Alex Raymond

• 1. Introduction

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  Alex Raymond, an American cartoonist who lived from 1909 to 1956, sent a world-famous polo player into space on a rocket. The destination was Mongo, a planet on course to collide with Earth. That adventure became the comic strip Flash Gordon, and it made Raymond one of the most imitated artists in all of comics.

  How did a Wall Street order clerk end up drawing alien worlds? Why did a strip built to chase a rival end up overtaking it? What did Raymond do when a war pulled him away from his drawing board, and what was waiting when he came back? And why does the manner of his death still divide the colleagues and biographers who studied it?

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• 2. Early Years

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  Alexander Gillespie Raymond Jr. was born on the 2nd of October 1909 in New Rochelle, New York. His parents were Beatrice W. Crossley and Alexander Gillespie Raymond Sr., and the boy was raised Roman Catholic.

  His father, a civil engineer and road builder, covered one wall of his office in the Woolworth Building with his son's drawings. When Raymond was 12, his father died. Afterward the boy doubted that art offered the viable future he had once hoped for.

  In 1926 Raymond played fullback for coach "Turk" Smith at Iona Prep, where he studied on an athletic scholarship. His first job was as an order clerk on Wall Street. After the economic crisis of 1929, he enrolled at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City and took work as a solicitor for a mortgage broker.

  A former neighbor, Russ Westover, changed the direction of his life. Raymond quit his job and by 1930 was assisting Westover on the comic strip Tillie the Toiler. That work introduced him to King Features Syndicate, where he later became a staff artist. On the 31st of December 1930 he married Helen Frances Williams.

  Raymond learned from strip cartoonists and magazine illustrators, including Matt Clark, Franklin Booth and John La Gatta. From late 1931 to 1933 he assisted Lyman Young on Tim Tyler's Luck. He eventually became the ghost artist on both the daily strip and the Sunday page, and he turned it into one of the most eye-catching strips of its day. At the same time he assisted Chic Young on Blondie. His younger brother Jim, also a cartoonist, later held the same assistant's job on Blondie.

  In 1933 the syndicate gave Raymond a strip to illustrate whose scripts came from the novelist Dashiell Hammett.

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• 3. Racing Buck Rogers

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  Towards the end of 1933, King Features wanted a Sunday page that could rival Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. That science fiction adventure had debuted in 1929 and had already inspired a competitor, Brick Bradford, in 1933. According to the syndicate, its president Joe Connolly supplied the starting idea. He suggested fantastic adventures in the spirit of Jules Verne.

  Raymond teamed with the ghostwriter Don W. Moore, a veteran of pulp fiction. Together they created Flash Gordon, a visually lavish science fiction epic. They also created Jungle Jim, an adventure set in South-East Asia that ran above Flash as a topper in some newspapers. Flash Gordon debuted on the 7th of January 1934. Raymond's spy strip Secret Agent X-9 premiered on the 22nd of January 1934, two weeks later.

  The cast of Flash Gordon grew around its hero. Dale Arden was his love interest, and Dr. Hans Zarkov was the scientist who joined them. Their enemy on Mongo was the warlord Emperor Ming, who stayed Flash's nemesis through every later version of the franchise.

  Before long, Flash Gordon pulled far ahead of Buck Rogers. Stephen Becker wrote that Flash "was wittier and moved faster." The historian Bill Crouch Jr. wrote that Buck's position as America's favorite science fiction hero "went down in flames to the artistic lash and spectacle of Alex Raymond's virtuoso artwork." Raymond had his own view of the medium. He believed comic art was an art form in itself, because the comic artist "is playwright, director, editor and artist at once."

  Secret Agent X-9 had a rockier path. In early 1935 Hammett left as writer to pursue a career in Hollywood. Biographer Tom Roberts believes the strip was then written by committee during editorial conferences, and R. C. Harvey thinks the strips themselves support that view. The author Leslie Charteris was hired in September 1935, but he and Raymond collaborated on only one storyline.

  By the end of 1935 the workload was too much for Raymond, and he handed X-9 to another artist. Harvey judged that Raymond's handling of the medium on that strip was not very impressive when set beside Milton Caniff's work from the same years. Those weaknesses mattered less on a weekly Sunday page, where the extra space suited an illustrator's gifts. The Sunday pages were where Raymond chose to spend his time, and they were about to change shape.

