Flash Gordon Volumes 4 and 5

I just finished up the most recent two volumes (4 and 5) of Checker’s reprint of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. I previously reviewed the first three volumes. These two volumes cover the period from June of 1938 to August of 1941, and Raymond’s art is even better than before. He eschews word balloons at one point, for a while just using a small line from the text to the speaker, and then completely switching over to just narration with dialogue written in it. By this point the strip looks more like Prince Valiant than anything else. If Raymond is less known that Hal Foster it can be attributed to his short life and career (he died in a car accident in 1956) more so than any lesser artistic ability.

By the end of volume 5, Flash, Dale, and Zarkhov are back on Earth ready to tackle a new menace. The volume ends shortly into this storyline, so I’ll have to wait and hope Checker will finish out Raymond’s run on the strip. He left the strip in 1944 when he went into the army, so that leaves probably 2 volumes worth of strips (Checker’s site is in a sad state of repair at this point). When he returned from the army he started up the detective strip Rip Kirby (which is quite good, I have a few reprints of that).

Tags: alex-raymond, comic_strips, flash-gordon

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