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A Mini-Interview with Blackhawk artist Rick Burchett.
Rick started out at Gardner Advertising in St. Louis, MO. Always a comics fan, Rick drew a lot of fan art in the 70s, which evolved into his becoming a regular comics artist 20 years ago. He started out doing work with comics companies like AC Comics, First, Pacific, Capital, Impact, Vertigo and others. Mike Gold became an editor at DC Comics, offering Rick his first job at the company he's worked with ever since. He's written and/or pencilled/inked a lot of "Black" titles: Blackhawk, Black Diamond, Black Hood. He's worked on JLA, E-Man, Batman, Detective, Batman Beyond, American Flagg, Great American Western, among others.
Q. Was Blackhawk your first assignment at DC?
Rick: Yes. Originally Mike Gold brought me in to ink Trevor Von Eden's pencils on The Shadow but Trevor wound up not doing the book. Bill Sienkiewicz was drawing The Shadow, so Mike gave me Blackhawk in Action Weekly.
Q. Were you familiar with Chaykin's Blackhawk when you were given the project?
Rick: Yes. I read the mini-series.
Q. Were you given any instructions or specifications?
Rick: Yeah, DC wanted the characters to look like Chaykin's version.
Q. Both you and Mike Grell looked like you did your homework for the Action Weekly series, that right?
Rick: Oh, yes. A lot. But we got started later than any of the other features in ACW. Grell was actually vacationing in Singapore at the time. He dictated the story on tape, then sent it to DC. U.S. Customs lost the tape, and then, six weeks later, they found it and sent it in. That put us way behind.
Q. Did you follow the original series when you were a kid?
Rick: Oh, yeah. I was a big fan of the original series. We're talking early 60's here. I followed them until it was canceled, then revived, then canceled, then revived again... then again.
Q. Give me your feelings on the original series. Then compare it to what went on post-Chaykin.
Rick: I think we traded camaraderie for history. The plots and villains in the original series were a little more fantastic, a little more science-fiction and super-villain oriented. Even though we did do that science-fiction story at the end of our run.
Q. Any use bringing up the Christmas Blackhawks or The Listener and Golden Centurion?
Rick: Ha, ha! To tell you the truth, I bet there are people who feel what we did to the Blackhawks was as bad as what the writers and artists did to them in the 60s. Had it been up to me, we would have done the book differently.
Q. How so?
Rick: Hmmm, I think our version was a little darker than the way I'd have done it. But, at the time, comics, as a whole, were a lot darker across the board.
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