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• 4. The Raymond Look

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  In 1934 the Flash Gordon Sunday page ran four tiers of panels. By 1936 Raymond had cut it to two tiers, which reduced the number of panels but doubled their size. He also moved dialogue out of speech balloons and into captions at the foot of each panel. That freed room for detailed, atmospheric backgrounds, and heroic poses set against them gave the strip what one commentator called a mythic air.

  Raymond drew from live models supplied by the Walter Thornton Agency of Manhattan. A profile titled "Modern Jules Verne" appeared in Dell Four-Color Flash Gordon #10 in 1942. It showed how the Thornton model Patricia Quinn posed as a character in the strip.

  His sensual artwork, which echoed pulp artist Matt Clark in the male figures, drew far more loyal readers than the "rather contrived and unconvincing adventure stories" it illustrated. Harvey called his technical virtuosity on the weekly strip matched on the comics pages only by Harold Foster in Prince Valiant.

  Jungle Jim changed in its own way. Armando Mendez called it "a thing of beauty." It began with two tiers and up to six panels, with speech balloons. It ended as a single row of four very tall panels with declamatory text and static, vertical composition. The strip was set in the exotic Malay peninsula, and it was meant to recall the tales of Kipling, Haggard and Burroughs.

  Some admirers felt the praise was too narrow. Mendez complained that critics dismiss Raymond's line work as "just pretty pictures." He noted that Caniff and Eisner were forgiven for borrowing from film, yet Raymond studying illustrators was treated as not being comics at all.

  Others criticized the photographic realism as too gorgeous for its own sake. Many commentators argued that this very quality plunges the reader into the story. Raymond often used feathering, a shading technique in which soft parallel lines suggest the contour of an object. His pages became, in one phrase, "the raw material for the swipe files of future generations."

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• 5. Captain Raymond

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  In the spring of 1941, Flash Gordon came home to Earth in the strip, as Raymond worked the war in Europe into his pages. Jungle Jim ended up fighting in the U.S. Army. Raymond grew restless about doing his own duty, and four of his five brothers had already enlisted.

  In February 1944 he left King Features and the Sunday pages of Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps, commissioned as a captain in its public-relations arm. He explained himself this way: "I just had to get into this fight... I've always been the kind of guy who gets a lump in his throat when a band plays the 'Star Spangled Banner'."

  Training took him to Quantico, to the Aviation Ground Officer's School. He then produced posters and patriotic images from a government office in Philadelphia. His best-known image from the period was "Marines at Prayer," which showed Marines on a battlefield pausing for worship and was widely circulated. He also designed the official 1944 Marine Corps Christmas card.

  Wanting to be closer to the action, Raymond trained at the Marine Corps Air Station in Santa Barbara. He then served in the Pacific on the 1945 cruise of the escort carrier USS Gilbert Islands. Fellow Marines who had grown up on Flash Gordon treated him as a celebrity, yet they found him a down-to-earth fellow.

  In May 1945 he designed a patch for the men of VMTB-143, and the squadron took the new name "The Rocket Raiders." He saw a period of intense combat in June 1945. In August 1945 he was made an honorary member of the squadron.

  Raymond was demobilized as a major in 1946. Flash Gordon had gone on without him. A daily strip had begun in 1940 under Austin Briggs, but it was cancelled when Raymond left. Briggs took over the Sunday pages until 1948, followed by Emanuel "Mac" Raboy. Dan Barry revived the daily in 1951 and took over the Sundays after Raboy died in 1967.

  King Features would not displace Briggs for Raymond's return, and it pointed out that he had left voluntarily. Relatives recall that Raymond resented the decision, which left him feeling "cast off with so little regard." The syndicate did offer him a chance to create a new strip.

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• 6. Rip Kirby

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  On the 4th of March 1946, the daily strip Rip Kirby debuted, named for its hero J. Remington "Rip" Kirby. King Features editor Ward Greene conceived it and wrote it at first. Exactly who plotted it later is harder to say. Published credit went to Raymond because his name sold the strip, and he won a part-ownership deal and a better split of the profits than was usual.

  Like Raymond, Rip was an ex-Marine. He set himself up as a private detective. Becker described the strip as "modern and almost too intellectual." Rip smoked a pipe and did more thinking than fighting. He had a frail, balding assistant instead of a two-fisted sidekick, a steady girlfriend, and even glasses. He also grew older as the strip went on, which was unusual for newspaper strips of the time. Raymond said, "I wanted to do something different and more down to earth."

