Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Flash Gordon Volume 4 The Storm Queen of Valkir by Don Moore Back to the Drawing Board With ‘Flash Gordon Volume 4: The Storm Queen of Valkir’ Comics have always been about second acts. Not only are the characters kept in the perpetual danger essential to any dramatic second act, they’re also subject to the departure of fan favorite or definitive creators. Few creators were as definitive as Alex Raymond. In 1934 Raymond, along with writer Don Moore, created Flash, Ming the Merciless, Dale Arden, Hans Zarkov, and all the characters populating the world of Mongo in the Flash Gordon comic strip. Raymond illustrated the strip until 1943 when he joined the Marines, after having previously been exempt from the draft due to service in the National Guard. To give his successor time to meet the rigorous deadlines associated with a weekly comic strip, Raymond built up eight full weeks of stories to give to King Features, the strip’s syndicate. This allowed Austin Briggs, the man chosen to follow Raymond, time to hit the ground running. Briggs was no stranger to following Raymond. Not only had he provided inks and fill-in strips while Raymond suffered a bout of pneumonia, he followed Raymond on both the Secret Agent X-9 and Jungle Jim Sunday strips. Flash Gordon volume 4: The Storm Queen of Valkir collects the first four years of Briggs’ run on the strip. At first, Briggs’ work feels like a simplified version of Raymond’s, the boldness of the characters’ figures and poses replaced by understated charm. Within a year on the strip, Briggs comes into his own, with Flash and Dale and the villains of Mongo looking as if they’re lifted from a photograph. Sometimes they were. Briggs’ use of photo reference is often as stunning as his predecessor’s. The fluid image of Kang the Cruel from the 6 October 1946 installment shows a typical melodramatic villain pose, rodent-like and shrinking from the light. The deceptively simple lines of Briggs’ rendering leave no doubt that that this is a villain, no room for the moral ambiguity of today’s gray-scale comic creations. Briggs maintains a relatively strict five- to-six panel layout for the strip, where Raymond pulled back his point of view more and more over time. In Raymond’s rendering, the the reader was often treated to vistas of Mongo, almost panoramic views of armies during battle, and our heroes posing like gods. Briggs’ use of smaller panels gives the story room to breathe, allowing for more movement and reducing the workload required for each panel. The action and frenetic pacing that is a hallmark of the strip remains unchanged. Another thing which remains unchanged is the creators’ reliance on a handful of rusty plot devices. Looking for narrative complexity in a five panel weekly comic strip from the ’40s might be like looking for notes of apricot and oak in a bottle of Mountain Dew, but a little variation would benefit these stories greatly. As Flash and Dale chase the deposed Kang the Cruel across the wilds of Mongo they encounter one queen after another or invariably falls in love with Flash while ignoring the advances of generals, guards, and princes. Flash welcomes the advances of each queen long enough to get out of whatever jam he’s been thrown into, proclaims his love and loyalty to Dale, then moves on to the next place. The strip’s treatment of women is very much of its time, of course, but even someone reading it in real time must have been frustrated by Flash’s constant disregard for Dale’s feelings. It’s his name in the title, though, which I suppose is license to be a pig. These incidents are scattered throughout Briggs’ run (and Raymond’s, for that matter) and are the only times the strip appears to be on autopilot. One other unfortunate feature of this run is its attempts at comedy. It comes in the form of Talky, a giant talking parrot that serves as the court jester and companion for Queen Ala of Birdland. Despite being an attempt at comic relief, Talky is neither, and considering all George Lucas plundered from the Flash Gordon mythos it’s not impossible to imagine Talky as an inspiration for Star Wars’ dreaded Jar Jar Binks. Today, Flash Gordon is known to most people today for being 1. the subject of a bombastic song by Queen; 2. the subject of the campy 1980 film; 3. being a progenitor of Star Wars . The tyranny of Dilbert , 15 years of denial of Charles Schulz’s death, and a continued decline in circulation numbers has resulted in mass amnesia for a time when the comics section was the only reliable bright spot of any newspaper. Collections like this are more than than