Blackhawk Part II

Blackhawk was among my favourite comics in the 60s. I expect the artwork had a lot to do with it. It wasn't only that Dick Dillin's pencils and Chuck Cuidera's inks fit the character perfectly. The other aspect that appealed was Dillin penciled every Blackhawk story from 1951 to 1968 with Cuidera inking all but a handful. So the characters always looked like themselves - like real people do.

That is an amazing record - even for an era where artists and writers stayed with characters a good deal longer than today. The 2008 Showcase collection of Blackhawk issues 108 - 127 show just how amazing. The collection covers a twenty month period in the eighteen year run. In those twenty months Dillin pencilled 505 pages of stories and covers. Extrapolating over the 18 years that's between 4,500 and 5,000 pages of Blackhawk artwork.

Blackhawk was published by Comic Favorites, Inc. (usually referred to as Quality Comics) until issue 107 at which time DC secured the rights to the character and continued the comic. Here are a couple of examples of Dillin's work from late in the Quality run - Blackhawk 99 (April 1956).