Flash Gordon: Dan Barry Vol. 1: The City Of Ice: The City of Ice

Superb book but is actually a re-working of earlier FG book I already had. Identical contents but in different format. Art reproduction is excellent.

Such a fantastic presentation of the classic comic strips. Absolutely love this series.

An excellent introductory essay and almost two years worth of dailies, with, overall, very good reproduction of the artwork (I'm guessing high quality press proofs are available for this period).The problem for me is with size. The dailies are printed at what you could say it's the standard size in this kind of reprint volumes nowadays, but Barry's artwork is very detailed and it begs to be printed at a larger size. The introduction is illustrated, among other things, with an oversized printing of two panels of the first daily, and it looks glorious. I understand printing all the strip at a big size would make the books much more expensive, and price is one of the good things about Titan editions, but...

Good read, looking forward to next volume.

Excellente bande dessinée, dommage que les Italiens soient les seuls à en avoir édité l'intégrale.

This Beautiful Hard Cover Edition collects the first two years of Dan Barry's Daily Flash Gordon strips in he landscape (wider than tall) format. We get three daily strips to a page. We also get an excellent introduction from Dave Schreiner which I believe was done for the Kirchen Sink Softcover edition. This edition has an additional five months of strips from that edition.Amazon's description contains many glaring errors. First it is Two Years worth of strips not Three. Second it is 224 pages and not the 208 they list. And finally and most importantly the creator Dan Barry is not the New York Reporter and Journalist of the same name.In 1951 Dan Barry was asked by King Features to restart the Daily strip which was canceled in 1944 when Flash Gordon lost Alex Raymond and Austin Briggs moved from the Daily to the Sunday. Starting soon after the second storyline Harvey Kurtzman was hired by Barry to write the strip. A task he maintained for about a year. He did breakdowns much like he did for his acclaimed EC Comics work. Two dozen of those breakdowns are included here. Mr. Barry also received help for a couple weeks on the strip from Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis and Master Fantasy Artist Frank Frazetta. The Frazetta penciled strips before Dan Barry inked them are all included so you can contrast and compare.I must say that between the writing of Harvey Kurtzman and Dan Barry's own scripts the writing here is much better then in the earlier Alex Raymond volumes written by Don Moore. While those Raymond volumes are gorgeous to look at, the writing makes it a slog to read through. These stories are well paced and fun reads. With the second story things seem to really come together and from here on out it the book is just a delight.The first storyline is entitled SPACE PRISON this one is pre Kurtzman and was Barry's take on what the strip should be. It is a very hard science fiction based adventure, with none of fantasy elements the strip was known for. Flash and Dale Arden are set for a trip to Jupiter but are forced to make an emergency stop on the on the Space Prison. They get involved in a prison break and take over. One of the good hearted prisoners named Kent even joins Flash's crew at the end of this storyline.In the next story THE CITY OF ICE they land on Ganymede and find an under world kingdom. Things quickly go from more realistic adventure to more traditional fantasy settings around the time Harvey Kurtzman joins the strip at about six weeks into the strip the second story. We also get several new re-occurring characters introduced in this story. The plucky teen aged boy Ray Carson and his missing scientist father. Plus the beautiful but deadly Ice Queen herself Marla. Marla follows that tradition of falling head or heels in love with Flash. While the youth was intended to bring in younger readers, Marla brings a new dimension to the group and does unscrupulous things that Dale could not be pictured doing.At end of our last adventure our heroes are separated and Flash, Marla and the boy Ray Carson find themselves on on the Planet Tanium. This is where the next three stories take place. In the first one we meet THE BUTTERFLY MEN and Marla makes a tragic error in killing a giant caterpillar.In TARTARUS , the trio enter a city in which all the inhabitants look like horned Devils. This is the storyline where Jack Davis pitched in to pencil a weeks worth of strips. His more comedic style is obvious.In THE AWFUL FOREST they are reunited with Kent the former Space Prisoner. Of course Marla uses her Sexy ways on poor Kent to try to gain monetary reward. At the end of this story the four characters seperate with Marla and Kent going back to Tartarus while Flash and Ray search for Dale Arden.In MURLIN we meet a familiar wizard and his young daughter. This story was a kind of wonky time traveling story involving an invention called the Time Case. Our heroes first return to earth then get involved in an adventure in the future. Of course they find out what is going on 1,000 years in the future by bringing back a newspaper from then. I guess everyone believed newspapers are around forever. This is the storyline where Dan Barry took back over the writing reigns. While both creators were headstrong controllers, each thought they were in charge. The main other problem was Kurtzman insistance on using thumbnail breakdowns and wanting Dan Barry to follow them. Barry described the experience as "what if Hal Foster had to follow Dik Browne's layouts". He claims his art was suffering greatly. Speaking of art this is the one where young Frank Frazetta did full pencils for seven strips while Barry got caught up with both the additional writing duties and other more lucrative commercial art assignments.The final story is the longest in this collection. THE SPACE KIDS ON ZORAN which brings back Ray Carson and introduces a whole gang of youthful "want to be" outer space explorers. I guess in 1953 nobody worried about child endangerment as Flash takes five boys and one of the boy's father on a test flight rocket to another planet.This Beautiful Volume gets my Highest Recommendation.

