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

Flash Gordon remains one of the most recognizable names in science fiction, but the SF adventure character’s fame rests ultimately on just ten years of newspaper comic strips by the extraordinary artist Alex Raymond (1909-1956). When the Buck Rogers comic strip became a sudden success, William Randolph Hearst and his mighty King Features Syndicate decided they needed a competing science fiction feature. They invited auditions, and the winner was a young artist who had assisted Chic Young on Blondie and then found fame drawing Dashiell Hammett’s strip, Secret Agent X-9. Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon debuted January 7, 1934.

In the first continuity, Raymond and writer Don Moore began the epic battle between evil Emperor Ming of Mongo, who dreamed of conquering the galaxy, and the forces of Earth led by the heroic Flash Gordon, the beautiful Dale Arden, and the scientific genius Dr. Hans Zarkov. Raymond’s work on the strip, influenced by the best American illustrators such as Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, was instantly appealing, and the strip was a hit. Within a few years, Raymond transcended his own early work with innovative strips that expanded the boundaries of comic art, exploring different panel configurations and new ways to depict action, movement and sequence.

Raymond also created spectacular, romantic SF imagery of exotic cities, strange races, interstellar battles, and beautiful princesses, such as Ming’s sensuous daughter, Aura. Raymond continually worked to improve his art, drawing from models and developing incomparable mastery of dry and wet brush techniques. Three movie serials starring Buster Crabbe were made from the strip, the first in 1936. Raymond left Flash Gordon to join the Marine Corps in 1944, where he became an inspiring patriotic artist, and the strip was turned over to his assistant Austin Briggs, who had been drawing the daily strip. When Raymond came back from the war, King refused to let him return to the strip, but allowed him to create his own, new strip, Rip Kirby, to which he held the rights.

Briggs was succeeded on Flash by Mac Raboy from 1948-1967, one of the few strip artists who had also worked in comic books, most famously on Fawcett’s Capt. Marvel, Jr.. His Sundays have been collected by Dark Horse Comics. Dan Barry, a cartoonist, drew the strip from 1968-1990, and then the strip fell to various hands, including Ralph Reese, Gray Morrow, and was even contracted out to a studio in Buenos Aires for a time.

The last regular artist on the strip was Jim Keefe, from 1996-2003, who tried to revive the spirit of the Raymond strip by including features on Raymond and the strip’s history and asking master artists like Al Williamson and Joe Kubert to collaborate or do guest strips. Currently, Flash Gordon is in very limited circulation, consisting solely of reprints of the Keefe strips. Reaching tens of millions of readers every week at the height of its fame, Flash Gordon was one of the most popular SF properties of all time. The continued dominance of the imagery and tropes of the romantic and adventurous SF pulps in the public mind (see Star Wars) owes much to Flash Gordon.

External links

• Flash Gordon Wiki