G-8 and His Battle Aces

 

 

G-8 and His Battle Aces (originally simply Battle Aces) was both an air war and a hero pulp, published between 1930 and 1944.  Every issue featured a lead novel centred around the adventures of secret agent and World War One flying ace G-8, as he and his sidekicks battled various nefarious German plots to defeat the Allies in the Great War.  From the outset, these plots were bizarre in the extreme.  The very first issue, for instance, involved the Germans using a newly discovered specious of venomous breathed bats against Allied forces, with the cover featuring G-8 astride an airborne example of said bats.  Other threats offered by the dastardly krauts included zombies, mummys, werewolves and even Martians.  Bearing in mind that one of G-8's regular antagonists was a voodoo priest, another a man with a face so badly scarred it was hidden behind a metal mask and an oriental fiend in the pay of the Germans, none of these threats should come as a surprise.  The above cover, from March 1934, is pretty typical, with its striking cover painting illustrating 'The Skeleton Patrol', which seems to involve G-8 and co menaced by some kind of giant skeleton creature.  

A notable feature of the covers (mostly by Frederick Blackslee) was that, no matter how fantastical the threat illustrated, the aircraft being flown by heroes and villains alike were portrayed extremely accurately.  All of the lead novels were written by Robert J Hogan, with each issue filled out with a number of short stories.  Most of these were written by other writers, (although Hogan usually contributed one short story per issue), and, in contrast to the lead novels, featured no supernatural or science fictional elements.  Instead, they were straightforward flying or air combat stories.  G-8 and His Battle Aces was a number of aerial adventure pulps which appeared in the late twenties and early thirties, which included Flying Aces, Air Stories, Wings and War Birds.  The character of G-8 himself and the reformatting of the magazine to focus on him, was a response to the growing popularity of Street and Smith's The Shadow, a hero pulp which quickly became phenomenally popular, spawning radio and film adaptations.  G-8, however, while popular never really came close to the popularity of The Shadow, or even Doc Savage, whose formats were less restrictive than G-8's, which ultimately tied his adventures to the skies above the Western Front during World War One.