Review by Win Wiacek
By most lights Flash Gordon is the world’s most influential comic strip. When the hero debuted on Sunday January 7th 1934 as an answer to the revolutionary, inspirational, but quirkily clunky Buck Rogers two new elements were added to the wonderment; Classical Lyricism and poetic dynamism. It became a weekly invitation to stunning exotic glamour and astonishing beauty.
Where Rogers blended traditional adventure and high science concepts, under Alex Raymond Flash Gordon reinterpreted fairy tales, heroic epics and mythology, spectacularly draping them in the trappings of the contemporary future, with varying ‘Rays’, ‘Engines’ and ‘Motors’ substituting for trusty swords and lances – although there were also plenty of those. Exotic craft and contraptions stood in for galleons, chariots and magic carpets. It was a narrative trick that kept the far-fetched satisfactorily familiar – and in 1948 was continued from the art of Austin Briggs (see The Storm Queen of Valkir) by Mac Raboy and Raymond’s ghostwriter Don Moore. Look closely and you’ll see cowboys, gangsters and of course, flying saucer fetishes adding contemporary flourish to the fanciful fables in this volume.
Raboy’s sleek, fine-line brush style, heavily influenced by his idol Raymond, had made his work on 1940s comics a benchmark of artistic quality in the proliferating superhero genre. His seemingly inevitable assumption of Flash’s extraordinary exploits led to a renaissance of the strip and in the rapidly evolving post-war world Flash Gordon became once more a benchmark of timeless, escapist quality that only Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant could touch.
This first 260 page volume, produced in landscape format and printed in bold stark monochrome (although one or two strips appear to have been scanned from printed colour copies) covers the January 8th 1948 to May 10th 1953. It opens with Flash as President of Mongo when Slyk, a refugee from the believed-uninhabited moon of Lunita, arrives. Beseeching assistance to liberate his world from the tyrannical depredations of the wicked siblings Rudo and Lura, the Lunite accompanies Flash, Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov to his hidden moon where the heroes are soon captured before Slyk saves the day. This short transitional tale set up an unfailingly popular formula of nightmarish beasts, distressed damsels and outrageous adventure that would last until Raboy’s death in 1967.
Over successive adventures Flash and Co. meet the inhabitants of a red comet, participate in an undersea odyssey, visit frozen Polaria, and then the tropics. A penal colony is investigated, there’s a vacation on Earth, and taking us past halfway, a tropical world with colossal plants and feudal warriors. Not only is our solar system teeming with unsuspected life, but it appears most of it is ruled by complete sods, as Flash, Dale and Zarkov battled winged tree-men, swamp horrors and the nefarious overlord Stang among others.
As is fitting for one of the world’s greatest continuity strips this first volume ends on a gripping cliffhanger, but with so much incredible action, drawn with such magnificent style there’s no way any fan of classic adventure can possibly feel short-changed.
Raboy was the last of the Golden Age of romanticist illustrators, but his lush and lavish flowing adoration of the perfected human form was already fading from popular taste. The daily feature at this time had already switched to the solid, chunky, he-manly, burly realism of Dan Barry and even Frank Frazetta. Here, however, at least the last outpost of beautiful elegant heroism and gracefully pretty perils prevail. Bring on Volume Two.
