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Page history last edited by Arthur Lortie 16 years, 9 months ago

On writing Flash Gordon

 

 

This article was originally printed in Ed Cox's fanzine Esdacyos #22, dated August, 1973. It gives insights into the problems of writing for a comic strip and also identifies Larry as the writer of a long stretch of Flash Gordon storylines that immediately precedes the work of Harry Harrison. My annotations are postscripted and added at the end. - Art Lortie

 

I WAS A DROPOUT FROM THE PLANET MONGO

LARRY SHAW

 

 

I became a science fiction fan because of that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.

 

Literally. I first encountered the daily Buck Rogers comic strip at the beginning of the Tiger Men of Mars sequence, which must have been in 1930, and I was hooked. I was looking for another source of crazy Buck Rogers stuff when I bought my first science fiction magazine, which happened to be the September 1936 issue of Astounding featuring "Finality Unlimited" by Donald Wandrei The story was not very Buck Rogers-ish, although it was satisfactorily crazy, and it threw me for a while. Not for long, but for a while.

 

Meanwhile, I became a fan of the comic strips, too, and read every "funny paper" I could find. Thus it shouldn't be surprising that I encountered Flash Gordon the Sunday he first appeared and never missed a Sunday page for the first several years. With the feverish loyalty of youth, I considered Flash an upstart and interloper who would never be Buck's equal as a human being; a college athlete became a Depression hero only if he had a lot of other things going for him, too, and Buck's territorial claims were clear. (We spent endless hours in those days debating whether Tarzan was stronger than Joe Palooka and similar Weighty subjects.) I was discerning enough to recognize the superior artistry of Alex Raymond, and after a while, Flash assumed a place almost equal to Buck's in the mighty assemblage of heroes I admired. (I even let Brick Bradford in later - but of course he had the huge advantage of being a professional airplane pilot in the early days of his strip.)

 

For many years my greatest ambition was to be a comic strip artist, and I drew stacks of pages presenting the adventures of heroes created by me but obviously inspired by Buck and Flash. While other kids were drawing World War I biplanes, I was designing spaceships. I quit only when struck by one inescapable and rather crucial realization: I couldn't draw.

 

So I became an editor instead, and one Saturday morning in 1957 when I was still in bed in my apartment on Greenwich Street, New York City, at the unearthly hour of eight in the morning, the telephone rang. A cheerful and disgustingly wide-awake voice announced that the caller was Dan Barry, the man who drew the daily Flash Gordon strip. He had also been writing it, he told me, but he had written himself into a corner, was in trouble, and needed a good science fiction writer to help him out.

 

I don't know to this day who told him that I was a good science fiction writer, but I went out and had breakfast with him and he hired me. His difficulty was that the syndicate which distributed the strip wasn't happy with the storyline he was pursuing, but he didn't see how to get Flash out of the situation he was in without junking the entire situation he had set up. Dan was frankly bored with the strip, and to make it more interesting for himself he was trying to do a satirical story set in an extraterrestrial city-state the government of which was designed chiefly to give Dan opportunities for poking fun at bureaucracy. My solution was to get Flash out of there in a hurry by having him take the alien ruler on a hunting trip in the surrounding jungle, thus doing a quick switch to slam-bang action-adventure without losing the characters or the entire original plot idea. Dan and the syndicate liked my work well enough so that I continued writing the daily for a while and eventually wrote three complete Sunday sequences (drawn by Mac Raboy); with very little direct supervision from Dan on the Sunday material.

 

Dan used probably dozens of assistants over the years, on the artwork as well as on scripts. Wally Wood, for instance, was just being phased out on penciling as I was being phased in on writing. The word among the experienced was that Dan was afraid anyone else who worked on the strip too long would begging to put his personal stamp on it, which he didn't want. But that's another story, which I may even tell some time if Ed retains his powers of persuasion.

 

The point here is that Dan Barry was first and foremost a true craftsman, and I learned valuable things from him. He was one of a dwindling breed even then, and from the daily strips I see today, there can't be more than half a dozen men left who are aware of the principles he taught me, much less make any attempt to use them. The daily adventure comic strip is -- or should be -- a unique form of storytelling. The pitifully few adventure strips that survive at all (with exceptions like the remarkable Johnny Hazard and the reliable but predictable Mandrake and The Phantom) have all the fire, suspense and reader involvement of last week's horoscope.

 

Aside from all the other requirements of a good story, each daily strip should (ideally) be a complete incident in itself, resembling a short story or a novel in having a beginning, a middle and an end. Since it will usually have a cliffhanger in the last panel, the first panel will usually resolve yesterday's cliffhanger. At the same time, it should not leave the new reader, who has never seen the strip before, totally befuddled as to what is going on. If that sounds difficult, let me assure you that it is -- but plenty of good men have done it the past.

