More Amazing Blakeslee Covers!
This week we have more great Dare-Devil Aces covers by Frederick Blakeslee. Popular Publications published some dynamite aviation art on the cover of Dare-Devil Aces! Sadly, we don’t use more than a sliver of it for our books. But that’s a design choice — We’re not trying to keep anything from you. And now we’ve added two more years of great Blakeslee covers to our growing gallery––1936 and 1937!
The June and December covers of 1936 are probably the two most recognizable Dare-Devil Aces covers and we have featured both of them now on back covers of our books. Our very first publication, Steve Fisher’s Captain Babyface, featured the June cover on the back. Captain Babyface and Mr Death matched wits through ten of the twelve issues that year––their last scrap appearing in the November issue. William Hartley’s The Adventures of Molloy & McNamara started running in the July 1936 issue with the adventure we choose to use as the title for the volume, Satan’s Playmates, in the December issue allowing us to utilize it’s cover in the cover design of that book.
As 1936 gave way to 1937, Blakeslee’s covers move further away from depictions of planes in use during the late great hate and start to feature more contemporary planes in the frenetic melees depicted on the covers. Robert J. Hogan’s The Red Falcon was also printing it last stories in 1937 with the last Dare-Devil Aces Red Falcon story being published in the January 1938 issue. The June 1937 cover seemed to work best with the crimson cover of the Red Falcon’s fourth and final volume. This is the latest cover we’ve used, but fear not, this is not the last update to our covers gallery. There are more covers to come.
You can enjoy these as well as covers from 1932 through 1935 in our Dare-Devil Aces Cover Gallery!
More Great Blakeslee Covers!
This week we have more great Dare-Devil Aces covers by Frederick Blakeslee. Popular Publications published some dynamite aviation art on the cover of Dare-Devil Aces! Sadly, we don’t use more than a sliver of it for our books. But that’s a design choice — We’re not trying to keep anything from you. And now we’ve added two more years of great Blakeslee covers to our growing gallery––1934 and 1935!
We’ve only featured two covers from this period on our books. The Red Falcon: The Complete Dare-Devil Aces Years Volume III collected his adventures from January 1934 through July 1935 and as 
such we used the cover from the May 1934 issue on the back cover of that book. The three planes on the May 1934 issue sort of mirror the three planes challenging the Red Falcon and Sika in the Blakeslee illustration for “The Tom-Tom Ace” used on the cover.
The other cover we’ve used was from 1935. Chinese Brady: The Complete Adventures made use of the April cover. The grey clouds worked well with the orange cover in a way the usual blue sky Blakeslee uses on a majority of the covers didn’t.
You can enjoy these as well as covers from 1932 and 1933 in our Dare-Devil Aces Cover Gallery!
Dare-Devil Aces Cover Gallery Update!
One of the great features of the Popular Publications air war anthology pulps we reprint in our books are the original Frederick Blakeslee covers. We feature Blakeslee’s interior black and white illustrations heavily throughout our books and on the covers. But the actual pulp covers were never representational of any of the stories or characters inside, so we don’t really get to feature them in our books aside from the back cover where sadly they are cropped and covered by the UPC code. But here on our site we can prominently feature Blaleslee’s incredible covers for Dare-Devil Aces in full color!
The Dare-Devil Aces Cover Gallery is a work in progress. 
We’re starting off with a good number of the covers from 1932 through 1933. We are missing a few we plan to fill in in the future. You may recognize the tops of a number of these. The April 1932 cover was used on the back of The Three Mosquitoes: The Magic Inferno. That’s the only cover from 1932 we’ve used so far, but we’ve used a number of the 1933 covers. Featured on the backs of several of our other books are the February cover which was used on the back of The Red Falcon Vol.1 while the September cover was used for Volume 2. Our first collection of The Three Mosquitoes—The Wizard Ace—employed the August cover. The May issue featured on The Sky Devil: Hell’s Skipper!
Check out the Dare-Devil Aces covers here!
The June and December covers of 1936 are probably the two most recognizable Dare-Devil Aces covers and we have featured both of them now on back covers of our books. Our very first publication, Steve Fisher’s Captain Babyface, featured the June cover on the back. Captain Babyface and Mr Death matched wits through ten of the twelve issues that year––their last scrap appearing in the November issue. William Hartley’s The Adventures of Molloy & McNamara started running in the July 1936 issue with the adventure we choose to use as the title for the volume, Satan’s Playmates, in the December issue allowing us to utilize it’s cover in the cover design of that book. 
As 1936 gave way to 1937, Blakeslee’s covers move further away from depictions of planes in use during the late great hate and start to feature more contemporary planes in the frenetic melees depicted on the covers. Robert J. Hogan’s The Red Falcon was also printing it last stories in 1937 with the last Dare-Devil Aces Red Falcon story being published in the January 1938 issue. The June 1937 cover seemed to work best with the crimson cover of the Red Falcon’s fourth and final volume. This is the latest cover we’ve used, but fear not, this is not the last update to our covers gallery. There are more covers to come.