  Raymond had five children: daughters Judith, Lynne and Helen, and sons Alan W. and Duncan. He gave Rip's girlfriend a name built from his daughters' names, Judith Lynne "Honey" Dorian.

  For the look of the strip, Raymond drew on the advertising style of the Cooper Studio and Al Parker. The strip ran in black and white, yet he created color through contrast with varied linework. His approach was widely imitated and became known as the Raymond style. From about 1949 he added what critics call sophisticated black spotting, used to control pacing. Fellow cartoonist Stan Drake recalled that Raymond called those dark areas "pools of quiet." They gave the eye a pause as it moved across the panels.

  Raymond won the fourth Reuben Award in 1949. Beginning in 1950 he served as president of the National Cartoonists Society, where he set up the committee structure that oversees the organization. From 1952 his writing collaborator was Fred Dickenson, who went on to write the strip for another 34 years.

  After Raymond's death, John Prentice, an illustrator for Prize Publications' Young Romance, took over the art. Commentators said he echoed the style but lacked Raymond's excellent design sense, though the Raymond family praised his work. Prentice drew Rip Kirby until shortly before he died in 1999, and the strip ended a month later.

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• 7. Artist's Artist

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  Raymond became known as "the artist's artist." In 1974 Time magazine grouped him with Hal Foster, the creator of Prince Valiant, as "some sort of genius." Who's Who in American Comic Books by Jerry Bails and Hames Ware called him possibly the most influential artist on early comic books. Harvey argued that Raymond and Foster created the visual standard by which adventure strips would be measured.

  Bob Kane, the artistic creator of Batman, and Joe Shuster, the artistic creator of Superman, both credited Raymond as an influence. Jack Kirby, who co-created most of Marvel Comics's heroes, did the same. Al Williamson said Raymond was "the reason I became an artist," and he later assisted on Flash Gordon in the mid-1950s and on Rip Kirby in the mid-1960s. Many others cited him as well, including Joe Kubert, Alex Toth, Gene Colan, John Buscema and José Luis García-López.

  George Lucas named Flash Gordon as a major influence on Star Wars. Star Wars in turn inspired the 1980 Flash Gordon feature film. Flash Gordon had already reached the screen in three Universal serials: Flash Gordon in 1936, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars in 1938, and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe in 1940. A 1950s television series followed.

  Roberts believes Rip Kirby inspired the soap opera style strips of the 1950s and 1960s, and he traces Apartment 3-G back to its success. Maurice Horn said Raymond unquestionably had the most versatile talent among comic strip creators. Carl Barks said Raymond could combine craftsmanship with emotions and all the gimmicks of a good adventure strip. Though Raymond preferred to focus on strips, he also illustrated for Blue Book, Look, Collier's, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

  In 1967 Woody Gelman reprinted some of Raymond's earlier strips in hardcover under his Nostalgia Press imprint. The Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame inducted Raymond in 1996. Raymond is also the great-uncle of the actors Matt Dillon and Kevin Dillon. The Society of Illustrators gave him a place in its Hall of Fame in 2014, nearly six decades after his death.

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• 8. The Last Day

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  On the 6th of September 1956, a month before his 47th birthday, Raymond was killed in a car accident in Westport, Connecticut. He was driving fellow cartoonist Stan Drake's 1956 Corvette at twice the posted limit of 25 miles an hour. Roberts, in his biography, ties the crash to the weather. The convertible's top was down when rain began, and Raymond chose to keep going rather than stop to raise it.

  The car hit a tree. Drake was thrown clear. Raymond was wearing his seat belt, but it made no difference, and he died instantly. He was buried in St. John's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Darien, Connecticut.

  Speculation about the crash began at once. Raymond had been in four automobile accidents in the month before his death. Drake and some others came to believe that Raymond was suicidal, and Drake said he had been trying to kill himself. Drake also wondered whether Raymond hit the accelerator by mistake.

  The author Arlen Schumer pointed to Raymond's personal life as the motive. Harvey rejected that, calling suicide an odd way for a man of Raymond's sophistication to react to disappointment in romance. Harvey also noted that Roberts's biography says nothing of the claims, probably out of consideration for Raymond's surviving family.

  Since 2008, Dave Sim, the creator of Cerebus, has published a comic book called glamourpuss. It examines Raymond's career and the techniques of photorealists such as Stan Drake and Al Williamson. Its framing story is a hypothetical one, set during the last day of Raymond's life.

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