 

It's comparatively easier, of course, if you resort to the use of lots of captions, but I have always believed and Dan Barry agreed with me that captions are a copout. The perfect comic strip should be composed of pictures and dialogue only. It's probably impossible to avoid captions completely, and the temptation to use them is always there, but they make the strip an illustrated textual story instead of a visual drama with dialogue. At his peak, Milton Caniff rarely used captions; now he throws them in indiscriminately. If you're not convinced, ask yourself if you've ever seen a good movie (since the advent of sound, of course) with captions to explain what is happening in the pictures.

 

Many of the things Dan taught me were things I had already sensed or known intuitively but didn't know the technical terms for. As an example, I had noticed long before that some daily strips were drawn in such a way that the bottom quarter inch or so of every panel contained nothing crucial, and could simply be sliced off in case some newspapers wanted to run the strips in a shallower format. Since this wasn't true of Flash Gordon, I never did learn the technical term for this, if any. Today, of course, daily strips are universally printed so small that it is hard for the artist to include three panels, let alone the four or even five of earlier years, so there is no need for such a device. But Sunday strips have suffered indignities considerably worse, and I did learn the name for one of these: dropout panels.

 

In the beginning, the comic strip artist had a page or sometimes a half page to fill and could do so pretty much as he wished. The Sunday comic section was something a newspaper threw in as an extra to please its readers and perhaps attract more of them to the paper as a whole. Then somebody realized that the Sunday funnies, too, could contain advertising. It was the beginning of a disastrous trend. At first the revenue from such advertising couldn't have amounted to much, but now it is apparently expected to pay for the entire production costs of the entire comic section.

 

Thus, years ago, an advertiser might buy a half-page, which did no real harm. Or a shallow strip of advertising might replace one of the small subsidiary strips many artists used at the top or bottom of his page, like Maw Green accompanying Little Orphan Annie (sort of comic relief to the tear jerking "comic" strip itself). Still, no great harm done.

 

Then came dropout panels. The artist was instructed to fit his strip into a very rigid structure indeed, with panels that could be eliminated entirely if whoever put the comic section together had a lucrative reason for doing so. And more and more frequently, this cheerful butcher found such a reason. Since an example is worth a thousand words, let's look at the first Sunday Flash Gordon page I wrote. This was designed so that it could be printed in any of three different formats: full page, half page, or one-third page. Strangely enough, only if your newspaper used the half-page format did you see the whole thing I wrote and Mac Raboy drew.

 

This consisted of a rectangle approximately thirteen inches wide by nine and one-half inches deep, with three rows of panels. On December 1st, 1957, the first row had four panels; one title panel, which was lettering only (the name of the strip and the artist), and three illustrated panels. They showed a rocket ship (remember rocket ships?) being struck by a "microscopic meteor" and crashing on Earth. Fine - except that if somebody wanted to confine the whole strip to one-third of a page, the whole business was expendable. Four dropout panels, or one dropout row, right there, depending on how you look at it. Which meant that somewhere, later on, I'd have to work an explanation about the rocket ship crashing into the dialogue.

 

The second row had three panels. The first showed another ship, containing Flash, Dale and Dr. Zarkov, landing smoothly on Earth from a mission somewhere. The second was a close-up of our trio, and the third was a long shot of them in a snappy convertible with a big tailfin as they took off on a vacation. Again fine - but if somebody wanted to print the strip in four rows of panels to take up a full page, that middle panel just wouldn't fit. That meant that the first and third panels had to be exactly the same size and the middle one had to contain something non-essential to the story. I solved the problem with some really snappy dialogue.

 

Zarkov: "Mmm! Fresh Earth air! Wonderful."

Flash: "Yes, Zarkov! I want to take a good long drink of it this time."

 

It shouldn't be surprising, under the circumstances, that the final, bottom, row of panels contained most of the crucial action. Nor should it be surprising that the dropout panels contained some of the most banal and embarrassing, dialogue ever written. I got somewhat better at it as I went along, and the dropouts I wrote toward the end were not nearly as bad as the example quoted, but they were always a moment of time-marking in the middle of the strip, and I was never happy about them. On top of that, I found that in writing around them I was frequently forced to use explanatory captions, much as I hated them.

 

The Saturday sequence of the daily story, incidentally, was designed to be a complete dropout strip, on the theory (amply substantiated by circulation figures) that many people who read the paper on weekdays didn't do so on Saturdays. So, on Saturday, nothing ever really happens to comic strip characters.

