In Blackhawk 138 (July 1959), the elite paramilitary team fought a “seething, unrecognizable mass.” But we readers could recognize it, all right.
It was the latest incarnation of the surprise hit film that had premiered on Sept. 12, 1958, earning $4 million on a $110,000 budget. The Blob featured the screen debut of Steve McQueen as a teenager fighting an amorphous extraterrestrial monster.
“Strong performances and ingenious special effects help The Blob transcend the schlock sci-fi and youth delinquency genres from which it originates,” notes the Criterion Collection.
“The picture is infamous for its theme song, written by none other than Burt Bacharach,” observed comics historian Jeff Rovin.
With the Sputnik satellite fresh in the public mind, the film tapped into a whimsical attitude toward space monsters prevailing at the time. Sheb Wooley’s novelty song The Purple People Eater had topped the Billboard charts during the summer of 1958.
In The Menace of the Blob, the Blackhawks’ jet engine test accidentally cracks a “weak spot in the fourth dimension,” freeing their own version of the Blob. The roiling black cloud radiates intense cold, heat, and lightning, and even generates a tsunami before the Blackhawks hit it with various stimuli from four ways at once, vaporizing it.
Elsewhere in that issue, the Blackhawks encounter The Saturnian Blackhawks, an extraterrestrial, mirror-image team purportedly calling themselves the Black Ravens, and an Invasion of the Rock Creatures in South America.
Blob-inspired beasts weren’t confined to DC Comics. Over at Marvel, Tales of Suspense 11 (Sept. 1960) offered a monstrous amoeba in I Created … Sporr! The Thing That Could Not Die! Despite its advance billing, it did, in fact, die.
“There was a 1950s horror comic story (possibly EC) that predated The Blob with some kind of ever-growing mold entity. It frightened the #### out of me as a small child,” Vincent Mariani recalled. “The comic was among a pile of comics that an older relative had given to my father for me to read. In this one, very specific case, Wertham was right!”
“Like the Challengers, the similarly ‘unpowered’ Blackhawks routinely faced down opponents and menaces that could have given some of the heroes with powers a run for their money,” Johnny Williams wrote. “The keys to both teams’ successful records were ‘ingenuity and teamwork.’ Those were traits that we Boomer Kids appreciated.”
Bruce Kanin said, “I always enjoy reviewing the evolution of DC’s comic books in the ’40s- ’60s, especially in that many followed the same path, i.e., solid tales revolving around their time period and nature of the heroes; gradual introduction of fantastic elements like big gorillas, dinosaurs, and, er, blobs; aliens arrive; new costumes; Neal Adams arrives (heh); back to gritty, realistic stories before cancellation.
“That applies more or less to Blackhawk, Sea Devils, Challengers of the Unknown, Doom Patrol and Tomahawk — perhaps others.”
Many of those are what I like to call the “uncanny team” titles.
About Author
