Lady Blackhawk title — who, within DC's in-universe timeline, is retroactively established as the first Lady Blackhawk, active with the squadron from 1943 onward.
• The central villain, Death Mayhew, is a British lord-turned-Nazi marshal whose plot involves stealing an atomic bomb prototype and bombing New York City; his Errol Flynn-esque, Hollywood-star-spy concept was later noted as a parallel to a similar character in the 1991 Rocketeer film.
• The mini-series' commercial and critical reception was strong enough that DC folded the Blackhawks into its 1988 Action Comics Weekly weekly anthology, making them the first strip from that anthology to spin off into their own ongoing series (Blackhawk vol. 3, beginning March 1989).
• The three issues were not collected in a single volume until DC's 2020 hardcover Blackhawk: Blood & Iron, which also bundles the Action Comics Weekly strips by Martin Pasko and Rick Burchett, Secret Origins #45, and Who's Who Update '87 character profiles — the first time all this material appeared together.

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