Captain Blood!

(Alex Raymond)

I don't think there has ever been a movie star with the allure and romance of Errol Flynn save perhaps for his predecessor Rudolph Valentino. He was dashing, handsome, and communicated a sense of devil-may-care that illuminated any room he walked into. 

Errol Flynn might well have been the greatest "movie star" ever. Of course, part of that fame is really the infamy of his personal life which is the very stuff of Hollywood legend. This movie is also the breakout for Olvia De Haviland, and she and Flynn had crazy chemistry on the big screen. Lionel Atwill plays a baddie in this jaunt, and I love Atwill in anything. 

This story from Rafael Sabatini's 1922 novel Captain Blood is a simple but tragic one. Peter Blood is a doctor who gets swept up in the political strife of his country when he's falsely accused of being a rebel against James I of England. His punishment is to be made a slave and sent to be sold as such. He is forced to serve as a slave for some time though his skills as a doctor give him elevated status. Nevertheless, when a Spanish warship is overtaken, it creates the opportunity for Blood to become a daring and dashing pirate with intentions of revenge on those who imprisoned him. This movie also sets up a clash between Flynn's Blood and Basil Rathbone's pirate Levasseur. It would prove to be the template for more such clashes. 

Captain Blood was Flynn's debut movie as a leading man in 1935, and a magnificent one it was. The character of Peter Blood as portrayed by Flynn is at once noble and selfish. Blood is a great vehicle for the viewer into the battle for freedom. He just wants to be left alone, but he is drawn into the war because of his noble ethics and finds no one in leadership possessing any ethics. He is what we'd call today radicalized by his imprisonment and harsh treatment. In our real world, the current savage conflict in the Gaza Strip will almost certainly have created lifelong enemies for the state of Israel. Certainly, villains exist and must be dealt with, but just as doubtless men are made enemies by what they see around them. Injustice is blind to a flag -- any flag. 

This is a must-see classic. More derring-do when The Sea Hawk docks later this week.    

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Fantastic Fashions Of Mongo!

It's a cliche that to overcome nervousness in an interview or public speaking or some such situation, it is suggested that the audience should be imagined to be without clothes. This is supposed to make them more humble looking and take off the tension. Don't know if it works, but I do know that seeing the mighty Ming the Merciless bereft of his typical robes and overpowering collars I do feel less threatened. (By the way, did Doctor Strange's cloak come from Ming? It's all I could think of recently when I watched the original serial again.)

Apparently one of the gimmicks used by King Features to maximize the allure of the Flash Gordon strip is to have Alex Raymond make paper dolls out of all of the characters. It certainly was a nifty means of extending the adventures into the imaginations of the kids who read it week in and week out, but did boys play with these? I would have, but I was the product of a more modern attitude.

Getting a fashion  paper doll for Dale Arden makes all sorts of sexist sense,but seeing Flash and Zarkov in their skivvies (or near it) is a big odd.

And really, just how many outfits is a Lion Man going wear anyway.

I certainly would've played with a Princess Aura paper doll, as taking off her clothes might be fun indeed. It still might be.

Don't judge me please.

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The Sunday Funnies - Flash Gordon 1941-1942!

Flash Gordon proved to be one of the most successful adventure comic strips of any era. But unlike Prince Valiant it quickly fell into other hands after Alex Raymond departed during the war and beyond. The potency of the strip though had already weaken before Raymond's departure.

In this final of four over-sized volumes we get Flash Gordon's last Raymond drawn adventure. After a brief stay on Earth to help defeat an all too familiar foreign enemy, Flash, Dale and Zarkov seems all too ready to jump into a rocket and get back to Mongo. The expressed reason is to get radium to help with the war on Earth but when Flash crashes the rocket (his patented landing technique) that is quickly forgotten as they try to survive in the land of Tropica.

Tropica is ruled by Queen Desira who is quickly deposed by her general Bazor and the next two years are swallowed up by the struggle to put Desira back on the throne, in the name of freedom no less. I've always been struck by how monarchies are the default governmental form in these stories, but that's owing to their fairy tale roots I suspect.  Without Ming to tussle against Flash is clearly a hero in need of an antagonist and we get Brazor, a remarkably bland wannabe dictator. The strip becomes nearly pure adventure for a few years with almost no real science fiction elements present save for the random appearance of a peculiar creature or vehicle. Flash owes as much to H. Rider Haggard as to Edgar Rice Burroughs in these final Raymond stories.

