G-8 Flies the Weird Skies

By Arnie Katz

The mysterious star of the pulp magazine series G-8 and His Battle Aces has been described as "America's WWI Flying Spy." He earned the moniker by battling not just the Central Powers, but mutants, aliens, ghouls and other supernatural creatures. G-8 and His Battle Aces is a startling cross-breed of two "pulp magazine" genres—aviation and science fantasy. It's Wings meets X-Files in purple pulpish prose.

Robert J. Hogan wrote all the G-8 epics, as well as most of the short pieces, from the first issue in October 1933 to the final June 1944 number. A veteran of aviation pulps like War Birds, Hogan's WWI experiences provided the basis for comparatively realistic, if romanticized, tales of high-flying heroics.

It seemed like a gamble in 1934, when Harry Steeger and Harold Goldsmith of Popular Publications picked Hogan to write the company's new air hero pulp. Popular Publications paid as little as a quarter-penny a word during the Depression years, and it almost didn't survive its first year. Even with the success of Dime Detective, launched in 1931, the company needed another hit.

They needn't have worried. Not only did G-8 and His Battle Aces achieve instant success, but Popular premiered another lucrative hero pulp, The Spider, that same year.

Hogan mixed horror, suspense and blazing action into a formula that kept G-8 and His Battle Aces on newsstands for more than a decade. He wrote two other hero pulps, The Mysterious Wu Fang and The Secret 6, but neither approached G-8 and His Battle Aces in popularity or longevity.

Though he had all the sterling traits that identify the classic pulp champion, G-8 boasted two main talents: he was the world's greatest pilot, and he was America's master spy. Most of the stories let him display both skills, as aerial action frequently led to a disguised G-8 operating undercover in enemy countries.

Unlike their leader, the Battle Aces had normal names. Bull Martin and Nippy Weston, both Lieutenants, are the proverbial bickering assistants of the pulps. Bull is big, strong and a bit dimwitted, while Nippy is a brainy little guy who's deliriously happy to be involved in all these adventures. Hogan emphasized the two characters' polar opposition by having Weston fly Spad #13 and Martin #7.

Batman has Alfred, Nero Wolfe has Archie and G-8 has Battle. The English servant is equally adept at whipping up a tasty meal and concocting an impenetrable disguise.

"The Bat Staffel," the first G-8 novel, introduces the most durable of the series' numerous villains, Herr Doktor Krueger. The insane German scientist menaces the free world with his bat-plane in the October, 1934 issue and then returns the next month in "Purple Aces" with a chemical weapon.

Over the years, Krueger threw everything imaginable at G-8 and his buddies. He tried giant skeletons in "The Skeleton Staffel" (March, 1934), giant tentacle creates in "The Death Monster" (March 1935) and walking skeletons in "Skeletons of the Black Cross" (February 1936). He also tried death rays, re-animated corpses and many other fiendish devices, all with the same notable lack of success.

Herr Doktor Krueger appeared in nearly half the issues during the early years, but then Hogan began to build stories around other evil characters. Evidently, "the little giant of science" was the baddie G-8 fans loved to hate, because he became one of the air ace's most frequent opponents in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The final bow for Herr Dokter Krueger came more than a year before the end of the magazine in June 1944. His final scheme involved a heavily armed giant zeppelin. Though the powerful air ship fared no better than Krueger's other creations, G-8 eventually succumbed to an attack of a different kind. Like most other pulps, G-8 and His Battle Aces lost out to rising paper prices and competition from other media, including the paperback book.

No one will ever confuse pulp fiction with Great Literature, but Robert J. Hogan's World War I yarns have a visceral appeal and the same kind of nonstop action that drives today's big—budget action movies. And though the heroes and villains of the more prosaic WWI pulp stories in the straight aviation pulps now read like ancient history, G-8's blood-splattered encounters with sinister forces and devilish doomsday can still keep us turning pages and shuddering through nightmares.

Arnie Katz is Editor of the Collecting Channel. These are the opinions of the author, not the opinions of eBay, and therefore eBay does not validate the accuracy of or endorse these opinions.

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The preceding material was written by Lee Bernstein. These are the opinions of the author, not the opinions of eBay, and therefore eBay does not validate the accuracy of or endorse these opinions.