 

The condition, needless to say, has grown even worse. An advertiser can buy a piece of a page in virtually any size and shape he desires, and the comic panels have to be designed to fit around almost anything imaginable. With the taboo on violence making many kinds of action impossible, and never knowing how his work is going to be chopped up, it's no wonder that an adventure strip artist, no matter how crassly commercial he may be, gets thoroughly disillusioned and bored with his characters after a few years.

 

I enjoyed writing Flash, in spite of the drawbacks. (A few days after I started, a girl I knew at the time and I bumped into folksinger Oscar Brand, and she told him brightly: "Larry is writing Flash Gordon!" Without a second 's hesitation, Oscar deadpanned: "Oh? Does Flash write back?") But I now see the invention of dropout panels as the beginning of the long decline and eventual complete death of adventure comic strips.

 

And I have one other regret. I learned to be a dropout artist, all right, but in spite of several attempts, I couldn't overrule the syndicate bosses and get Flash and company back to his best-known turf. I never did write a story taking place on the planet Mongo.

 

(Author's note: Ed's deadline looms, and other pressures force me to end this here, but I find I have a lot more to say on the subject. Perhaps, fate willing, I'll return next issue.)

 

Larry T. Shaw

 

===================================

 

 

Editorial Commentary Dept.:

 

Just call me "fate", brothers! You've got ten weeks, Larry, before next deadline! And you folk out there, leave us have them cards and letters. This is the first article by Larry Shaw for a fanzine in an eon or so. Let's help him, by encouraging letters and such, to keep up this return to the pages of FAPA.

 

Then, a couple of comments on the foregoing article. Yes, indeed it was 1930 when the Tiger Men from Mars invaded the Earth in the Buck Rogers comic strip.

 

I will endeavor to effect via my powers of persuasion, of a sequel by Larry Shaw.

 

Ed Cox

 

===================================

 

Although the promised follow-up ran in Esdacyos #23, published 6 months late, it dealt only briefly with his Flash Gordon work.

 

Larry contributed three Sunday stories for artist Mac Raboy, based on the tear sheets he retained in his science fiction collection and the article above:

 

The Lonely Crowd, syndicated 1957/12/01 to 1958/01/12

Missiles from Neptune, syndicated 1958/01/19 to 1958/03/09

Robinson Crusoe in Space, syndicated 1958/03/16 to 1958/06/15

 

There are three likely stories written for the dailies, though the only confirmation for the second two is that the art was drawn by artists residing in the United States. Dan Barry was in Italy and the art chores were being coordinated by his brother Sy Barry, later long time draftsman for Lee Falk's The Phantom.

 

Cybernia, syndicated 1957/08/19 to 1957/10/19

Radioactive Loot, syndicated 1957/10/21 to 1957/12/07

The Time Pendulum, syndicated 1957/12/09 to 1958/01/25

 

As detailed in the article above, Cybernia, about a city on the planet Mongo controlled by computers, was started by an unknown writer and finished by Larry. [Writer / artist Lou Cameron wrote a similiar novel called Cybernia in 1973 dealing with an earth city being controlled by a malevolent computer, but I interviewed him in 2003 and he confirmed he didn't begin the Flash Gordon story]

 

The Time Pendulum borrows elements from the two A. E. van Vogt stories The Weapon Shops of Ishar and The Weapon Makers, though common and often used SF currency [The Weapon Shops of Isher is a 1951 novel created from short stories about the Weapon Shops civilization which originally appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction Magazine. Its prequel The Weapon Makers was published in 1947]. As Flash oscillates back and forth through time, he relives his adventures depicted in the previous few years of the daily strip, which suggests heavy input from Barry. The story also introduces the 23rd century's Ming XIII and was novelized as Flash Gordon: The Timetrap of Ming XIII in 1974 by Con Steffanson [actually Bruce Cassiday using Ron Goulart's pseudonym], published by Avon Books.

 

These three stories have a common technological base depicting Mongo as having more advanced technology than previous shown, including establishing Mingo City, its capital, as an interstellar space port. 

 

The next Flash Gordon story, The Far Side of the Moon, running 1958/01/27 to 1958/03/15, likely marks the beginning of Harry Harrison's decade on the strip. Though the art was done by Fred Kida in the US, Harry and Dan had been introduced by World Citizen Garry Davis back in December and this fits the timeline. There's little question that the next story, The Flying Saucer, beginning 1958/03/17, is Harry, as it has elements foreshadowing the Skorpi storyline that ran for several years.

 

 

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