JOHNNY HAZARD

It's been a while since I made any changes with the strips I follow every day at the King Features website. (It's now called comics kingdom.com .) My main interest is their classic strips, of course. The other day I noticed that they've started carrying Johnny Hazard, so I added that to my favorites list.  It started just a few months ago, so I got caught up pretty quick.

They're carrying Frank Robbins' adventure strip from its beginning in 1944.  The title character is a USAF pilot fighting the Nazis, and he's a rebellious badass.  The first story had him escaping from behind enemy lines in a stolen Messerschmidt--I think maybe they couldn't find the first week--and now he's on a particularly dangerous mission to supply weapons to partisans to support a big Allied operation.  The mission is complicated by the presence of Brandy, a blond photographer who wants to land to photograph the partisans...  All this is in the dailies; the Sundays are more comic.

Later on Johnny becomes a postwar pilot going on big adventures around the world and eventually becomes an agent for an organization called WING.  It has some nice artwork: I liked reading the strip from the mid-1970s in my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.  And the dialogue has lots of wartime slang. ("Flying coffins!")

Among the other classic strips, the current Rip Kirby story has him and Desmond rescuing a prince and his baby son from a prison behind the Iron Curtain.  The Cold War was always a bit too complex for adventure stories, and I would have thought Rip Kirby was too smart for Cold War stuff.  The Cold War worked better as implicit subtext, like in the current Flash Gordon stories where he's battling the Skorpi empire that's threatening the earth from afar.

I'm seeing all this on my computer with its Mac OSX operating system, which I just updated to something called "Mavericks." (Did Don Draper suggest the name?) I can no longer use the zoom-in and zoom-out feature.