Frankly it all gets a bit stale and more than a little bit dull. Flash and Dale seem to have finally moved passed her getting jealous of his every encounter, though shadows of that do surface and the villains and turncoats in the comic are dispatched with as little concern as they are developed. It's all been done before and with more dash and spirit, but eventually Desira is returned, the land of Tropica is happy and our heroic trio head off to new adventures which will alas be more of the same.

I possess the Flash Gordon comic strip adventures in three forms. The first is the amazing Nostalgia Press volumes from the 70's which I still remember seeing ads at the time and lusting after. I got them pretty quickly and enjoyed the stories and tucked them away.

Much more recently I found the Checker Publishing volumes for exceedingly discounted prices and went ahead and picked them up since my Nostalgia Press tomes were showing the wear and tear of age and sometimes indifferent storage due to the hazards of daily life. That series offers up one more Flash Gordon adventure, his trip to Marvela after leaving Tropica. (I note that Flash leaves the rocket in Dale's capable hands and she doesn't crash. Hmm.) In Marvela Flash and Dale match wits with a devilish pair named Lura (beautiful with designs on Flash...check) and Ardo (scientist who makes monsters...check). By the end we earn Lura and Ardo are siblings (shades of the Skywalker twins) and are pawing each other before Flash and Dale can get into the air for more shenanigans in another land.

The drop off in the allure of the strip is quite remarkable, especially comparing it to the rip-roaring wonder of those earliest adventures. Reading it alongside Hal Foster's Prince Valiant it is clear that the quality of the latter is much more refined and much more satisfying over the long stretch. Flash Gordon was printed for many years, and I'm positive some of those adventures are dandy, but once they were glorious and mythic.

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The Saturday Serials - Universal's Flash Gordon!

When Flash Gordon was adapted to the big screen by Universal studios it was appropriately enough in the serial or chapter play format. Serials were commonly the domain of pulp or comic heroes and in 1936 the Flash Gordon comic strip had become very successful and had maintained that success for a few years, a good sign that interest would be strong for a film rendition. When they started looking for someone to play Flash they found the rough and tumble but handsome mug of Buster Crabbe looking at them. An inspired choice, Crabbe became one of the mainstay stars of the serial in the 30's and 40's and beyond when serials became television. He was joined by Jean Rogers, probably a bigger star at the time and Frank Shannon as the intrepid trio of terrestrials who fly to the speeding planet of Mongo to save the Earth.

They find on Mongo the deadly Fu Manchu, or the variation on the "Yellow Peril" villain designed by Don Moore and Alex Raymond called Ming the Merciless. Joining forces with Thun the Lion Man and Prince Barin the trio battle Ming and his forces again and again until ultimately prevail and return home (spoiler alert?). I've always liked the idea that Thun was played by a Tarzan actor and that he joined forces with Crabbe, a one-time ape man himself. The serial worked hard, sometimes to its detriment, to cleave to the images that Raymond had burned into the memories and imaginations of the youth of America. Universal borrowed sets sets from Frankenstein, clips from Just Imagine, and costumes from who knows where, but still they pulled it off, and with sufficient success to warrant a sequal..

Now the first Flash Gordon serial was a huge success and so a rare sequel was scheduled. But by the time it rolled around one Orson Welles had made a big star out of the planet Mars so it was decided that Flash and his allies would go there instead of Mongo in the directly titled Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. (Not all that surprisingly it looks a whole lot like Mongo.) This new adventure has more polish than the first one, more surface production value and while the first one cleaved to the Alex Raymond original to its detriment at times (do we really need to see Frank Shannon's knees?) this one felt comfortable enough to add a character.

That character was named "Happy Hapgood" a news hawk (played by Donald Kerr) who ends up accidentally along for the ride into space. Happy is added to the mix to give jokes, to be the comedy relief. He's totally unneeded and unwanted and he messes with the classic Flash Gordon formula something awful. One of the strongest aspects of  this installment is the presence of the Clay People who are cursed and as a consequence are able weirdly blend into the walls of their territory. Watching them blend in and out of the walls is seriously creepy and one of the scariest memories of my childhood. They are wraiths in nearly every sense of the word, ghosts blended with goblins to form a really unsettling creature.

