<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Buck Rogers of the Buck Rogers Comic Strip is one of only a few characters adapted directly from pulp magazines into comic strips. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan was the first successful crossover, but Buck may be more influential, since he brought SF to the funnies. Based on Philip Francis Nowlan’s novel Armageddon 2419 AD, published in the SF pulp Amazing Stories in August 1928, the strip premiered January 7, 1929. John F. Dille, head of the National Newspaper Syndicate, asked Nowlan to adapt the story, changed the lead character’s name from Anthony to Buck, and assigned Dick Calkins to draw a daily strip.

When he's trapped in a mine, a strange gas places Buck in suspended animation, and he awakens in the world of the twenty-fifth century, when Earth has been conquered by Mongols. Buck joins the liberation forces, meeting lovely Wilma Deering and scientific genius Dr. Huer. The first continuity was adapted from Nowlan’s novel, but once the resistance won, the action moved into outer space.

On March 30, 1930, a Sunday page ghosted by Russell Keaton was added to the daily. Inspired in part by Calkins, Keaton drew marvelous Art Deco-style pages with jewellike coloring, biomorphic spaceships, and charming human and robot characters. Dille was interested in educating children, and Keaton created features about space, as well as games and puzzles, featuring Buck’s young sidekick, Buddy. In 1936, Keaton’s friend Rick Yager took over, and worked in a similar lively, cartoony style. Nowlan left in 1940, and the artists began scripting their strips. Yager worked on the strip until 1958, doing dailies and Sundays for several years. Later artists included comic book veterans Murphy Anderson and George Tuska, who drew the final Sunday in 1965 and the last daily in 1967. Among the scripters in the last years were SF writers Judith Merrill and Fritz Leiber.

The success of Buck Rogers led the Hearst Syndicate to create Flash Gordon, and introduced SF ideas and imagery to comic strips, from spaceships and interplanetary travel to ray guns. Never as popular as Flash (it inspired only one serial, in 1939, not three, and Flash star Buster Crabbe got this role, too), the strip did spawn the pejorative description of SF as “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.”

In 1979, a Buck Rogers series followed Star Trek onto network television, and was popular enough to last three seasons and spark a brief revival of the strip. It ran from 1979 to 1983, and again comic book creators were involved, including artist Gray Morrow and writer Cary Bates.