Star Hawks is a comic strip written first by Ron Goulart and later by Archie Goodwin, with artwork by Gil Kane. It began on October 3, 1977 and ran through 1981.[1]
Kane received the National Cartoonist Society Story Comic Strip Award for 1977 for his work on the strip.[2]
In 1978, shortly after the launch of the strip, Kane recalled its genesis:
I got a call from Ron Goulart, who told me he'd been having some talks with Flash Fairfield, who is the art editor of the comics at [the newspaper syndicate] NEA, and they wanted to see me about going to work on that strip. I met with them at that time. Ron had done about two weeks of material, but it was very far from where we went with it. So we reworked the material, and I'm very strong ... on romance and lyricism, and I started to advance the cause of that kind of material and make it less satirical and more of a classic[-style] adventure strip. [For the hero,] originally I had James Coburn in mind. ... The hero's friend, Chavez, was modeled after a bald-headed Victor McLaglen.[3]
The daily strip was unique in that it was two-tier: Each daily was twice as large as the normal daily strip. This format allowed artist Kane great flexibility in layout. However it greatly hampered efforts to sign on papers to carry the strip. The strip ran daily and Sunday for three and a half years, for a total of 1,252 strips.[4]