Then some years later they did it again with Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (a most unwieldy but memorable title. As in the comic strip Flash, Dale, and Zarkov go back to Mongo and get involved with saving the planet from Ming yet one more time. Again the movie looks like the comic strip, but by this time the comic strip was lush and handsome indeed. This is a good looking serial and one of my favorites, because it was this serial I owned first as it has always been in the public domain for some reason. 

There is much daring-do and the serial looks great. Buster Crabbe never looked more handsome or dashing on the screen. But some of the blood and thunder was missing, and that's true of the comic strip as well. There's a sense at times of going through the motions, both on screen and on the Sunday funny supplement. More on that tomorrow. 

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Flash Gordon Takes To Painting!

This link will take you some fascinating art by Ruben Garrido where he takes some of the classic Alex Raymond images and blends them in collages which evoke other times and places and artists. Fascinating. 

Flash Gordon Takes To Painting

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The Sunday Funnies - Flash Gordon 1939-1941!

Flash Gordon is properly remembered as one of the finest adventure comic strips of any era. The story of three desperate people rocketing to an unknown planet hurtling toward Earth to save that Earth is the stuff of legends. But once Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Professor Hans Zarkov are stranded on the planet Mongo and this planet is safe they must still fight hard land long to free the various peoples of that world from the grip of an evil tyrant Ming the Merciless. It is in the later Sunday pages that the struggle against an evil military force finds it more complete development.

My gripe about these Flash stories which detail Flash's second victory over Ming (albeit as always temporary) is that the episodes themselves seem to take a dang long time to unfold. (Actually now that I reflect on it, the first time Flash came to an accord with Ming when the latter made Flash the king of the cavern territories.) At one point Flash, Dale, Zarkov and their allies are trapped inside a glacier by a dangerous ice worm (an utterly fantastic monster by the way) and spend an enormous time trying to escape. It gets more than a bit monotonous after a time.

Another thing about Flash, and I've alluded to this before, is his tendency to reward with mercy those undeserving of mercy and he ends up getting his faithful allies killed as a result. In actuality Flash is a fine inspirational leader but his tactics often fall short and his skill as pilot must be called into question because I'm not immediately aware of any safe landings. He is always crashing into some snow bank or some overgrown giant forest or such. Flash is a good and noble man and we admire him for those traits but reading his adventures we have to make note of his weaknesses as well. Heck even when Flash, Dale and Zarkov do get back to Earth briefly to confront a new menace there, one remarkably out of the headlines of a nation on the brink of war. As it turns out Flash wrecks the space ship on their return yet again. Some things are a constant.

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The Sunday Funnies - Flash Gordon 1936-1939!

Flash Gordon by Don Moore and Alex Raymond had proven to be a grand success and as the years roll by the adventures on Mongo continue with one hair-raising misadventure after another. The trio of Flash, Dale, and Zarkov begin in the underwater realm of Undina where they are converted to water breathers. After proving themselves to be stalwart they eventually are freed of that limitation and get to land again to begin a trek to Arboria, the kingdom of Prince Barin and his new bride Princess Aura. The trip is dangerous and Zarkov in particular suffers. They battle all sorts of threats in Arboria and afterwards such as cave men. The volume begins with our trio seeking Arboria and ends with them leaving it for new territories when it's clear Ming will kill all to revenge himself on Flash. The strip does measure time as a child is born becomes a year old while adventures unfold. Always the looming threat of Ming the Merciless hangs over everyone, and Flash and Ming do confront one another directly again.  As the dashing heroes throw themselves into one scheme after another to not just survive but bring down the tyrant, the basic theme of Flash Gordon becomes clearly revealed.

Flash, often to the detriment of those who work and fight beside him, is a man of great honor and mercy. He is often quick to spare an opponent, though that enemy will just as often use the merciful time given them to betray and kill Flash's allies and friends. It's frustrating as a reader to see Flash spare the enemy and then see good soldiers die because of that mercy. It happens several times. But then Ming's relentless and perverted "honor" comes into focus and we can see that the heroic and noble (if often foolhardy) Flash embodies honor while Ming only ever rewards loyalty with death. Slowly as the narrative unfolds we see Flash's new way of thinking winning the day as more and more of Ming's forces, those not driven by greed, fall away from the grip of the merciless tyrant.

