Trump’s ‘Space Force’ has comic roots

MICHAEL CAVNA Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said he would direct the Pentagon and the Defence Department to create a “Space Force” as a separate but equal branch of the U.S. military.

But like numerous colourful terms that the president deploys, Space Force has popular roots at least as far back as the American midcentury — harking back to the era of Trump’s childhood. That was when the “Space Force” was launched onto the newspaper comics page.

The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, not only ramped up the space race but also helped fuel the cultural appetite for new space-oriented entertainment.

So the following year, Jack Kirby — who had co-created Captain America nearly two decades earlier, contributing to the Golden Age dawn of superhero comics — was eager to help start a syndicated sci-fi comic strip that he could ride into the Space Age.

The title of the short-lived strip: Sky Masters of the Space Force. Sky Masters is celebrating its 60th anniversary this summer but though the strip was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, the feature’s run ended after just three years.

Part of the problem: The strip was beset by legal issues over payment percentages and royalty cuts, as Kirby and National/DC editor Jack Schiff battled in court; Schiff prevailed.

Now, in timely fashion, editordesigner Ferran Delgado, working with the Jack Kirby Museum, is publishing to the American market Sky Masters of the Space Force: The Complete Sunday Strips in Color (1959-1960).

Delgado, who has worked as a letterer for Marvel, first discovered Sky Masters in 2000, when the editor-in-chief of the publisher of Marvel Comics in Spain showed him a Sky Masters book published by Pure Imagination.

Now, Delgado says he’s working on “the definitive book compiling Wally Wood’s Sky Masters dailies shot from a newly found set of printer’s proofs.”