Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo

The Complete Flash Gordon Library, Volume 1

By Alex Raymond

Titan Books, 2012

ISBN: 9780857681546

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

So, you are wondering: how does it all begin?

Well, as set out above: Flash Gordon, a ‘Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player’ (so one of the world’s finest: smart, sporty and surely flush with cash), is forced at gun point into a rocket ship.  He’s accompanied by a pretty young woman, wouldn’t you know it, name of Dale Arden, and the two have just become intimate, well kind of, by parachuting out of a plane together.  As for the fellow holding the gun, that’s a brilliant though mad scientist called Hans Zarkov.  The rocket ship, Zarkov‘s own invention, heads towards a feral planet that’s on a collision course with our own.  The aim is to save our world by deflecting the wayward planet off course, and this they succeed in doing, but at a price.  They crash land on the planet’s surface – see strip below.  Yes, that’s pretty much how Flash Gordon’s adventures begin…

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This sumptuous volume has nine complete stories in total, originally published from 1934 to 1937.  The full-colour comic strips (this was way before comic books, never mind graphic novels) have been beautifully restored by Peter Maresca, and for those who were introduced to Flash Gordon by watching black and white serials on a Saturday morning in the local cinema (it was The Rialto in Salford and Bury Odeon for me), Alex Raymond’s artwork will come as a revelation as well as a return to childhood.  His colour illustrations are magical, wonderfully exciting, enchanting and (let’s be frank) just a wee bit kinky at times, just like the serial.

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For at the basis of Flash Gordon is a love quartet: Ming the Merciless desires Dale and his daughter Princess Aura lusts after Flash.  Aura was always kidnapping/enslaving/punishing girlish and innocent Dale, her love rival, and Ming had it in for Flash too.  Dale is always rescued by Flash (eventually) and Aura constantly saves Flash from her father’s clutches.  Capture, play, escape; escape, capture, play…  Looking back, it was all very strange to see this stuff  in a children’s serial on a Saturday morning.

You wanted to be Flash Gordon, of course, because he was the hero, brave and strong and noble, able to withstand torture…  But Ming’s gig – Emperor of the Universe, infinite power, all those lackeys at his command – didn’t seem too bad either.

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In this book, there are appreciative introductions by Alex Ross and Doug Murray, which set Alex Raymond’s creation in context.  Flight was still something new in 1934 and sci-fi was an inchoate genre.  Wells, Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs fed Raymond’s imagination and he in turn influenced many others (Joe Kubert and George Lucas, to name but two).  There’s also some of Alex Raymond’s hitherto unpublished artwork.  It’s a terrific package, all told.

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo by Alex Raymond, Volume 1 of The Complete Flash Gordon Library, is out now from Titan Books, priced £29.99.  The publisher’s description of this wonderful book can be read here.

Zembla

Zembla (Volume 1)

By Franco Oneta

Foreword by Joe Kubert

Hexagon Comics, 2007

ISBN: 9781932983937

This book collects together five black and white comics featuring Zembla, a character not unlike Tarzan.

The brainchild of Marcel Navarro, Zembla came into being in 1963 and clocked up about 650 issues, all told, before finally deciding to hang up his leopard-skin loin cloth.  Not an undistinguished or an unsuccessful run, as I’m sure you’ll agree, and he managed to keep order in an often unruly jungle.  Never let it be said, either, that he failed to do his bit for ecological harmony and the like.  That was one of his strongpoints, actually.

We begin with ‘The Birth of Zembla’, in other words at the beginning.  Zembla is the offspring of a French adventurer and an African princess and, when his parents are hunted down and killed by xenophobic philophobes, the bereft babe is raised in the wild by majestic lions.  Modesty and manly virtues generally are imparted by beautiful apes.  He forms bonds with fiery elephants and an old man imparts wisdom and weapons-training (just in case the wisdom doesn’t quite suit all situations).  Their human protector, that’s how the jungle’s citizens view Zembla at the end of the story.  Perhaps some creatures – say the dastardly crocodiles, they’ve never been the most congenial – aren’t too keen.  Anyway, he’s a good lad and as he vows: ‘Wherever evil and injustice loom I shall be there to fight it.’  Can you say fairer than that?

When we see Zembla in the later stories he has acquired a coterie of helpers and hangers-on.  They include Ye-ye, a lippy kid in a MP helmet; Rasmus, a nattily-dressed magician who looks a little like Mandrake; Satanas, a manic leopard that sees people as (contra Jean Rhys) walking steaks; and Petoulet, a loopy kangaroo.  Precious and beyond price, also, is Bwana – a white-maned, mystic lion.  Some of Zembla’s adversaries in these stories are a wacky and warped ventriloquist, a haughty gorilla (he’s just jealous of Zembla but, well, what can you do?  You can’t reason or negotiate with a gorilla…) and an evil demon who casts spells that make others – human and non-human creatures alike – obey his commands.  But the most fearsome enemies and most challenging battles are to be found in the story entitled ‘The Super-apes of Anthar’.  For (let me get this straight in my own mind first…) these belligerent apes live underground in a futuristic city where they have a nuclear programme and will use any means necessary to get their fair share of the Earth’s riches.  They’ll brook no refusal.  Can this story, written in the very early 1970s, be an allegory – at once anxious and guilt-ridden – about the rise of the developing world?

Of Franco Oneta’s artwork, one can say that it possesses in abundance the two qualities - narrative clarity and emotional impact – that the great Joe Kubert  (who writes the foreword) values above all others.  There is action, humour and an offbeat goofiness here (because Zembla’s pals are always getting into scrapes, bless ‘em).  In short, there is plenty of entertainment.

