LEGENDARY HEROES #18

FLASH GORDON

Flash Gordon was created by King Features Syndicate to compete with the already established comic strip Buck Rogers.  The syndicate originally attempted to purchase the rights to the John Carter of Mars stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but when that failed they approached Alex Raymond with the idea of creating a comic strip story set in space.  One source of inspiration for Raymond was the 1933 novel "When Worlds Collide" by Philip Wylie - the story of an approaching planet threatening Earth, an athletic hero, his girlfriend, and a scientist who travel to the new planet by rocket.  Alex Raymond adapted this storyline as the origin of Flash Gordon.  Flash, handsome polo player and Yale University graduate, is kidnapped along with his girlfriend Dale Arden by a half-crazed scientist named Dr. Hans Zarkov.  They blast off in a rocket to the planet Mongo that is on a collision course with Earth where they halt the collision and incur the wrath of Mongo's evil ruler Ming the Merciless.  The three travel across Mongo and enjoy adventures with Hawk men and Lion men in water worlds, and forests, and lands of ice.  Buck Rogers popularity peaked in 1934 when Flash Gordon debuted on January 7, and soon Flash was the more popular of the two science fiction comics.  By the late 1930s the strip was in 130 newspapers, translated into 8 foreign languages, and read by 50 million people.

Alex Raymond (1909-1956) was an assistant on comic strips like Tillie the Toiler and Tim Tyler's Luck before creating Flash Gordon.  In the old days of newspaper comics an entire page of newsprint was dedicated to a single comic strip.  To help fill the space of an entire page many cartoonists created a second strip called a "topper" that ran at the top of the major feature.  Raymond created Jungle Jim as his topper.  And two weeks after launching Flash & Jungle Jim, Raymond supplied the artwork for another strip Secret Agent X-9 that was written by hardboiled author Dashiell Hammett.  Flash and Jungle Jim were Sunday pages and X-9 was a daily, but the grind of producing three comic strips got the better of Raymond and he stepped away from Secret Agent X-9 in 1935 to concentrate on his other two creations.  A daily strip was launched in 1940 by Austin Briggs, the respected magazine & advertising illustrator, and he assumed the Sunday page in 1944 when Raymond enlisted in the Marines during WWII.  Raymond stated, "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'."  He saw heavy fighting in June 1945 in the Pacific as the war was winding down and achieved the rank of major before being demobilized in 1946.  He hoped to return to Flash Gordon but Austin Briggs was under contract and King Features had no desire to remove Briggs.  Besides, the Syndicate pointed out, Raymond wasn't drafted, he left voluntarily.  Alex felt like he'd been cast off with little regard for what he had done previously for King Features.  Instead, Raymond created a new comic strip about a private detective named Rip Kirby, and his popularity soared.

Briggs left the Flash Gordon strip in 1948 and was succeeded by Mac Raboy.  When Briggs had taken over the strip in 1944 the daily was cancelled but in 1951 it was resurrected by Dan Barry, and when Raboy died in 1967 Barry took over the Sunday page as well.  The daily strip ran until 1993 and the Sunday page ended in 2003.  Like most of the popular strips of the day Flash Gordon transitioned to the Big Little Book series by Whitman, then comic books.  King Comics reproduced the newspaper strips from 1936-1949 in 155 issues.  Dell comics published Flash Gordon reprints in their Four Color Comics from 1945-1953.  Reprints continued in Harvey comics and Gold Key comics, but in 1966 King Comics produced 11 issues with covers and original art by the likes of Al Williamson and Reed Crandall.  In 1936  one issue of Flash Gordon Strange Adventure Magazine was published featuring the original novel "The Masters of Mars".  A second novel "The Sun Men of Saturn" was planned but never saw print.  The lone issue of Flash Gordon as a pulp is highly sought by collectors.

The comic strip was adapted to radio on April 22, 1935 as "The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon" as a 26-episode weekly serial.  The radio show followed the strip closely amounting to a week-by-week adaptation of the Sunday comic.  The radio show broke with strip continuity on the last two episodes when Flash, Dale and Dr. Zarkov returned to Earth, crash landing in Malaysia where they meet Jungle Jim.  The series ended on October 26, 1935 with the marriage of Flash and Dale and the following week "The Adventures of Jungle Jim" debuted in the Saturday timeslot.  But two days later, on October 28, "The Further Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon" went out over the airwaves as a daily show that ran four days a week.  The series took the trio to Atlantis for 60 episodes and ended on February 6, 1936.  In 1936 Universal released the first of three movie serials starring Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon with Charles Middleton in the role of Ming the Merciless.  "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars" was released in 1938, and "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe" in 1940.  George Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie in the 1970s but when he couldn't acquire the rights he made "Star Wars" instead.  In 1980 Dino De Laurentis produced a movie with a soundtrack by Queen and Sam Jones as Flash and Max von Sydow as Ming.  A TV series was produced 1954-1955 starring Steve Holland that ran for 39 episodes.  The American TV series was unique in that the first 26 episodes were filmed in West Berlin, Germany, and the final 13 were shot in Marseilles, France.  The series was syndicated to stations affiliated with the defunct DuMont Network.

Perhaps the greatest contribution to pop culture was the photorealistic artwork of creator Alex Raymond.  He became known by his contemporaries as "the artist's artist" and influenced the work of many cartoonists and illustrators, even after his death.  On September 6, 1956, Raymond was killed in an auto accident in Westport, Connecticut.  Raymond was driving fellow cartoonist Stan Drake's new Corvette at twice the posted speed limit of 25 mph on a rain-slick road when he lost control of the car and hit a tree.  Drake was thrown clear of the wreck but had an ear ripped off, while Raymond, wearing a seatbelt, died instantly as part of the windshield went threw his lower face and exited the back of his head.  Much of Flash Gordon's success was attributed to Alex Raymond's sleek, brilliant brushwork.  He had the most versatile talent of any cartoonist, and he did illustrations for major magazines like Blue Book, Look, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire.  He combined craftsmanship with emotion and his style was much imitated and his influence was considerable.  Alex Raymond was one of the most celebrated comic artists of all time.  He created four successful strips, a feat unequaled to this day, and he received many awards and recognition during his lifetime for his cartooning and illustration.  Raymond served as president of the National Cartoonist Society from 1950-1952 and was awarded their Reuben Award in 1949 as best cartoonist of the year.  And he championed comic art as a serious art form to be enjoyed by the masses.