Review by Win Wiacek

Although Mac Raboy has the cover credit, he draws plots provided by Don Moore, his compositional skills, fine linework, eye for clean, concise detail and just plain genius for drawing beautiful people and things echoing the work of Flash’s creator Alex Raymond.

This fourth and final 276-page paperback volume is printed in stark monochrome, landscape format and still criminally out-of-print/long overdue for a fresh edition. It spans December 1962 through to the end of December 1967, by which time successor Dan Barry was already adding his artistic contributions to the final chapter. After one last informative appraisal of Raboy in Bruce Jones’ introduction it’s time for one last blast-off as the adventure resumes with already-in-progress thriller ‘Sons of Saturn’. It cliffhangerly closed Volume Three barely weeks in and the hitherto unsuspected super-civilisation thriving in the clouds of the Sixth Planet is revealed.

Pure cold war paranoia shapes the next sequence. ‘The Force Dome’ sees well-meaning Professor Howe build a perfectly impenetrable protective energy barrier and convince the authorities to let him run a live test by shielding all of Metropole City. When Howe suddenly dies the experiment goes awry and the generators can’t be switched off. Thankfully, Flash and Zarkov are on site and able to avert the crisis before all the air under the city-sized bubble is used up.

Despite working on the strip from the earliest days, Moore never seems short of ideas. He mixes adventures set on Earth featuring Yetis, lost Andes tribes and attempts to control the weather with trips to far flung planets to overthrow tyrants, deal with a comedic con man and cope with a pack of killer beasts. That story is notable for the Space Agency Survival Corps squad being led by Commander Singh, a Sikh.

Sadly, Raboy’s time on Flash Gordon was ended by illness, only 53 when he died of cancer. He was the last great Golden Age romanticist illustrator and his lushly lavish, freely-flowing adoration of perfected human form was beginning to stale in popular taste. The daily feature had already switched to the solid, chunky realism of Dan Barry and Frank Frazetta, but here at least the last outpost of ethereally beautiful heroism and pretty perils still prevailed. It’s a dream realm you can visit as easily and often as Flash, Dale and Zarkov popped between planets, just by tracking down this book and the one which preceded it.