just reminders of what we’ve lost. The stories are completely unbelievable, the characters operating somewhere between fully-formed and cardboard, but there is beauty and magic in the way the forms and figures of this world work together, no matter who’s sitting at the drawing board. Austin Briggs. Austin Briggs ’s journey began in 1908 in Humboldt, Minnesota, where he was born in a railway car, while his father was installing telegraphic instruments in the local station. He began to draw at an early age, and in high school his work attracted so much attention that he was awarded a scholarship to the Wicker Art School in Detroit. He began his career at sixteen, when an illustrator who specialized in automobile pictures took him on as an assistant. Since he was skilled at rendering the human figure, it was his job to paint in pretty girls and prosperous men enjoying the luxurious automobiles. However, Briggs got tired of the demands of advertising work and was eager to break into story illustration. In 1932, when an art editor at Collier’ s showed interest in his drawings, he packed up and moved to New York, where he enrolled at the Art Students League and took on assignments, all in pen and ink, for Collier’s and other magazines. He created illustrations for the pulp magazine The Blue Book , but was plagued with feelings of disappointment and disillusion. Finally, he turned his back on the drawing board for six months and traveled around Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula on the Saint Lawrence River, where he spent his time painting and thinking. By the time he returned, he had realized that an illustrator needs not only to master his craft, but also to live, to pile up experiences and become aware of the infinite aspects of our world. With this new outlook, taking on each assignment as a personal experience and solving problems in his own way, without referring to other artists’ work, he began to build his career. He created illustrations for top magazines such as Redbook , Cosmopolitan , and The Saturday Evening Post , and also drew the popular comic strip Flash Gordon . Briggs was especially known for the great subtlety and sensitivity of his drawing with a lithography crayon, charcoal, or similar tools. He was at the forefront of artists introducing a more realistic informality into illustration. Previous illustrators focused on the one key moment or reaction shot, where the subject's eyes were widest or their expression was the broadest or their leap was at its height. Briggs took a different approach and began focusing on moments that looked less staged. His sketches reveal a deliberate search for offbeat moments, where a subject might be looking away or checking his watch or other things more integrated into daily life. Briggs was a bold and principled pioneer who left the field with more artistic freedom than it had when he began. Flash Gordon: The Storm Queen of Valkir. Features Flash who battles a rogue's gallery of villainy to protect the innocent, the wronged and a bevy of beautiful women from the likes of Kang The Cruel, Queen Valker the Violent, giant birds, lizards, sea-beasts and rock men, as well as wolfmen and gas spiders. Don Moore was the writer of Flash Gordon between 1935 -1967. He was previously a pulp editor. Alex Raymond is one of the most famous artists in the history of comics. He created Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9, Rip Kirby, and Jungle Jim. George Lucas has admitted Flash Gordon inspired Star Wars, and Raymond's work has inspired decades of writers, artist, and filmmakers. Produktdetails. Einband gebundene Ausgabe Seitenzahl 224 Erscheinungsdatum 20.10.2015 Sprache Englisch ISBN 978-1-78276-286-7. Verlag Titan Books Ltd Maße (L/B/H) 28.2/26.3/2.5 cm Gewicht 1396 g Abbildungen mit Illustrationen Illustrator Austin Briggs. Produktdetails. Einband gebundene Ausgabe Seitenzahl 224 Erscheinungsdatum 20.10.2015 Sprache Englisch ISBN 978-1-78276-286-7. Verlag Titan Books Ltd Maße (L/B/H) 28.2/26.3/2.5 cm Gewicht 1396 g Abbildungen mit Illustrationen Illustrator Austin Briggs. Beschreibung. Features Flash who battles a rogue's gallery of villainy to protect the innocent, the wronged and a bevy of beautiful women from the likes of Kang The Cruel, Queen Valker the Violent, giant birds, lizards, sea-beasts and rock men, as well as wolfmen and gas spiders. Don Moore was the writer of Flash Gordon between 1935 -1967. He was previously a pulp editor. Alex Raymond is one of the most famous artists in the history of comics. He created Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9, Rip Kirby, and Jungle Jim.