In the world of pulp heroes, very few have hit over 100 issues or stories. One of those is Popular Publication’s G-8.
Created and written by Robert J. Hogan and pubished under his name, another rarity, G-8 first appeared in October 1933 in G-8 and His Battle Aces, a retitled and relaunched Battle Aces, at the same time as Popular’s The Spider. He lasted until 1944, outliving The Spider by a year, but had only 110 issues versus The Spider’s 118. Both were victims of wartime paper shortages.
G-8 is an air-war pulp hero, one of several actually. He is both an aviator and spy. His stories are set in World War I, but in a bizarre version of WWI, with wild, recurring villains and supernatural or science-fiction elements.
The closest character to G-8 is Donald Keyhoe‘s Capt. Philip Strange, who ran in Ace’s Flying Aces starting in 1931 and lasting for 64 stories. I wonder if G-8 was created to copy Strange? I hope to do a posting on Strange and maybe a future comparison between the two.
We never know who G-8 really is. He has a girlfriend who is a nurse attached to his group, but she is unidentified as well. He has an English manservant named Battle and two American wingmen. His “battle aces” are the short Nippy Weston who flies plane #13 and the tall Bull Martin in #7. As noted, G-8 had several recurring foes including Herr Doktor Krueger, the Steel Mask (his head is covered by a bullet-like steel helmet), and Grun, a revived primative man.
While his stories were set in WWI, one would wonder why they didn’t update the stories with WWII looming and then occuring. It apparently was discussed, but didn’t happen. Interestingly, they did have him go up against Asian foes as well, which is strange when China and Japan were on the side of the Allies in WWI.
The go-to work on G-8 is Nick Carr‘s The Flying Spy, A History of G-8, which was first published by Robert Weinburg in his Pulp Classics series, and has been reprinted by Wildside Press.
Comics
Popular Publications, unlike most of the larger pulp houses, did not have an associated comic book line, though they did look into it. So we had to wait much longer for any G-8 comics.
The first is a single issue from Gold Key Comics done in 1966, coming out a month before their Doc Savage comic. Now, as the Doc comic was apparently done as a tie-in to the possible movie coming from Goodson-Todman Productions, I have always wondered what led to the G-8 comic. I am not aware of any movie, and it would be a while before there would be any paperback reprints, so why?
In 1991, Argosy Communications, owners of the Popular characters, got into comics briefly as Blazing Comics (three comics in three years). From this we got one issue of a G-8 comic, which had him go up against Grun. It used the logo that Berkeley had done. By the way, Argosy had been called Blazing Communications until renaming to Argosy in 1988, hence the name of the comics line.
Reprints
Over the years there have been a few reprints of G-8. The first was done by Berkeley in 1969-71, when they also reprinted The Spider. This one is interesting as they engaged Jim Steranko to do the covers. He did three pieces which they did not use, then he did three more they did use, with a nice “swoop” logo similar to Doc Savage’s. Then they did five more with reprints of the pulp covers, though reduced in size. They did twice as many for G-8 than The Spider, more than anyone else, but it was shortlived.
Then Dimedia, which was connected to Argosy Communications, did some mass-market paperbacks in 1984-85 with nice covers by Ken Kelley for some Spider novels and G-8. While they did three Spider books, they only did one G-8 book.
However, since 2001, Adventure House has been reprinting the G-8 novels in a large format (7×10) similar to the pulps, though not as true facimiles as they only reprint the G-8 story with a few additions. At this point they have put out 60 novels and I hope they succeed in putting them all out. It also looks like they have reprinted some of the earlier issues that have fallen out of print. So please check these out so we can get a complete run.
New stories
There have been a handful of new stories that have included G-8 (such as the new Spider novel, The Doom Legion) or hinted him, some showing him in WWII, but no solo G-8 novels. Ron Fortier created a new character called Nighthawk, who is similar to G-8. I find it strange that as we get new works on The Spider, we have yet to see new G-8 stories. Someone could even have him come back and help in WWII. But then attempts to have new Operator #5 stories have failed.
Philip José Farmer linked him to his Wold Newton family. His original idea was that G-8, The Spider, and The Shadow were the same man, as all three were involved in WWI as aviators and spies of some sort, then he later revised this to have the three being related. A take on G-8 appeared in his Adventure of the Peerless Peer, rewritten as The Adventure of the Three Mad Men.
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