Zembla contains a pride of jungle yarns.

More details of Zembla the comic book character can be found here.

A Family Matter by Will Eisner

A Family Matter
By Will Eisner
W.W. Norton & Company, September 2009
ISBN 978 0 393 32813 4

A family get-together on the occasion of a patriarch’s 90th birthday is the centrepiece of Will Eisner’s bleak and acerbic take on family life.

The old man’s children, now fully grown and mostly middle-aged, gather from near and far to be with him on the special day.  It is love and loyalty that motivates them, surely?  And not the craven desire to curry favour with a father who is apparently well wealthy and not too long for this world?  They do make an effort not to seem like carrion slowly circling, though it’s not exactly convincing.

There are many other raw issues to be going on with in the meantime: old grievances, long buried rivalries and resentments.  In any family gathering, fault lines will tend to surface sooner or later.

Will Eisner was still working very much at the top of his game when he wrote and drew this comic, which was originally published in 1998, when he had just turned 80.  With a deft, masterly touch he conveys character and compels the story forward too; all at once.  There is a virtuoso panel sequence on pages 63-67 here: while the old man listens to his children’s plans to warehouse him in a care home for the elderly, he recalls the last moments spent with his wife.

Clearly, the way in which families (in so far as they can be said to exist in modern societies) treat and care for their old was very much on Will Eisner’s mind when he wrote A Family Matter.  He was, after all, just 10 years younger than the patriarch here.

Yet his concern with the young, those fragile vessels of hope, is evident too.  And there is an awareness, also, of how the stress of everyday economic survival impacts on family obligations…  Like most of Will Eisner’s work, A Family Matter is a complex brew, beautifully rendered.  It is an absolute gem, one of the great master’s late masterpieces.

For the publisher’s description of A Family Matter please click here.

For Will Eisner’s official website please click here.

Classic Pin-up Art of Jack Cole

Classic Pin-up Art of Jack Cole
Edited by Alex Chun
Fantagraphics Books, April 2010 
ISBN-13: 978-1-60699-284-5

Jack Cole was a brilliant artist and one of the most significant figures in American comics.  He invented Plastic Man, a sublimely weird superhero, writing the stories and drawing and inking the panels all by his lonesome, from 1941 to 1945.  True it is that, in a far-off time, to be plastic and supremely malleable was considered a power and a virtue.  Conformist America, where art thou?

Behind an anodyne facade, mind, dark and disturbing beasts lurked; and Cole captured some of the era’s sleazy underbelly in ‘Murder, Morphine and Me’, a story that he drew for the first issue of True Crime Comics in May 1947.  (Chun calls it issue 2 in the introduction to this book, but it was in fact the first issue.  It just says issue 2 on the cover.)  It is shocking to read this particular story even now, and the image of the syringe held before a woman’s eye, needle poised and ready to strike and pierce, retains its harrowing force.

The book under review collects together some of the risqué cartoons that Cole placed in various men’s magazines in the 1950s, after leaving the comics industry.  Some of these cartoons appeared in one magazine that, amongst a host of mostly forgotten titles, is still in existence today: Playboy, which Cole joined in 1953.

In essence, these are single panel cartoons, beautifully composed and drawn as you would expect, accompanied by a gag or punchline.  They are pleasing to look at and vaguely amusing, to be sure, but there is none of the surreal, chaotic, rollercoaster quality to be found in Cole’s comic book art.  There is nothing too objectionable either, unless you regard cheesecake as commodification.

We are in the pre-feminist world of saucy seaside postcards and Mad Men (the TV series) or perhaps simply a world of mad men, indefinite playboys who are infinitely malleable and plastic.

Jack Cole found steady work at Playboy, working there until the fateful day when he killed himself.  Chun includes all the details, and he even tells you the calibre of gun that was used.  Cole was only 43 years old when he chose to end his life, an awful waste of a gorgeous talent.  What is it Patchen wrote?  ‘There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death.’

The World of Steve Ditko

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko
By Blake Bell
Fantagraphics Books, 2008
ISBN: 9781560979210

As a tour guide to the world of one of the great comic-book artists of the twentieth century, this book could hardly be bettered.

Most comic-book fans will know Steve Ditko as the creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, and his work on these iconic characters is well covered here.  But the author devotes just as focused an attention to Ditko’s work at Charlton Comics in the 1950s, and to his later career, following the acrimonious split with Marvel Comics in 1966.  Since then, scant popular recognition and very little commercial success has come Ditko’s way, even though the quality of his work has generally remained high.

It has to be said that Ditko has not always been the best custodian of his talent and, following stints at Warren Publications and DC Comics and a brief return to Marvel in 1979, he has tread an independent and an increasingly idiosyncratic course from about 1988 – and he continues to do so.  Those well-intentioned souls who have sought to work with the artist – and there have been many, among them Frank Miller and the late Will Eisner – have found him a difficult person to deal with; most have regretfully given up on him.

Still, once Ditko was a boy who persuaded his mother, an accomplished seamstress, to make a Batman costume for him.  Once he was a young man with a burning ambition to become a comic-book artist, and he did so under the tutelage of the great Jerry Robinson.  Once, he drew Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, his own creations.  And he put much of his own life into both of these characters, especially Spider-Man, as Blake Bell clearly demonstrates.  But between the duplicity of the comics industry and Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ideas and maybe something in his own make-up, his head got messed up and he lost his way.

Here, along with a full biography, Bell gives a perceptive appreciation of Ditko’s achievements and a generous selection of artwork from all stages of his career, ending with a gallery of comic-book covers from the 1950s.  Sure, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a large-scale art book, is gorgeously designed and produced.