Before we end 2025, we wanted to acknowledge that it's the 45th Anniversary of Flash Gordon.
Though critically-reviled when it came out, the movie has attained cult-classic status, primarily due to the soundtrack by Queen...
...and over-the-top performances by (among others) Brian Blessed (Hawkman Prince Vultan), Topol (Dr Zarkoff) and Max Von Sydow (Ming the Merciless).
The comic adaptation was written by Bruce Jones and illustrated by legendary artist Al Williamson (who, ironically, was also doing the equally-magnificent graphic novel version of The Empire Strikes Back at the same time)!
Interestingly, Williamson inked the entireFlash adaptation, while allowing the talented Carlos Garzon (himself, no slouch) to ink the bulk of Empire. Read it, from the beginning...HERE!
Here's a tale of future love published exactly 50 years ago...
...Nestled none too securely in the grim world of the future, Liana longs for the miracle that will end the pain of her lonely existence! But, miracles can have dangerous side-effects, as Liana will soon find out!
This tale originally appeared in The Monster Times #14 (July 31, 1972), written and illustrated by Bruce Jones, who went on to write and illustrate (but rarely both at the same time) for DC and Marvel. BTW, if you wonder why the caption in the first panel is so hard to read, it's because this was published as two pages in a tabloid 11 1/2"x 16 1/2" format (like 1970s Marvel and DC "Treasury" editions), so I repeated the text below the first page!
...hapless astronaut Hunt Bowman, put in suspended animation by a NASA experiment, slept through World War III, which reduced Earth to a barren world populated by savages.
Finally defrosted, he meets a mute woman flying a jetcycle and armed with advanced focused-energy weapons.
She flies him to a nearby small city where he discovers...an exact look-alike of himself!
You'll note all three of my theories are still equally-valid...
1) Since Bowman is from the past, is this guy also from the past...or Bowman himself, returned from further into the future? 2) Is he a clone, created from Bowman's cells taken before he went into space?
3) Is this not only a future Earth, but an alternate universe as well?
Regrettably, we'll never know the answer, since this was the final issue of Blackthorne's revival of Planet Comics! (The book being printed in b/w instead of the previous issues' full color might've been a tip-off!). Neither the Golden Age nor Bronze Age versions of Hunt Bowman have appeared in new tales since!
