Flash Gordon #1 begins as Flash has been a prisoner of the planet Death for… he doesn’t know how long, until the day a new prisoner arrives. Flash learns that Dale Arden, his girlfriend from Earth, is in trouble and hatches a desperate plan to break free from his cell.
This review contains spoilers
Flash Gordon #1
Writer: Jeremy Adams
Art and Main Cover: Will Conrad
Color Artist: Lee Loughridge
Variant Covers: Frazer Irving, Reilly Brown, Dan Panosian, Joe Chiodo
Release Date: July 24, 2024
Flash Gordon #1 — The Story
Flash Gordon #1 begins as Flash wakes up in a prison cell, strapped to a rack, unsure of how much time has passed. A robot comes in every day to administer nourishment to him in a syringe. It seems like this is it for Flash – until the day a new prisoner arrives. This prisoner is raving that he is a healer and Dale Arden will die without him. Now Flash has a new urgency to escape, for Dale was his closest friend.
Further, from the other prisoner, Daranek, Flash learns that Dale is to marry Prince Aton (one would assume, before she dies), and that Ming’s mercenaries are coming (for her? Daranek is a poor communicator). Flash’s daring plan to escape is to move his neck. This causes the next syringe delivery of his liquid dinner to cut a major artery. For some reason, the robot needs to open Flash’s wrist shackles to cauterize the wound on his neck, giving Flash the opening he needs to go all Magnus Robot Fighter on that droid. Flash has just enough strength left to unshackle Daranek before passing out from blood loss.
The next time Flash wakes up, his wound has been cauterized by Daranek. Daranek doesn’t know who he helped until Flash switches out his rags for a dead prisoner’s clothes and shaves his beard – finally looking like the Flash Gordon Daranek (and we) recognize. Flash learns a little about the new political alliance in the galaxy while hotwiring the door – but even before they can get out of the cell two lizard men with automatic rifles come in, guns blazing. Luckily the guards are lousy shots and Flash has a Bullseye-like ability to strike them unerringly in the face with syringes.
Flash kills one of the guards and gets his gun, but the gun is less effective than the syringe was and Flash only succeeds in releasing a fourth prisoner – a big, tentacled monster that kills the remaining guard and then chases Flash and Daranek out of the cell. They trap the monster in an elevator that Flash sends crashing to the bottom of the shaft while Flash and Daranek climb up the shaft to safety.
Soon thereafter, a servant of the same species as Daranek reports to the Empress that Flash Gordon has escaped and she orders his capture, dead or alive. The twist – the Empress is Dale Arden!
Analysis
So, you’re Mad Cave Studios and you want to revive Flash Gordon, a character with 90 years (off and on) of history, who has been rebooted quite a few times and never seems to stick for long. How are you going to do it different this time?
The obvious step 1 is to change Ming the Merciless and the Planet Mongo so its people are not obvious Asian analogs. Done – in this version, Ming is a green alien who looks nothing like an Asian human. Now the resemblance of the name Mongo to Mongol is left as coincidence.
The more complicated step 2 is to decide where to start – over from scratch? Where some previous publisher left off? After some significant storyline in Gordon’s past? With the 1980 movie – what most people know Flash Gordon from? Should it sync up with the new relaunch of the syndicated comic strip?
Answering in reverse order – no, this has no relation to the new comic strip from King Features. No, it definitely has none of the aesthetic or campiness of the movie. It definitely follows a new version of Flash Gordon’s original storyline – and many reboot storylines thereafter – where Ming is defeated. But in many ways it is a starting over from scratch too. Flash Gordon has been removed from his own story, all the characters have been reassembled into different alliances, and Flash is going to have to go out and navigate it all as if for the first time.
If you’re wondering how Flash Gordon wound up on the planet Death, you won’t find out in this issue and probably for some time in this story arc. If you’re wondering how Flash Gordon defeated Ming, or what this “Unraveler” is he keeps mentioning, that’s because you started with issue #1 like most people do, ignorant to the fact (like I was….) that there was an issue #0 that is not supplemental reading (like most issue 0’s), but is in fact the start of the story arc and necessary reading to understand this issue.
Does it feel very Flash Gordon-y? Mad Cave, and writer Jeremy Adams (best known for his recent long stint on – ironically? – The Flash for DC), deliberately want to invert our expectations. This Flash Gordon can barely save himself, let alone seem like he can save the world. Our expectations are inverted in other ways, particularly the big reveal about Dale Arden at the end – a spoiler you have to read the spoilers above to get out of me. The big reveal is less of an “oh wow!” moment than a “huh…how are they going to explain this?” moment.
Will Conrad, the artist, has done a lot of work for Marvel in recent years, though his style and panel layouts seem more reminiscent of Marvel in the 1990s. Another visual aesthetic that Mad Cave is pushing (you can see it in their Dick Tracy title too) is lots of blood. If you like seeing your protagonist almost bleed to death in the very first issue – this is the first issue for you.
Final Thoughts
If you want a Flash Gordon that’s fun, I highly recommend you go find that in back issue bins right now. It is too soon to say how this series will measure up in time. So far, it’s taken 19 pages for Flash Gordon to escape one room; I trust the pace is going to pick up soon and Flash won’t be moving from room to room one per issue.
For all its flaws, Flash Gordon #1 accomplishes what it sets out to do – introduce you to Flash Gordon, give you a reason to root for Flash Gordon, and a hook to come back.
Mad Cave Studios provided The Comic Book Spot with an advance copy of this comic for review purposes. Find more reviews here. If you would like to buy a copy of this title, and help support the Comic Book Spot at the same time, consider purchasing this book at Amazon or from My Comic Shop.
