Product Description: The first of seven full-color volumes collecting the entire output of comics great Alex Raymond on his signature strip, Flash Gordon. Thanks to Raymond's unrivaled gift for gorgeous sprawling artork and rapid-fire plotting set on a world of unrivaled wonder - the mysterious planet mongo - Flash Gordon quickly became a house-hold name which still resonates in film, literature and cartooning to this day.
Flash Gordon I am a fan of Flash Gordon since around 1946. The series of the 7 books is EXCELLENT, and it brought back many childhood memories. The format and quality of each book is very good. I would not mind seeing and reading more of it in future publications.
Nice content, poor binding The content itself is in great condition and very nice to look at, but the book itself is more of a children's book than a comic collection. It would've been great if they had decided to put it in a quality hardcover format.
Graphic SF Reader 1934, but almost doesn't seem like it. More dragons and monsters than you can shoot a light gun at. Introspective, this is not. Who else would you want for a hero, but a Yale polo champion? Polo skills are the perfect training for an interplanetary action hero, you would think. Not a horse to be seen, but this is great fun.
Classic adventure The plots are ridiculous and the characters are thin, but that is all inconsequential. Flash Gordon is FUN.
It's hard to read Alex Raymond's comic strips without the Queen soundtrack running through my head from the early 1980s movie. And all the principals from that movie are from the comic strip: Dale Arden, the constant damsel-in-distress; Princess Aura, the manipulative yet beautiful woman out to seduce Flash; Prince Barin, the dashing rebel; King Vultan, the violent yet honorable Lord of the Hawkmen; and Hans Zarkov, the brilliant yet slightly mad scientist. And in the center of it is Flash Gordon, Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player and his arch-nemesis, the dreaded Ming the Merciless, Emperor of the planet Mongo.
Volume One kicks off the action pretty quickly: a mysterious planet (Mongo) is about to crash into Earth. Dr. Zarkov designs a rocket ship to divert the planet and forces Dale and Flash to come along; the mission is successful, but the three wind up marooned on Mongo. Quickly captured by Ming's soldiers, they are put in front of the Emperor himself. Ming falls for Dale (many men fall for her), while his daughter Aura falls for Flash (many women fall for him). And the adventures begin.
This first volume has four chapters. In "On the Planet Mongo", Flash and Dale have their first run-in with Ming. "Monsters of Mongo" has Flash, Dale, Barin and Zarkov as prisoners of the Hawkmen. "Tournaments of Mongo" offers Flash a chance at power, if he can survive a deadly contest. "Caverns of Mongo" takes Flash and Dale off to conquer mysterious cave people.
Almost every strip ends in a cliffhanger, but never fear: Flash is almost unbeatable in a fight. The great pleasure in the comic is the wonderful art with a world more fascinating that most of those offered on the comics page. Who cares if it's ludicrous; it is still a delight. In a way, it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon: the laws of nature can be bent (or broken) as necessary and reality need not get in the way of telling the story. It's great fun, and the seeming flaws don't hurt the story, they enhance it. If you enjoy reading classic comics, this is one of the best.
Beautifully rendered One of the best reprints of comic art I've seen. The pages are high quality, the images are large and the colors are amazing. The Publisher's Weekly review must have had a different version (as one of these reviews claims), because this book is amazing. If you're a fan of comic art, you won't do much better than this.
Anything Goes Trivia
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