Pilot's Log

This past week, somebody put out a graphic combining the new Steve Trevor from the Wonder Woman movie with the current Captain America (who as we know, has the real name of Steve Rogers) with the title Steves on a Plane.

Being the airplane/comics nerd that I am, I could not let that go past.  So to Super-Team Family: The Lost Issues, I proposed the All-Steve Squadron, which includes the above and...

* from DC's War Heroes, Steve Savage the Elder, better known as Balloon Buster

* from Avon Comics of the Fifties, Steve Savage the Younger (Captain Steve Savage)

* from TV and Charlton Comics, Steve Austin (The Six Million Dollar Man)

* and from Archie Comics, Steve Stacey: Sky Detective.

I guess I need to get into Steve Stacey.  He had a very very brief career.  He only appeared in 16 PAGES in the anthology Blue Ribbon in 1941.  His series was an okay idea for a comic, but the writing and visuals didn't work so it's no surprise to me that it ended.

In the story, Steve was a flight instructor who broke up a sabotage scheme against his flight school, and as a result, he got recruited into the Civil Aviation Authority as an investigator.  In the course of his adventure, he also saved the life of a female student pilot named Joyce Barton--who appointed herself his assistant.  Together, they fought mob hitmen, air pirates, Nazi sleeper agents and the like.

There wasn't much backstory for either character.  It was alluded that Steve was previously a competitor in air races, and before that, flew for the U.S. Mail.

A couple weeks ago at the Knoxville IPMS meeting, a fellow member was clearing out his closet of old periodicals and some of us got to divvying the pieces among them.  When I saw that he had old issues of War Monthly and True War among them, I shamelessly scooped up as much of those as I could.

Both those magazines were influences on me, and perhaps more than I'd care to admit.

War Monthly was the product of the Marshall Cavendish publishing powerhouse, and (I felt) a good value for the combination of artwork, writing and layout work.  The articles would get repurposed into volumes, and from there sometimes into whole coffee table books.

True War, on the other hand, was the product of the notorious low-budget tabloid schlockmeister and pornographer Myron Fass at Countrywide Publications.  The only color content was on the cover, and the interior was made up mainly of archival or press-release photos and cut-to-the-bone prose.  True to form, their presentation on the Battle of Arnhem (for an example) was slimmer in both page count and journalist prowess as the photo spread of Cornelius Ryan's book A BRIDGE TOO FAR!  I got a replacement copy of an issue of True War I thought I lost in 1978 and now that I think about it, I think one of my parents could have thrown mine out in disgust.

To make a long story short, I couldn't afford as a kid to subscribe to War Monthly, and even if the option were available my folks probably wouldn't have condoned me subscribing to True War.  My main go-to publisher of magazines from then was Challenge Publications (Air Classics, Air Combat, Air Progress, Military Modeler, etc.).

But I'm glad to get back these.  And then I found a bunch of online sources for .pdf versions of War Monthly, so one way or another I have all the content from the get-go through to Issue 49.  The series lasted much longer than that, but the later ones are very hard to find because they were subscription-only and most went to library collections.

FP