Review by Win Wiacek
This second 260-page paperback continues the lush romanticism of Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordon, produced in landscape format and printed in stark black and white, covering 1953 to 1958. It opens with a scholarly Introduction on ‘Comic Strip Godfathers’ from Bruce Jones before addressing Volume One’s cliffhanger.
With a new spaceship, far-flung travellers Flash, Dale and Zarkov set off for Earth but are forced to land on the Moon where a secret human base has been established. For unknown reasons Dr. Stella and her thuggish aide Marc detain and delay them, but after an increasing number of close shaves and mysterious accidents, a little digging by our heroes reveals that they are the unwitting guests of ruthless space pirates.
Although to this day Raboy’s excellent illustration sells the strip, it was the constant variety provided by uncredited writer Don Moore that freed Raboy’s imagination. Flash and his allies switch between Earth and other planets, where they encounter the likes of invisible psychic dictator the Mind, the god-like beings of Cortinus, and the feudal inhabitants of Venus. Threats on Earth include evidence of a prehistoric atomic blast in the Libyan desert leading to an alien in a bottle, a meteor crash in the Amazon introducing an invasion from Pluto, and an incredible trip to the past to witness the earliest humans. Along the way a new brief run supporting character is introduced, orphan boy Pebbles.
Most strips range between one and two months of the original weekly continuity, but this volume’s episodic epic occupied just over a year from June 1956. The fantastic wonder planet’s eccentric orbit again intersects with Earth, so after six years Flash, Dale and Zarkov ‘Return to Mongo’. However, their proposed sightseeing trip inevitably involves them in an icily arctic cold war between Wolf Men and Walrus Men, a face-off with would-be supreme tyrant Gant, and clashes with leather-winged Dactyl Men. This leads to capture by arrogant cloud dwellers of Paxora where robot duplicates intent on conquest end Mongo’s most secretive sub-culture.
Defeating the artificial men’s plan eliminates all but one of the inimical automatons, but Rok is like no android the Earthlings have ever encountered before: patronising protector and unstable enemy in one. Despite safeguarding them through Mongo’s wildest regions, the mechanoid’s ultimate aims remain unclear. Following that Flash, Dale and Zarkov enter a spaceship race, intent on winning a craft able to take them home to Earth. Their eventual escape from Mongo sees them lured in a trap set by the Gatherer, a nebula-dwelling desperado who wants to imprison them beside a legion of other valiant explorers in his vast Sargasso of Space.
Every week he toiled on the strip, Mac Raboy produced ever-more expansive artwork filled with distressed damsels, deadly monsters and all sorts of outrageous adventure that still thrills, and continues in Volume Three.
