Review by Ian Keogh
It speaks greatly to Alex Raymond’s sense of civil duty that despite being the artist of one of the USA’s top newspaper strips, in 1944 he felt he had to serve alongside other Americans fighting in World War II. He completed the strips ending The Fall of Ming, and Austin Briggs took over for around three and a half years before Mac Raboy in turn became the regular artist on the weekly Sunday strip.
Briggs had drawn the first Flash Gordon daily newspaper strips beginning in 1941, so was familiar with adventurer Flash, girlfriend Dale Arden and scientific genius Dr. Zarkov, and because Raymond was the trailblazer there’s a tendency to underestimate Briggs. His brief was obviously to emulate Raymond’s style, which he adheres to throughout, and while he may not be as technically gifted as Raymond, very few artists are. Allowing for the styles of the times, this begins with good artwork and becomes more adventurous throughout, and sequences of Flash in action drawn by Briggs have a greater sense of movement than Raymond, while he maintains the tradition of alluring women in alluring clothing. As was common for the era, though, women are decorative items to be captured and rescued rather than individuals with their own strengths. The exceptions are the warrior women featured in the title story.
As ever, the criminally undersung Don Moore writes everything, this collection encompassing ten stories ranging from between four and seven months of original Sunday continuity. We pick up with Flash and Dale on their way to Mongo, but waylaid in Marvela on seeing an unconscious woman menaced by a giant scorpion. It sets the theme for what follows as Flash sees off assorted other giant creatures while he and Dale are pursued by the cold-hearted rulers of the area.
The previous book finally saw Ming the Merciless deposed as Mongo’s tyrant ruler, but Flash is unaware his equally cruel son Kang is now the planetary power. From here the tendency is for Moore to run one adventure into the next, so although he looks different, there’s little else separates Kang and Ming. After an interlude in a floating city Flash returns to deal with Kang in a great twisting adventure featuring doppelgangers and a tyrant on the run, but not without resources.
Collecting pages originally published a week apart into a single volume seems to show Moore as a clumsy scripter, forever moving Flash from one cliffhanger ending to another threat in the course of six panels. That, though, was the expectation, and if the villains now seem clichéd and the traps overly sensational, there’s a fair chance Moore originated what later became overused. Having noted that, every woman Flash meets, almost always a ruler, becoming instantly besotted with the hunk was surely even hackneyed in the mid-1940s.
Allowing for the times, these are largely solid adventures, although Moore seemed to have his mind elsewhere with ‘Wizard King of the Fur Men’, with an uncharacteristic lack of imagination and bizarre ending. Otherwise if you’re unconcerned about shades of grey and can put your cynicism to one side, there’s much to enjoy. Titan published the strips in 2015, and ten years later an American edition was issued by Mad Cave Studios under the title Flash Gordon: The Classic Collection Volume Four.
