Flash Gordon

• 1. Introduction

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  Flash Gordon first appeared in print on the 7th of January 1934, and within a few years, 50 million people were reading his adventures every week. He was a polo player and Yale graduate dropped into a rocket ship headed for an alien world, accompanied by a kidnapped scientist and a woman the scientist had also abducted. The strip was drawn by a young staff artist named Alex Raymond, working for King Features Syndicate, and it would go on to be called one of the best illustrated and most influential adventure comics in American history. Raymond never contributed a single illustration to a science-fiction magazine or book, yet he became, in the words of one historian of science-fiction art, one of the most famous science-fiction artists of all time. How did a comic strip born in competition with a rival franchise produce Superman's cape, Batman's first published image, and the creative frustration that led George Lucas to make Star Wars?

• 2. The Race to Compete

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  King Features Syndicate wanted a piece of what Buck Rogers had built. Buck Rogers had become commercially very successful, generating novelizations and children's toys, and King Features decided to create a science-fiction strip to compete directly with it. Their first move was to try to acquire the rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars stories. That negotiation failed. King Features then turned to Alex Raymond, one of their own staff artists, and asked him to build something new.

  Raymond drew on the 1933 Philip Wylie novel When Worlds Collide for his initial concept. Wylie's book featured an approaching planet threatening Earth, an athletic hero, a girlfriend, and a scientist traveling to the new world by rocket. Raymond adapted those elements directly. His first samples were sent back, dismissed for not having enough action. He reworked the material, resubmitted it, and this time the syndicate accepted it.

  Raymond was paired with Don W. Moore, an experienced editor and writer who served as ghostwriter throughout Raymond's tenure. The first Flash Gordon story appeared in January 1934 alongside another Raymond creation, Jungle Jim. Readers embraced it immediately, and Flash Gordon became one of the most popular American comic strips of the decade.

• 3. Mongo and Its Kingdoms

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  The planet Mongo is not a single world but a collection of distinct kingdoms, each with its own ruler and geography. Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Hans Zarkov first arrive seeking to prevent Mongo from colliding with Earth. They find themselves in conflict with Ming the Merciless, the planet's ruler, and that conflict expands into an entire civilization of competing realms.

  Among the kingdoms the three companions visit are Arboria, a forest domain ruled by Prince Barin; Frigia, an ice kingdom under Queen Fria; Tropica, a jungle realm led by Queen Desira; an undersea kingdom of the Shark Men ruled by King Kala; and the flying city of the Hawkmen, commanded by Prince Vultan. Prince Thun of the Lion Men joins them in several early adventures.

  Enemies accumulate across the years of the strip. Azura the Witch Queen, Brukka the chieftain of Frigia's giants, and the fascistic Red Sword organization on Earth all challenge Flash and his companions. Later writers expanded the roster further. Austin Briggs created Kang the Cruel, Ming's callous son. Mac Raboy's run introduced Prince Polon, who could shrink or enlarge living creatures, along with the unscrupulous Queen Rubia and Pyron the Comet Master. The Skorpi, a race of alien shape-shifters bent on galactic conquest, became recurring villains in both the Raboy and Dan Barry eras. Their space-fighter ace, Baron Dak-Tula, emerged as a periodic nemesis in the late 1970s stories.

  Eventually Ming is overthrown and Mongo is governed by a council of leaders headed by Barin, who marries Ming's daughter Princess Aura. Revolts led by Ming himself, or by one of his many descendants, ensure the peace is never permanent.

• 4. Artists Who Shaped the Strip

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  Alex Raymond drew the Sunday Flash Gordon strip from 1934 until 1944, when he left to join the US Marines. His tenure was defined by what comic-book artist Jerry Robinson described as "sleek, brilliantly polished brush work" in its final years, and by what Robinson called "the rich imagination he brought to his conceptions of the future." R.C. Harvey, writing in The Comics Journal, declared that Raymond's Flash Gordon displayed "a technical virtuosity matched on the comics pages only by Harold Foster in Prince Valiant."

  Austin Briggs had been drawing the daily strip, which launched in 1941. When Raymond left, King Features cancelled the daily and gave Briggs the Sunday strip instead. Raymond wanted to return after the war, but King Features declined to displace Briggs. As a conciliation, Raymond was allowed to create a new strip, Rip Kirby. Briggs held the Sunday strip until 1948.

  His successor, Mac Raboy, came from comic books and drew the Sunday strip until his death in 1967. Dan Barry then led the daily strip from 1951 onward, assisted by a remarkable roster of collaborators that included Harvey Kurtzman, Harry Harrison, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Bob Fujitani, Jack Davis, Sy Barry, Fred Kida, and Emil Gershwin. Barry left the strip in 1990, and the daily ended in 1993.

  The Sunday strip's final regular artist was Jim Keefe, occasionally assisted by Williamson, John Romita Sr., and Joe Kubert. King Features ended the newspaper strip in 2003. On the 22nd of October 2023, cartoonist Dan Schkade relaunched it as a new daily strip, with Sunday editions providing an overview of the week's installments.

• 5. A Global Phenomenon

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  By the late 1930s, the Flash Gordon strip appeared in 130 newspapers, had been translated into eight foreign languages, and was read by 50 million people. King Features sold it to papers across the world, and the character took on different names and identities as he crossed borders.

