I’d forgotten about this character. Back in the ’60s that was about as close as you could get to a black comic book hero. This comic had everything I liked: WW II fighter planes and an enigmatic non-white hero.
Flying “Johnny” Cloud was a member of the Navajo tribe but little is known about his early life. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at the start of World War II and overcame racial prejudices with his superior skill as a pilot, quickly becoming known as “the Navajo Ace.”
When the commander of his unit died in battle against a squadron of Nazi bombers, Cloud became his successor and the unit was dubbed “The Happy Braves.”
Cloud led the Happy Braves for several years, but during one failed mission his plane was shot down. He was rescued by the Haunted Tank, which picked up several other stray soldiers on the same run, and the strays banded together to form the misfit military unit the Losers.
http://www.comicmix.com/news/2008/06/09/happy-birthday-johnny-cloud/
That part about his life with the “Haunted Tank” I did not know.
Hard to find pix. The thing that gave the artwork its signature image was the plane that ( Lt or Capt) Cloud flew. The P-51s in the Navajo Ace comic were always one of the later models that hardly saw any action, in real life, except in the final months of the war, if I remember correctly. Instead of the much more typical P-51Ds, all the Mustangs in the Navajo Ace were P-51Hs or Js or something. Hopefully I’ll be able to find pix of Cloud’s plane.
I told you. I was really into this stuff. Messerschmidts and Spitfires had dogfights throughout the pages of my school notebooks.
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This is why it was so difficult to remember this character. He didn’t have his own book. He appeared as one of two or three features in this mag.
http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/400w/376/183761/984125.jpg
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