$29.99 • WWW.IDWPUBLISHING.COM Cov e r by Timothy Truman Original Series Edits by Timothy Truman Collection Edits by Justin Eisinger a n d Alonzo Simon Collection Design by Gilberto Lazcano AIRBOY #1 AIRBOY #2 AIRBOY #3 AIRBOY #4 on wings of death the wolf and the phoenix misery loves company assault on villa miserio JULY 15, 1986 JULY 29, 1986 AUGUST 12, 1986 AUGUST 26, 1986 P A G E 8 P A G E 2 2 P A G E 3 6 P A G E 5 0 AIRBOY #9 AIRBOY #10 AIRBOY #11 AIRBOY #12 body count! tooth and claw i am birdie gone to texas NOVEMBER 4, 1986 NOVEMBER 18, 1986 DECEMBER 1, 1986 DECEMBER 15, 1986 P A G E 12 0 P A G E 14 4 P A G E 16 8 P A G E 19 2 ISBN: 978-1-61377-900-2 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher Facebook: facebook.com/idwpublishing Greg Goldstein, President & COO Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist Twitter: @idwpublishing Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief YouTube: youtube.com/idwpublishing Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer Alan Payne, VP of Sales Instagram: instagram.com/idwpublishing Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing deviantART: idwpublishing.deviantart.com www.IDWPUBLISHING.com Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services IDW founded by Ted Adams, Alex Garner, Kris Oprisko, and Robbie Robbins Jeff Webber, VP of Digital Publishing & Business Development Pinterest: pinterest.com/idwpublishing/idw-staff-faves AIRBOY ARCHIVES, VOLUME 1. FEBRUARY 2014. FIRST PRINTING. Airboy © 2014 Chuck Dixon. © 2014 Idea and Design Works, LLC. The IDW logo is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IDW Publishing, a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe St., San Diego, CA 92109. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Printed in Korea. IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork. Originally published by Eclipse Comics as AIRBOY issues #1–16. AIRBOY #5 AIRBOY #6 AIRBOY #7 AIRBOY #8 misery takes a holiday back in the u.s.a. partytime down in the darkness SEPTEMBER 9, 1986 SEPTEMBER 23, 1986 OCTOBER 7, 1986 OCTOBER 21, 1986 P A G E 6 4 P A G E 7 8 P A G E 9 2 P A G E 10 6 AIRBOY #13 AIRBOY #14 AIRBOY #15 AIRBOY #16 tag-team a barrel full of sharks caribbean rampage pt1 carribean rampage pt2 JANUARY 12, 1987 JANUARY 27, 1987 FEBRUARY 10, 1987 FEBRUARY 27, 1987 P A G E 2 16 P A G E 24 0 P A G E 2 6 4 P A G E 2 8 8 Why Airboy? It was the Eighties and the direct market was blowing up. Comic book shops were popping up everywhere in strip malls and main streets and malls. Sales were humming and not just for Marvel and DC. Dozens of independent companies were rising. It was a growing boom and competition, real competition, was fierce. Eclipse Comics was unique even among the crowded field of start-up publishers. They’d been around longer having practically created the independent market in 1978 with Sabre, the first graphic novel ever published in the USA. Eclipse was a throwback to an age of comics when redundant publishing was practiced. Simply put, redundant publishing is finding something that sells and printing the hell out of it before the trend dies and then jumping onto the next trend. Eclipse was adverse to no genre. Horror, science fiction, funny animals, detectives, good girl art, adventure, westerns and mixes of the all the above were grist for their mill. The only proviso was that the material not be stale re-treads. There had to be a twist in the tale, a fresh hook or unusual outlook. The house style was no style. Wild and wooly was the only rule. They published avant garde material but it was without pretension or posing. This was a publisher that was as at home with Reid Fleming the World’s Angriest Milkman as it was with their own Ninja Turtles knock-off (Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters). This was the Eighties, remember? And superheroes were the only genre that mattered. And Eclipse entered that game with Miracleman, originally a UK title, that proved as successful for them as it was outrageous. They also had Mr. Monster, a retro pastiche about a masked muscleman slaughtering vampires and werewolves by the bushel load. They wanted to add to their stable with a title of their own. Wisely, I think, Dean Mullaney and Cat Yronwode decided that just creating a brand new hero from scratch was a non-starter. The