  In France, Flash Gordon appeared in the magazine Robinson under the name "Guy l'Eclair," and Dale Arden was renamed Camille. In Australia, the strip was retitled Speed Gordon entirely, because "flash" carried a connotation of showiness and dishonesty at the time. In India, the comics were published by Indrajal Comics.

  Politics interrupted distribution in the 1930s and 1940s. Newspapers in Nazi Germany were forbidden from printing the strip. In Fascist Italy, it was restricted to two newspapers. In 1938, the only Spanish publication carrying Flash Gordon, the magazine Aventurero, ceased publication due to the Spanish Civil War. The outbreak of World War II ended the strip's run in many countries.

  Belgium's situation produced one of the strip's more unusual chapters. With Flash Gordon unavailable, artist Edgar Pierre Jacobs was asked to bring the current story to a satisfactory conclusion. Jacobs later produced his own science-fiction strip, Le Rayon U, which began serial publication in Bravo in 1943 in the style of Flash Gordon. In 1974 he reformatted it with speech bubbles; this version was published in Tintin magazine and in book form by Dargaud-Le Lombard.

• 6. Superman, Batman, and Star Wars

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  Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster based Superman's uniform of tights and a cape on costumes worn by Flash Gordon. Bob Kane's drawing of Batman for the cover of Detective Comics No. 27, the character's first published appearance, was based on a 1937 Alex Raymond drawing of Flash Gordon. Dennis Neville modeled the costume of comics hero Hawkman on the Hawkmen characters in Raymond's strip.

  The 1980 Flash Gordon film came into being partly because of George Lucas. In the 1970s, Lucas had attempted to acquire the rights to make a Flash Gordon film from producer Dino De Laurentiis, but De Laurentiis would not sell them. Unable to secure the rights, Lucas created Star Wars instead. De Laurentiis eventually hired Mike Hodges to direct the film after Nicolas Roeg left the project and Sergio Leone declined, with Leone saying the script was not faithful to Raymond's original comic strips.

  The 1980 Hodges film starred Sam J. Jones, a former Playgirl centerfold, in the title role. The plot made Flash the quarterback of the New York Jets rather than a polo player. Queen composed and performed the entire musical score, including the signature theme "Flash." Brian Blessed's performance as Prince Vultan produced a single line that remained the most repeated quotation from the film more than 30 years after its release: "GORDON'S ALIVE?!" The film's cult following led it to feature prominently in the comedy films Ted in 2012 and Ted 2 in 2015.

• 7. Radio, Stage, and Television

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  Starting the 22nd of April 1935, the strip was adapted into a 26-episode weekly radio serial called The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon. Flash was played by Gale Gordon, later known for television roles in Our Miss Brooks, The Lucy Show, and Here's Lucy with Lucille Ball. The serial followed the comic strip closely and ended on the 26th of October 1935, with the marriage of Flash and Dale.

  Two days after the radio serial concluded, a daily version called The Further Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon debuted, running four days a week. It aired 60 episodes and ended on the 6th of February 1936. Twenty-six years after his last film serial, Buster Crabbe again played Flash for two audio dramas released in 1966 as an LP on MGM records.

  Television brought Flash Gordon to new audiences starting in 1954, when Steve Holland starred in a live-action series that ran for 39 episodes. The first 26 episodes were filmed in West Berlin less than a decade after World War II ended, and some showed the destruction still visible in Germany at the time. The final 13 episodes were filmed in Marseille, France. In the series, Flash, Dale, and Dr. Zarkov worked for the Galactic Bureau of Investigation in the year 3203.

  In 1979, Filmation produced an animated series, and separately produced the animated television movie Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All, written by Star Trek writer Samuel A. Peeples. The movie aired in the UK in December 1981 and in the US in August 1982. The only known commercial releases were by VAP Video in Japan in 1983, in both laserdisc and NTSC VHS formats, and in Bulgaria on VHS.

• 8. Comics Beyond Raymond

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  Al Williamson won the 1966 National Cartoonists Society Award for Best Comic Book for his work on the King Comics Flash Gordon series. Williamson described his approach directly: "I was paying homage to Alex, you know. I tried to treat his creation with respect and dignity and tried to do it to the best of my ability." He later provided artwork for a Western Publishing adaptation of the 1980 De Laurentiis film, written by Bruce Jones, which was serialized in issues 31-33 of Whitman's Flash Gordon comic book in March through May 1981.

  In 1988, Dan Jurgens wrote a modernized nine-issue DC Comics miniseries featuring Flash as a washed-up basketball player and Dale as an equally capable adventurous reporter. The series concluded with an open-ended finish. Marvel Comics published a two-issue series in 1995 written by Mark Schultz with Williamson on art, returning the strip to its classic visual register.

  Dynamite Entertainment launched Flash Gordon: Zeitgeist in 2011, written by Eric Trautmann from a story and designs by Alex Ross. In July 2023, Mad Cave Studios obtained the license for new stories, graphic novels, and reprints, with a new ongoing series launching in 2024. Williamson's complete Flash Gordon comics and strip work was collected and reprinted by Flesk in 2009, a volume that gathered decades of his contributions to the character he had spent his career honoring.