King Features Syndicate, which introduced the character in 1934, will relaunch the comic strip “Flash Gordon” beginning Sunday after a two-decade absence — featuring a new look and a new artist. (The Sunday and daily strips will be available online and in print.)
The Daily Cartoonist broke the news earlier this month and now King Features Syndicate confirms that a rebooted Flash Gordon comic strip returns October 22, 2023. Michael Cavna at The Washington Post carries the story.
More from Cavna:
Guiding the new enterprise will be Dan Schkade, an Eisner-nominated cartoonist in his early 30s best known for his work on such comics as “Will Eisner’s The Spirit Returns,” “Lavender Jack” and “Saint John.”
Schkade won a competitivetryout earlier this year to script and draw the strip, shortly before King announced a licensing deal with Mad Cave Studios, which will begin publishing other original “Flash Gordon” narratives, graphic novels and comic reprints beginning next year.
“The initial version of Flash I pitched was a little more purposefully a himbo,” Schkade said,comparable to Disney’s version of Hercules — but King sought a more classic, straightforward hero. So in the revised pitch, Flash landed somewhere between Captain America/Steve Rogers, and Marty McFly of “Back to the Future.”
Amid Flash’s world that the artist calls “a grab bag of monsters, death rays, energy effects and sometimes outright horror,” [Schkade] believes it is the emotional ethos of the strip that makes it vital and relevant still, nine decades later.
Read Michael Cavna’s full article: Flash Gordon, American icon, returns to comics after a 20-year break
Flash Gordon
by Alex Raymond, Austin Briggs, Dan Barry, Mac Raboy, Jim Keefe, others
Sundays: January 7, 1934 – March 16, 2003
Dailies: May 27, 1940 – June 3, 1944; November 19, 1951 – July 3, 1993
Sunday reruns: March 23, 2003 – October 15, 2023
Sunday and daily: October 22, 2023 – on
King Features Syndicate
Question: Will the King Features Weekly Service continue with the Jim Keefe reruns?
Breaking news from the Michael Cavna report:
“Flash Gordon” reenters as King ends distribution of another adventure strip, “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Among the new clients is The Washington Post, which carried “Spider-Man.”
Anybody have any idea which print newspapers still carry Flash?…and, almost as importantly, which carry the entire Sunday strip? It ain’t easy bein’ a print newspaper comic collector these days!
Wow. Just read that last sentence about the Washington Post carrying Flash. To quote the great Emily Litella, “…Never mind!”
…and great thanks (or, a “tip of the hat”) to Michael Cavna!!
Great! I can’t wait!
I’m looking forward to it.
So it’s the official end of newspapers and online for the Spider-Man comic strip?
Don’t know if my Chicago paper will pick up this new Flash Gordon reboot strip.
One of the announcements I read was indeed that it is the official end of the Spider-Man comic strip. I was still reading these reprints, although I had wished that Marvel had kept the strip going on after Lee died. Lee’s ghost writer was certainly willing to do so. Marvel did say back then it would return with new stories – but that never happened.
This day and age, when TV shows can be about ANYTHING , and all KFS can think to do is reboot a strip that’s almost 100 years old?