superguys with the big sales had all been around a while with long legacies and ties to the Silver and Golden Ages. Batman, Spider-man, X-Men, Teen Titans and the rest of the cape and boots crowd went back decades. Sure, there were new super characters being created but few of them were catching fire, with the notable exception of Nexus by Mike Baron and Steve Rude. For whatever reason, Cat and/or Dean chose to resurrect Airboy, a long-running costumed adventurer published by Hillman Comics through the ‘40s and into the ‘50s until they threw in the towel rather than publish under the new Comics Code Authority. Airboy! He was the perfect fit for Eclipse. An adolescent who built a miraculous airplane with the help of a Franciscan monk in California’s Napa Valley (not far from Eclipse’s HQ!) and then flew off to fight the Axis to a standstill. The series was preposterous, funky, sexy, weird and violent with strong horror undertones and the strangest cast of villains ever to appear in a comic book. In other words, it was practically an amalgam of everything that made Eclipse special. Davy Nelson was actually no superhero. He wore a colorful costume but no cape or mask. His only power was the intuitive ability to fly the hell out of Birdy, his crazy bat-winged fighter plane. But all the trappings of the genre were here; a ridiculous origin story, a femme fatale, wicked recurring villains and fantastic settings. Cat and Dean certainly saw all this in the series. They also knew they wanted an earnest portrayal. There would be no snark or tongue-in- cheek or retro chic. Airboy would be revived intact with all the imponderables and silliness retained and presented for a new audience. That’s where I come in. Well, actually, Tim Truman came in first. Tim was producing Scout for Eclipse; his apocalyptic epic, under his own studio set-up under the 4 Winds banner. Cat approached him about putting together an ongoing Airboy comic for them, acting as editor and packager. I’m not sure if he had decided on taking it up or not when he happened to mention it to me. I was relatively new to writing for comics and had submitted scripts for Tales of Terror, Eclipse’s horror anthology. So, Cat knew my work as she’d edited all of my stories. My reaction to hearing about Airboy probably took Tim back. I LOVED Airboy! I found out about him in Jim Steranko’s comic book history and managed to hunt down a fair collection of his comics in bootleg reprint form. Back when I thought I might want to be an artist I even drew sample pages featuring Airboy and the cast of Air-Fighters Comics. I wanted to write this book. I HAD to write this book. I’d rather write Airboy than Spider-man. Fan-geek enthusiasm took over from there and I think I left Tim really no choice. He didn’t really want to see some big bearded lug crying in his studio. Tim convinced the folks at Eclipse that I was the man for the job and we went to work. Everything about Airboy leant itself to being published by this particular outfit. Chief among these elements was that, in his original run in Airboy Comics and Air-Fighters Comics, Davy Nelson was featured in topical adventures. He fought the Nazis and Imperial Japanese to victory then gassed up Birdy to go hard at the commies. It was a natural fit to drop him into the battlefields of the 1980s; Central America, Afghanistan and the drug wars of south Florida. And what about that crazy plane? I was concerned that, of all the impossible things in the series, Birdy was the hardest to swallow. Tim told me that I was dead wrong. Birdy was the key to the series. The goofy bat-winged airplane was like the Batmobile or, more accurately, the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver. Birdy was a character as important as Airboy to the story. To change her to some sterile jet-powered contraption was to leave the heart of the thing behind. I wasn’t sure then but I bowed to his instincts. The only question left for us after that was Valkyrie, the femme fatale of the original series who was a sometimes foe and sometimes love interest for Davy Nelson. Valkyrie was the sexiest character of Golden Age comics bar none. A cross between a Milton Caniff siren and Veronica Lake, she was a stone Nazi and Hitler’s favorite pilot. Say what you want about the Third Reich they were equal opportunity employers when it came to war.