As I started learning to read in the late 50s, the Flash Gordon I knew was the one drawn by Mac Raboy in the Sunday papers. (We didn't get the daily strip by Dan Barry) So for me, Flash Gordon was a strip I liked but it was simply a run of the mill spaceman series. Most kids of my age knew nothing of Flash Gordon's glorious past.What changed for most of us was the revival of Alex Raymond's grand and glorious vision in the first Flash Gordon issue published by King Comics in the mid 60s, returning to planet Mongo to face the evil Ming The Merciless. Al Williamson had grown up in the 30s, his imagination fired by the grand, operatic wonder that was the original strip, and he brought that vision back to life. For me, and countless others, it was almost like finding a new religion. For many of us, Alex Raymond became our new artistic hero.I had gotten a slight sneak peak a few years earlier when my mother brought home a 1959 book from her library job called "Comic Art in America" by Stephen Becker. It reprinted a single 1936 Alex Raymond page that simply blew me away with its power and elegance. I felt a deep ache of longing to see more of his pages, and I felt absolutely cheated and swindled by the mediocre and unremarkable Raboy version. Why couldn't we have something wonderful like that? (Mac Raboy was one of the greatest comic book artists of the 40s, but once he got the newspaper strip assignment, he settled into a routine so lacking in sense of wonder that French comics historian Maurice Horn labeled him "a talentless hack," apparently unaware of his former greatness.) I think most newspaper strips, by the 50s, had toned down considerably from their prewar magnificence, but this one had lost its special essence perhaps the most.This book reprints the daily strip version of pretty much the same thing: a spaceman strip devoid of any swashbuckling or operatic splendor. I actually love Dan Barry's earlier work for DC Comics, and it's been said that he, along with Alex Toth, helped create the new DC house style as noirish detectives and crime stories replaced superheroes, but reading in the introduction that he made a conscious choice to abolish anything to do with Raymond's vision is especially galling. Because he himself didn't like the original strip, he chose to reduce it to a pure adventure strip. So as far as I'm concerned, the content of this book cannot exceed 3 stars at most. It's the same swindle and short-changing of a historic milestone strip into something far less, similar to DC turning the editorship of Wonder Woman over to Robert Kanigher, a man who hated the strip and proceeded to ruin it in any way possible.I only purchased this volume for the week's worth of dailies penciled by Frazetta, but find that it delivers less than a previous Flash Gordon book that covered that episode in greater detail. The Photostats of Frazetta's pencils were first published in Squa Tront fanzine, in far better detail and resolution, and this volume doesn't even feature all of them, though it easily could have. Frazetta's penciling prowess in that handful of strips is positively breathtaking, and Barry's heavy handed inking almost makes his wondrous style undetectable. (Yes, I'm sure it was supposed to, since it was Barry's strip.)Barry's artwork is fine, and deserves some respect, but I know I won't be purchasing any future volumes. I just hope no one reads it, thinking that this is the "real" Flash Gordon. It compares about as well to Alex Raymond's creation as Klinton Spilsbury does to Clayton Moore's Lone Ranger, in my opinion. Nothing about his characterization under Barry has anything to do with the heroic figure struggling against a strange, elemental and exotic world in his heyday. Any generic space-suited hero could substitute for him here; it could've been called anything.It's fine artwork, but this Flash Gordon, as I see it, is Flash Gordon in name only.

This is a revision to my earlier review: I almost gave up on this book and gave it a bad review due to holes in the story line from not including the Sunday strips. Starting fairly early in the book, around 4/5/52, the Sundays were no longer tied to the daily. Good call! Now the stories are continuous without major gaps and are enjoyable to read! I'm happy I stuck with it and was able to revise my review!

