Target Comics #5
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeTarget Comics Vol. 1 #5 (June 1940) is the first appearance of Spacehawk, Basil Wolverton's visionary science-fiction hero, marking the launch of one of the most creatively distinctive strips of the entire Golden Age. Where nearly every contemporaneous space-adventure strip aped Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon aesthetic, Wolverton's approach treated the science-fiction elements as genuine storytelling material rather than exotic backdrop — an unusually rigorous creative choice for 1940. The debut story, in which Spacehawk foils the space pirate Gorvak's scheme to weaponize a protoplasmic Neptunian creature, established a run of 30 consecutive issues of solar-system adventure that scholars of the SF Encyclopedia single out as 'one of the highlights of that era's sf comics.' Wolverton's idiosyncratic hatched-line grotesquerie and tightly plotted narratives set this series apart from every other anthology feature of its moment.
# Target Comics #5 (November 1944) This anthology issue contains at least two stories. In the primary Target story, the costumed hero and his team pursue saboteurs through a metropolitan building, engaging in combat to stop the criminals from escaping via an elevator and tower. A secondary story features Bill, a soldier, who arrives at a remote cabin with a note from fellow soldier Ike, only to discover Japanese spies planning an attack; Bill goes into action to stop them, tackling the enemy operatives and thwarting their ambush at the cabin door. The issue includes a backup feature about air raid wardens conducting blackout drills and investigating suspicious activity on the home front.
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Novelty Press was the comic-book imprint of Curtis Publishing Company — the Philadelphia-based publisher of The Saturday Evening Post — though its editorial offices operated out of New York City. Target Comics launched in February 1940 with content supplied by Funnies, Inc., the same packaging outfit responsible for many of Timely/Marvel's earliest characters, bringing in talents like Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Tarpé Mills. Wolverton, a self-taught Pacific Northwest artist who worked entirely by mail rather than from the Manhattan studios where most of his contemporaries clustered, had previously run a proto-version of the character under the name 'Spacehawks' in the short-lived Circus, The Comic Riot (1938); the Target Comics iteration was a substantially redesigned and improved version. All 30 episodes of the strip were written and drawn solely by Wolverton, an unusual degree of single-creator control for the era.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Spacehawk, created, written, and drawn entirely by Basil Wolverton — cover date June 1940, on-sale approximately April 24, 1940 per copyright registration records.
- Spacehawk debuted with the story retroactively titled 'Spacehawk and the Creeping Death From Neptune' (story titles were not printed in the original issues; they were supplied later by the Grand Comics Database and by Monte Wolverton for the Fantagraphics reprint collection).
- Novelty Press was the comic-book arm of Curtis Publishing Company, publisher of The Saturday Evening Post; early Target Comics content was packaged by Funnies, Inc., the same shop behind many Timely/Marvel Golden Age debuts.
- The Spacehawk strip ran for 30 consecutive issues — Target Comics Vol. 1 #5 through Vol. 3 #10 (June 1940–December 1942) — totaling 262 pages, all by Wolverton.
- A predecessor strip called 'Spacehawks' had appeared in Circus, The Comic Riot (1938), but the Target Comics version was a distinct, substantially revised feature.
- Beginning with Vol. 2 #1 (1941), Novelty Press editorially redirected Spacehawk from interplanetary adventures to Earth-bound WWII stories, with the character pivoting to defend America against Axis-linked threats — a creative compromise that Wolverton's fans and later critics regarded as a weakening of the strip's original vision.
- Wolverton was posthumously inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991, cementing scholarly recognition of the Spacehawk run as a landmark of Golden Age cartooning.
- The Spacehawk stories from this issue onward have been reprinted multiple times: a black-and-white collection in the 1970s, a five-issue Dark Horse Comics series (1989–1993), and the definitive Fantagraphics oversized color paperback collecting the complete run from Vol. 1 #5 through Vol. 3 #10.
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Reprints
↩ Reprints Target Comics #10 [66] (1946), Target Comics #5 [71] (1946), Target Comics #8 [98] (1948), Gabby Hayes Western #83, Gabby Hayes Western #86
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