In terms of the art, Raymond's style matures during these years. In the early stories undersea there's a nifty balance of energy and draftsmanship but as the stories continue and the settings become more realistic, the art is still handsome but loses maybe just a mote of excitement. Movement is sacrificed for closer looks at posed faces. It's possible to forget in the later years here that Flash and Dale and Zarkov are even on an alien world, but rather are merely fighting an underground war here on Earth. That change might well reflect a maturity of style but also an attempt to make the adventures relevant to the news of that day. Europe was falling under the heel of the Axis, and the battles Flash with Ming's minions seems to echo that struggle as folks were left to wage the war while hiding between skirmishes.

More to come.

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King Comics - Flash Gordon!

Of all of the King Comics heroic offerings I'd have to dub Flash Gordon the most successful. That success is not owed to consistency (that's The Phantom) but to the sheer raw talent of the artists who draw many of the issues.

The series kicks off with a Flash yarn featuring both story and art by Al Williamson. Williamson was the youngest of the old EC crowd, a native of South America who was inspired by the work of Alex Raymond. He brings the dramatic heft of Raymond's later work along with a complete working knowledge of how to tell a story on a comic book page.

Frank Bolle is on the art in the second issue which features a very exciting Gil Kane cover. Bolle is no slacker by any means, but his pedestrian style falls short of the high romance which influences Williamson's take on the character.

Under arguably the finest Williamson cover is a darn fine artistic effort by Ric Estrada who comes through with a very dynamic story written by Bill Pearson to add to the canon.

Al Williamson returns in the next two issues of the run, his final ones for King alas. They are lovely and the scripts by Archie Goodwin are first rate. This a team which will make some of the best comics ever seen.

Apparently Reed Crandall took the artistic helm on the recommendation of Williamson and though his classic style is more static than much of what had gone before, his distinctive finishes create some very handsome pages. Bill Pearson is back on the scripts and stays so for all the new issues of this King run.

With the next issue, as with the other books in the King Comics line-up, the wheels begin to come off the effort as a reprint of Mac Raboy's comic strip is fitted for the comic book page. It's vintage stuff from the early days and good looking but odd.

Reed Crandall is back in the next issue  and does some wonderful work. This is the only issue of the run which I ever bought on my own way back then. Just seeing Crandall's Flash was great stuff and I just assumed the rest was comparable.

That's not the case as the next two issues of the run are again reprints, this time by Alex Raymond from the earliest days of the vintage comic strip. This is the raw stuff and reformatted isn't as effective as it was on the original page, but then that's to be expected.

The series wraps up with another Reed Crandall issue under a Dan Barry cover. The story ends somewhat abruptly, but it would be continued and Crandall would get another crack at the character but over at Charlton Comics. More on that maybe later.

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The Sunday Funnies - Flash Gordon 1934-1936!

It's difficult to overstate the influence of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon on the world of comics. In conjunction with writer Don Moore, Raymond created one of the most iconic characters in all of pop culture and utterly changed the way comics were expected to look. It was Raymond, a man with his eye to doing magazine illustration, brought that lustrous more realistic style to the comics color section and inspired talents such as Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert. Suffice it to say without Raymond comics would look very different and might not even exist at all.

But reading early Flash Gordon comic strips is a weird experience. The character has been adapted to film, radio, and television more than a few times and its's those adaptations which sometimes dominate the imagination and memory in regards to the character. The name "Flash Gordon" brings to my mind the face of Buster Crabbe who perfected the role in three fantastic serials for Universal.

And I think of the lush Raymond artwork too, but that's not the Flash Gordon of the earliest strips. It took some time for Raymond to find his path forward on the character and for the first year or so it looks great but not as epic as it will become. Reading the first strips is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, the figures are frustratingly small and seem weirdly far away. It's a story of vistas and landscapes and not so much of people, though that rich characterization would come.

When Flash, Dale, and Zarkov first land on Mongo they are upright citizens of the world standing talll against the dreaded "Yellow Peril". Ming the Merciless is second only to Fu Manchu as the definitive expression of that sordid racist trope. Mongo might be another planet, but it's really just what was once called the "Orient" and Ming is the absolute despotic depraved ruler of that land filled with a sprawling variety of races of "men". Mongo is a network of kingdoms, each defined by not just geography but also ethnicity and it's taken as a given that the populations of these kingdoms need monarchs to rule them. Taken in tandem with Prince Valiant, it's fairy tale optimism at its most extreme.

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