You think you know Flash Gordon. You’ve seen the beloved 1980 film. If you’re lucky, you saw the Filmation Saturday morning cartoon, or maybe the excellent animated short from 9 years ago that adapted a chapter from the original movie serial. The set-up and the story are firmly lodged in your head. Except… there’s a lot more to it.
Thanks to Mad Cave Studios having landed the rights to publish Flash Gordon, we don’t just have a man of two worlds. We have a man of two time periods. Though other publishers have reprinted the original Sunday comic strips by Alex Raymond and Don Moore, those have been largely out of print and expensive on the secondary market. This week, Mad Cave launched their Flash Gordon Classic Collection Volume 1, a hardcover restoring the first four years of the strip in vibrant color. Though that color is a bit simplistic, restorer Peter Maresca stayed true to the color palettes of 1934 newspapers.
And this is where I realized that I’d only occasionally seen a couple of Sunday strips out of context. Alex Raymond’s reputation has always loomed large, and of course the 1980 film uses figures and occasional panels in the opening credits. But I’d never read the original strip.
By modern standards, the first movie serial starring Buster Crabbe seems quaint. The cliffhangers ending each chapter often happen abruptly. Though the chapters aren’t exactly slow, they’re not moving at a breakneck pace. Reading a few months of Flash Gordon, it’s clear the serials left out a lot.
Each strip is stuffed with action, beautifully laid out by Raymond. Ghostwriter Moore packs at least 2 death-defying situations in one strip, making it easy to overlook the occasionally clunky dialogue. Within about 50 pages, Raymond and Moore have introduced the Court of Ming the Merciless, the Lion Men of Mongo, the Hawkmen of Mongo, the Shark Men of Mongo, and the Dwarfs of Mongo. Each species gets a moment to shine and a culture fairly built out.
But it must be acknowledged, often those cultures are racist views. Take the strips as of their time, and try to see Ming and his followers as literal aliens. It’s hard with the faithful color recreation. Yet other than some costuming, there’s nothing about them that follows stereotypes of the time. It’s still problematic and it’s comics history. It deserves its props because of all it inspired.
The work is cinematic, and if you enjoy Golden Age Comics, you’ll notice many poses and panels “borrowed” for later comic book heroes. One obvious is the original Hawkman, inspired by the Hawkmen of Mongo though wearing Flash’s face. Overall, it’s an easier read than early Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which Flash Gordon was created to compete with and soon overshadowed. Buck Rogers artist Dick Calkins couldn’t hold a candle to Raymond.
Though Mad Cave’s own Flash Gordon #1 packs its own punch, it dims in comparison. Though the characters have undergone a massive redesign (Ming’s brief appearance here is clearly reptilian) and artist Will Conrad has terrific control of the setting, as a relaunch, it assumes a lot from the reader.
Writer Jeremy Adams sets it long after Flash has beaten the forces of Mongo, but he is now imprisoned on Planet Death. (Which, I grant you, sounds like a concept right out of the original.) We’re catching up along with Flash, so as an introduction to a new reader, it stumbles. We have to accept a lot of “fame” for Flash, which also echoes the original. But the reader buying the Classic Collection may not be the same reader buying this one, with familiarity only from the film. I have hope that as an arc, this will read a lot better.
King Features Syndicate has put a lot behind reviving the character. Already there’s a separate newspaper strip that looks very different from Raymond’s work. We’ll be getting much more from Mad Cave Studios. There’s a Flash Gordon Adventures for kids coming, and a quarterly Flash Gordon magazine that I hope (but don’t know) will bring in creators for one-off stories, sort of like The Savage Sword of Conan, but a lot less gory.
I’m excited for alll of it, because the promise is in the song. He’ll save every one of us.
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