Flash Gordon: The Fire Plain

Flash Gordon was a comic-strip hero dating to 1934, created by King Features to compete with the successful Buck Rogers series. It ran until 2003 under various artists, for our purposes including Emanuel (Mac) Raboy between 1948 and his death in 1967.

Raboy began his working career in the Federal Art project, already developing a visual style in wood engravings that would translate successfully into the comics medium: high-contrast lighting, dramatically composed scenes, and expressive bodies captured in moments of action. Four of those works are in the New Deal Museum collection.

Here, we see a typical episode of the Flash Gordon series, where Raboy had to navigate the constraints of small panel size and large blocks of speech balloons. Dramatic tendrils of fire--in red, orange, and yellow--surround the protagonist and his girlfriend Dale Arden. These visual elements contrast with the blues and violets of rocks, one of them hurtling downhill toward them in the last panel, in typical cliffhanger fashion.

Raboy, Emanuel (Mac), 1914-1967

Color comic strip

14 x 10 in.