Space Hero Saturdays FLASH GORDON by Dan Schkade

There's currently a lot of new Flash Gordon material from several different publishers...

...but the one that's a must-see is the hardest to find!
Yes. visually, it's not the minutely-detailed Alex Raymond/Austin Briggs/Mac Raboy/Al Williamson "classic" series (which, for the record, I revere)!

But it is a stylized semi-reboot that King Features decided to implement after almost 20 years of reprints!

I'm gonna give you an analogy...

If the original Flash Gordon was the Neal Adams/Jim Aparo/NormBreyfogle Batman...

...the current Flash is the Bruce Timm version!

Are you gonna tell me you don't like (if not love) Bruce Timm's take on the Caped Crusader???

He's visually-different, but incredibly-respectful to the "classic" vision!

That's the near-impossible feat Schkade's pulling-off six days a week...and Sundays!

Dan believes everybody knowns the basic premise, and if you've seen the 1980 movie...

(and/or the first Buster Crabbe serial)...

...you know the plot.

The series follows-though with the history of Mongo shortly after Ming's fall, and carries on from there.

Here's a link to a superb interview with Dan from The Comics Journal.
And here's a link to Schkade's own feed on BlueSky, where he not only posts the strips every day, and offers backstory, but also interacts with the audience!
He goes the extra mile because he loves the series and wants it to find as big an audience as possible!
So do I!
Sadly, too few newspapers are carrying the strip.
So hit those links and/or go directly to Comics Kingdom!

Friday Fun HARRY HOTDOG "Peevy Over TV"

He's not a dachshund, but a generic canine with no self-control...

...who just can't understand what's going on with the then-"newfangled" tech known as "television"!

For those under 70, when TV was introduced to the American public in the early 1950s, it featured news, old movies, and low-budget original programming which this never-reprinted story from Magazine Enterprises' Hot Dog #1 (1954) aka A-1 #107 satirizes!

If you're wondering why the comic has two titles and numberings, let me explain...

Like Dell's Four Color Comics, A-1 was an anthology title which served as a tryout platform for various concepts, so it had both the strip's numbering and the title's numbering.

That way, if the strip didn't sell well, the publisher wouldn't have to pay for another second-class mailing permit (which was required for each title published) for a new series!

Numerous ME series were published this way, including Cave Girl, I Am a Cop, Trail Colt, Manhunt, Ghost Rider, and Thun'da!

This issue was the first of four Harry Hotdog-starring issues!

Writer/Artist George Crenshaw began as an animator for Walt Disney, then MGM before going to comic strips and books.

Besides being a longtime "ghost" on Dennis the Menace, he created his own long-running strip, Belevdere, about (surprise) a dog...but not an anthropomorphic one like Harry!

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Reading Room STUART TAYLOR IN WEIRD STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL "Waterloo"

We presented another tale of time traveler Stuart Taylor last year...

...today, we see how Stuart and his mentor, Dr Hayward, changed the course of history!

Bet you didn't know time-travelers with ray guns helped defeat Napoleon!

That's just one of the time-lost secrets found in this Sy Reit-illustrated tale from Fiction House's Jumbo Comics #25 (1941), published almost a year before we entered an already-ongoing World War II!
At that time, almost everyone felt we'd be entering the war sooner or later.
The only questions were "when?" and "why?", which were answered on December 7th, 1941, when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor.

The rest...as we say...is history!

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Best of Wednesday Worlds of Wonder CHRONICLES OF GENGHIS GRIMTOAD

I'm Sure a Lot of You are Going...WTF???

It's the story of the heroic and handsome Prince Erik, the heroic and beautiful Princess Jade (his MILFy mother...don't get any ideas!)..and the decidedly un-heroic and...well...toadlike, inept sorcerer's apprentice Genghis Grimtoad!

Written by Alan Grant & John Wagner and illustrated by Ian Gibson, it was originally-published in Marvel UK's bi-weekly anthology magazine Strip (their counterpart to American Marvel's Epic Magazine), it appeared in the entire 20-issue run, but remained unfinished since the magazine was cancelled before the strip was scheduled to finish several issues later!
However, due to public demand, Marvel UK gathered up the published storyline, added in the unpublished material and issued it as a graphic novel!

We presented the entire rarely-seen-in-America tale here...

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Conclusion

Take Robert E Howard, JRR Tolkien, and Terry Pratchett and toss in talking toads, this is what you get!

Reading Room COMIC READER "Invasion!"

Here's a single image that conveys an entire story...

...a, sadly, never-completed tale meant for one of the Charlton sci-fi anthologies of the late Silver Age.

Probably abandoned when Jim Aparo joined editor Dick Giordano when he moved over to DC, it's typical of the detailed work Aparo produced for them, despite the awful printing that would obscure a lot of the time-intensive rendering.

The Comic Reader was a late 1960s-early 1970s newszine/fanzine, available at comic conventions and by subscription.

The covers were almost always exclusives, either pieces done to promote current projects (a Manhunter cover by Walt Simonson during the character's revival in Detective Comics) or unpublished work like this one that editor-publisher Paul Levitz felt deserved exposure to an appreciative audience!