For anyone who’s seen a number of G-8 and his Battle Aces covers, then you know Frederick Blakeslee was not as adept at rendering the human form as he was machinery. Trained as a draftsman and with his work at the Curtiss-Sperry Company, Blakeslee excelled in the minutia of areoplane design. And no where was this more evident than in the beautiful and dynamic covers he painted for Popular Publication’s air war anthology series: Battle Aces, Battle Birds and Dare-Devil Aces. The covers were never reflective of the stories within, but Blakeslee usually supplied a brief write-up of the events behind his monthly cover spectacular!

This time we have his twelve covers for the year of 1938 joining those already posted from 1932 through 1937 in our Dare-Devil Aces Cover Gallery! The July and November covers include a bonus of planes battling over a train yard–Blakeslee loved to paint trains as well, providing many covers for Popular’s Railroad Magazine.