I’ve always been a sucker for Pulp adventure stories, movie serials, and retro versions of those.  Comics like The Rocketeer.  Movies like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004).  This is right in that wheelhouse.  Airboy is a two-fisted hero of a slightly weird World War II, who flies a strange airplane and gets into lots of misadventures.  

This volumes collects Airfighters #1 and #2, the specials Airboy: 1942, Air Vixens, and a new to this collection story, Insurrection.  Chuck Dixon is writer on many of the stories, but there are a bunch of other authors.  And there are a LOT of different artists.  This is published by Moonstone, and they never had, in my memory, a roster of really good artists.  Most of it is the quality you’d expect to see in any given “artists’ alley” at a comic convention.  It’s fine.  It gets the job done.  Is it pleasant to look at?  Not really.  There are exceptions.  I like Todd Fox & Lito Fernandez’s work on Airboy: 1942 quite a bit.  It’s not jaw dropping, but it’s solid work.  It’s of a quality that wouldn’t look out of place coming out of the “big two.”

I assume there’s more Airboy out there.  I never really followed the comic.  I just remember seeing it occasionally at the shops, and thinking, “I should check this out.”  A lot of the stuff in this book feels like it maybe draws on a larger mythos.  There are characters who show up and do some crazy stuff, but aren’t really explained.  Are they from other issues?  Or was that just the feeling they were going for, like reading a random issue of Batman or The Fantastic Four, and seeing references to things you don’t know.  

Whatever the case, I enjoyed reading this volume.  I don’t want to sing its praises too loudly.  It’s wonky and uneven.  The art is all over the place.  In a lot of ways, it feels like echoes of other, better works.  But if you like the genre, it’s got some good stuff.  And it did remind me how much I’d love to run a Weird War II roleplaying game one day.  I’ve talked about it off and on for 35 years.  Maybe one day I should actually do it.  

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