Science Fiction Space Adventures!

This month it's all about outlandish imagination and mind-bending science fiction. Building off last month's extensive look at Flash Gordon, I want to look at what came before and after and after that.

The most famous science fiction star of the comics aside from Flash Gordon is Buck Rogers. While the Buck Rogers comic strip never had the lush elegance that Alex Raymond brought to his strip, it's clear that Flash Gordon began as a copy of the successful strip by Dick Calkins based by the character invented by Philip Francis Nowlan. In more recent times times the strip has been converted to a reasonably well-remembered television show. We'll take some time to revisit Buck Rogers in a few of his icarnations.

"Space...the final frontier." That line resonates in the memory and more importantly in the imagination of many a man and woman of my vintage who caught hold of a little space opera TV show called Star Trek. Nowadays Star Trek is a brand, a franchise with multiple variations and versions in a multitude of formats. But we only had the show, some novels Ballantine, and some cards from Topps. Gold Key did offers up some comics, but in early days a rough-hewn doppleganger of the actual show. I want to read a bunch of those comics this month and will be using my Checker collections to do so. Star Trek took many years to catch fire as the iconic cultural experience it has become, but there was another similar project that burst into  bright raging flames in an instant.

"The Sunday Funnies" feature will continue with some investigations of a that little flick called Star Wars reference above. Before it became this behemoth which was at once consumed by and consumed the "House of Mouse" Star Wars was a transforming brand with toys and books and cartoons and more. Everyone knew at once that the world had changed, but the nature of those changes took a bit to sort out. When that first "new hope" hit the theaters there was just a few novels by Ron Goulart and a comic strip by Russ Manning. That remarkable bit of comics lore in dire need of reading and reporting here at the Dojo and so it shall be.

On Saturdays and otherwise expect more movies, and those flickers will have a Star Wars inspiration as well, though George Lucas will not have been involved in any of them. I'm also looking into movies which anticipated Star Wars and the sci-fi boom that followed it, or at the very least inspired it. I'm looking forward to spoofs and spacemen, as my country tries to wrestle back its soul. Wish us all luck as we venture into the where no man has gone before in a time long long ago.

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