Tomahawk was a Revolutionary War-era pioneer woodsman created in 1947, just as superheroes were fading.
The character anticipated and undoubtedly got a boost from the Davy Crockett craze of 1954-55, kicked off by Disney’s version of Crockett’s life. The Ballad of Davy Crockett was probably the most-sung song of 1955, recorded by Bill Hayes, Fess Parker, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Steve Allen, Burl Ives and Fred Waring.
Graduating from a back-up feature to his own title in 1950, DC’s Tomahawk was a cross between Davy Crockett and Batman.
With his boy sidekick, Dan Hunter, he fought British troops, tyrannosauruses rex, a frontier Frankenstein monster, aliens, Indians and alien Indians (don’t ask). Like Batman, he occasionally gained super powers and encountered a female masked champion of justice — Miss Liberty.
“Toward the latter part of the ‘50s, practically all DC comics ran aliens, monsters and other goofy sci-fi stuff on the covers, no matter how badly it clashed with the title's subject matter — even war comics often sported dinosaurs in that position,” observed comics historian Don Markstein. “And so, all through the late 1950s and early to mid ‘60s, Tomahawk fought gigantic tree men, miraculously surviving dinosaurs, mutated salamanders and other menaces that seem somehow to have escaped the history books. There was even a giant gorilla among them, and putting a gorilla on the cover was also a contemporary trend at DC.”
“The character was created by writer Joe Samachson (who also scripted the first J’onn J’onzz, Manhunter from Mars story) and artist Edmond Good (whose work also appeared at Quality and Fox) — but the man most closely associated with his development was Fred Ray, a cartoonist who was also a Revolutionary War buff,” Markstein noted.
“Tomahawk got his name from the fact that he was raised by Indians, thus absorbing their lore — a definite asset in the forest-based guerilla warfare he carried on against the British — combined with the fact that his name actually was Tom Hawk.”
Well and fondly remembered
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