Space Hero Saturdays FLASH GORDON "Return to Mongo" Part 1

In 1978, with production of both a Flash Gordon feature film and an animated TV series under way...

...Gold Key decided to revive Flash's comic book series which had been on hiatus since 1970!

To Be Concluded...
Next Saturday!

Writer John Warner and illustrator Carlos Garzon took their story cues for this tale from Gold Key's Flash Gordon #19 (1978) from the classic Alex Raymond comic strip.
Writer Warner had extensive experience scripting entertainment properties at Gold Key, including Star Trek and Dark Shadows, as well as Planet of the Apes and Doc Savage at Marvel!
Artist Garzon had worked with Al Williamson on multiple projects including Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and the Flash Gordon newspaper strip.
Both were ideal choices for the project!

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Volume 4

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Friday Fun RIOT! "Guillotine!"

Sometimes you find something so weird, you just have to show it to others!

This never-reprinted cover and story from Atlas' RIOT! #1 (1954) are two such examples!

Illustrated (and possibly written) by Howie Post.

This tale proves that, with Atlas doing several MAD comic clones at once, even the most talented of creatives could find themselves stretched thin!

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Sincerest Form of Parody

Reading Room FANTASTIC WORLDS "Asteroid God"

Some call Golden Age sci-fi "Westerns with ray guns"...

...but it could also be "jungle tales with aliens instead of natives", as this tale demonstrates!

John Celardo illustrated this story from Standard's Fantastic Worlds #7 (1953), the final issue of a short-lived anthology that featured artwork by Alex Toth, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, Gil Kane, and Murphy Anderson, among others.

Wednesday Worlds of Wonder MEDUSA CHAIN Part 5

If you want to know what happened before one of the koolest space battles ever seen in comics begins...

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Then continue, with the codicil that it gets extremely gory and may be NSFW...

Why do the Earthians want radioactive material?
Find out next Wednesday, in the surprising climax!

There's no explanation in the story as to what the "Fibonacci Sequence" is.

Named after the Middle Ages mathematician Leonardo of Pisa aka Fibonacci (although it was known in Indian science and arts at least a century earlier), the sequence begins with 1 and 1, or 0 and 1, depending on the starting point, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two.

For sci-fi fans, the concept is also the basis for the famous "computing number of tribbles" scene in classic Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles".

Plus, Fibonacci is also the person responsible for instituting Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) as the standard in our mathematics, replacing the Roman numbers (I, II, III, IV, V, etc) used until then.

Reading Room UNKNOWN WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION GIANT-SIZE SPECIAL "Threads"

An alien invasion may not be in the form of hulking monsters and heavily-armed spacecraft...

...but something subtle and unseen...

This oversized special, published in 1976 after Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction was cancelled, ran previously-unpublished material like this story...except for the tales "Arena" which had appeared in the color Worlds Unknown title (You can read it HERE and HERE.), and "Sinner", previously-published in the pro-zine witzend.
The writer of this tale, listed here as "Mat Warrick", may be the same person as "Mal Warrick" and "Mal Warwick", as stories under all three names appeared during the mid-1970s in various titles from Marvel, Star-Reach, DC, Red Circle, and Charlton.
Artist Adrian Gonzales was part of the wave of Philippine artists who contributed work to American comics from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.
In 1985, he turned from print comics to doing character design and storyboards for animation studios until his passing in 1998.

Monday Madness OZARK IKE

As SuperBowl Sunday approaches...

...lets see how rurals, including hillbillies, outside the big cities, play football...in the comics, of course!

The rest of the issue deals with the multi-talented Ike playing baseball, so we'll run it during baseball season.

Yes, the King Features strip was created in the mid-1940s as a competitor to Al Capp's wildly-successful Li'l Abner series!

No, it was nowhere near as successful.

The only known licensed spin-offs were this one-shot reprint collection in Dell's Four Color Comics #180 (1948), a subsequent short-lived 1950s comic series for Standard/Better/Nedor. and a couple of 1980s reprint paperbacks from Blackthorne Publishing.

Writer/artist Ray Gotto, though not a familiar name to comics fans today, achieved sports immortality for designing one of the iconic graphics in baseball history...still in use 61 years later:

The New York Mets' logo!

BTW, this month's Monday Madness theme is SPORTS!

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Best of Li'l Abner

by Al Capp