“Edge of the Sky” is issue #5245 of the long-running British war story comic series COMMANDO, published by D.C. Thomson.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird never flew in Russian airspace…officially.
The Blackbird could reach a top speed of 22,000mph and a ceiling height of 85,000ft – enough to see the curvature of the Earth. They outmatched everything the Soviet Air Force could throw at them… Except the MiG-31 ‘Foxhound’.
So when one angry Red sets his sights on the elusive pilot known as the “White Comet”, it’s a battle to the death…at the Edge of the Sky!
AUTHOR’S NOTES
It’s no secret that I’m a huge aviation nerd, so getting this opportunity to write about one of the most amazing aircraft in flying history was great! That stunning cover is painted by my good friend Neil Roberts (whose work graces several of my Horus Heresy novels) and interior art is drawn by Paolo Ongaro.
I first laid eyes on an SR-71 Blackbird as a young aviation geek at Farnborough Air Show in 1986. To this day, I’ll never forget the noise of those big engines and the way it looked like a hole in the sky as it flew against a backdrop of cloudless blue. In the years since, I’ve been up close to Blackbirds at the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, the Udvar-Hazy Annex of the Smithsonian in Virginia, the US Air Force Museum in Ohio, the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and aboard the USS Intrepid in New York… They never fail to impress!
The story also features few other landmark pieces of aviation hardware – from the Soviet Union, the MiG-21 “Fishbed”, MiG-25 “Foxbat” and MiG-31 “Foxhound”, along with the venerable USAF F-4 Phantom II – and it was a lot of fun to write about all that Cold War heavy iron!
The story was later reprinted in the Finnish comics anthology Korkeajännitys (High Voltage).
GALLERY