I've been a big fan of the daily Flash Gordon strips since the 50s, and I was delighted to find this high-grade collection of the strips. Dan Barry's excellent artwork still thrills me today! His work is different, but just as good as Al McWilliam's (TWIN EARTHS fame)

Perfekte Unterhaltung, die auch nach 65 Jahren noch in den Bann zieht!THE CITY OF ICE enthält sieben abgeschlossene Geschichten, die zwischen den Jahren 1951 und 1953 als Dailies in der Zeitung gedruckt wurden, geschrieben von Harvyey Kurtzman und großartig gezeichnet von Dan Barry, der mit den hier vorliegenden Stories Flash Gordon zu neuem Leben erweckte und für die nächsten 50 Jahre die Zeitungsstrips zeichnete.Da es sich um die Dailies handelt, ist klar, dass der Band durchgängig in Schwarzweiß ist, was ich persönlich "bunten" Comics zumeist sogar vorziehe. Nichts lenkt hier von den wirklich tollen Zeichnungen ab, die kontrastreich und knackescharf wiedergegeben sind. Aufgrund der Größe es Bandes sind auch Details prima zu erkennen und die Schrift läßt sich auch von Brillenträgern gut lesen.Diese Space Operas decken ein breites Spektrum ab und sind abwechslungsreich. Vor allem spannend geht es in der ersten Geschichte zu, in der Flash Gordon und seine Mannschaft auf einem Gefängnisraumschiff notlanden müssen und als Geiseln in einen Gefängnisaufstand geraten. Danach wird es vor allem exotisch, bleibt aber auch spannend, als die Reise in Richtung Jupiter fortgesetzt wird und man auf dem Mond Ganymed in der Eisstadt in Gefangenschaft gerät. Es schließen sich weitere Abenteuer an und zum Ende hin richtet sich die Erzählung vor allem an jüngere Leser, wenn eine Gruppe noch arg minderjähriger Raumkadetten ihr erstes Abenteuer an Flashs Seite bestehen. Doch auch die SPACE KIDS ON ZORAN ist eine ausgesprochen charmante Lektüre und nicht nur für Kinder geeignet. Überhaupt bezweifle ich, dass diese Dailies noch ein junges Publikum ansprechen, das heute so unendlich viel mehr über Radioaktivität und Raumfahrt weiß, als der Leser in den Fünfzigern. Aber gerade in dieser Unbedarftheit, im Draufloserzählen im Stile der großen Pulps a la Edgar Rice Burroughs liegt für mich der Reiz. Erzählt werden Geschichten, die in den Bann ziehen, unterhaltsam und spannend sind. Wissenschaftliche Glaubwürdigkeit spielt dabei keine Rolle, und das ist auch gut so. Dem Gravitationszentrum von Flash Gordons Abenteuergeist kann sich auch die Physik nicht entgegenstellen: das Feuerwerk an Weltraumabenteuern, das hier abgebrannt wird, war auch Anfang der 50er Jahre schon physikalisch der reinste Nonsens, aber es geht hier nicht um Glaubwürdigkeit. Damit Dales Lockenpracht nicht durch einen Helm Schaden nimmt, ist die Atmosphäre auf Ganymed atembar, und der Leser dankt es Dan Barry. Für die Dauer der Lektüre dürfen wir den Sorgen der Welt entfliehen in die Weite des Alls und darauf vertrauen, dass es noch wahre Helden gibt. Und Flash Gordon ist ein zeitloser Held, der neben Abenteuerlus und Mut vor allem die nötige Portion Ritterlichkeit aufbringt, um den Damen in Not zur Seite zu springen. Gerettet wird dabei nicht nur die wunderhübsche Dale Arden, sondern auch die so egoistische wie hinterlistige (Ex-)Königin Marla. Doch, ja, Flash Gordon ist für alle da, die in Not sind, egal ob uralte Zauberer und ihre Töchter, Kinder oder liebreizende Damen. Und natürlich sind die Abenteuer "jugendfrei", sprich frei von expliziten Gewaltdarstellungen oder sexuell aufreizenden Szenen. Und obwohl Fredric Wertham hier wohl kaum etwas zu meckern gefunden haben dürfte, sind die Stories sehr viel weniger platt und weniger eindimensional als die später von Gold Key im Stile von BONANZA präsentierten Abenteuer der Enterprise.

São livros eternos, que encantaram gerações e hoje continuam seu encantamento.

J'avais découvert "Guy l'Eclair" à la fin des années 60, dans le journal de Mickey. C'est de la SF de papa, mais avec des scénarios tirés au cordeau ( j'ai découvert grâce à cette édition, qu'ils étaient le fait d'Harvey Kurtzmann, grosse surprise, je ne voyais pas le créateur de Mad dans ce registre). Mais surtout le dessin impeccable et sublime de Dan Barry, chapeau l'artiste !

I like this book very much. Delivered in time.