Surprise! Much like the rogue planet of Mongo I’m sending this new What’s Going On In … essay plunging through what had been a nice balanced system. Mostly since I started recapping Olive and Popeye I had this nice balance of three daily and one weekly strip, and that felt nice and harmonious. And then King Features, through the work of Dan Schkade, tossed in a new daily strip. I’ll figure where it really goes later. For now, I’ll just throw my usual weekly schedule farther off schedule.

So as alluded, Flash Gordon restarted as a daily strip, with Sunday recaps, the 22nd of October. And it is starting from an early Flash Gordon adventure, where Our Heroes catalyze the peoples of Mongo into overthrowing Ming. We’ve seen this before, but years ago, even just in the comics. Whenever I do pass by Mongo again I’ll put a plot recap — or news about the strip — here. In the meanwhile here’s what we missed:

Flash Gordon.

22 October 2023 – 14 January 2024.

We opened in media res, Flash Gordon piloting a small ship through the great battle the Allied Mongothic Nations lead against Ming’s flagship. Gordon smashes through the ship and all Ming’s Supernumerarian Guard to free Prince Barin from Ming’s torture. They barely start to flee when the bomb in Gordon’s ship destroys Ming’s gravity generator. When Ming stops the fleeing Gordon and Barin, Barin declares this to be his fight and shoves Gordon, and the reader, into the escape pod.

Days later Gordon recovers. Ming’s dead, or at least vanished. Also vanished is Barin, a fact that becomes Gordon’s new mission. For the wedding of Barin and Ming’s “faithless” daughter Aura is the only political settlement that could plausibly prevent civil war on Mongo. And Barin hasn’t been seen since the crash of Ming’s flagship.

Flash Gordon, narrating: 'My name's Flash Gordon and I don't think I'm all that complicated. I just want people to be safe to live, love, and prosper ... and if somebody gets in the way of that, I make them my problem. That's more or less how I ended up fighting in an alien revolution. Which, here in the decisive battle of the war, involves me flying a dart plane into the imperial flagship. My mission has two parts. One: rescue Prince Barin, rightful king of Mongo. And my friend. Two: get us both out before the gadget Dr Zarkov built into the dart detonates, knocking out the flagship's engines and nixing the empire's last shot at survival. We head to the escape pods ... and find Emperor Ming waiting for us like a gold-plated vulture. He knows he's lost hte war, but he doesn't want me alive to enjoy it. This man brutalized his planet. He tried to destroy *mine*. I'm ready to end this here and now ... but then Barin screams that this is *his* fight. Ming's been working him over for a week --- his head's not right. He shoves me into an escape pod --- I bash my head pretty bad. Before I know what's happening, I'm sealed inside, blacking out in a tin can 40,000 feet above the ground, leaving Barin alone with the deadliest man in the universe ... ' — Dan Schkade’s **Flash Gordon** for the 5th of November, 2024. A minor but wonderful point is that the Sunday strips are recaps, yes. But they’re recaps from a point of view. Flash Gordon himself, in my examples this week. But it’s not always Flash. The recap perspective jumps around, including to antagonists such as Bones Malock (in Borrower’s Firth) or the free airmen’s action reports, or in one case the flight log of their windcraft. It’s a clever twist.

Fortunately Dr Zarkov has whipped up an act of superscience to help: energy traces on stuff from Ming’s escape pods. He, Dale Arden, and Flash Gordon set out on a secret mission to track Barin down. The trail leads to Borrower’s Firth, so open up your space opera RPG manual to “treacherous thieves’ flea market city”, please. Zarkov spots the first real clue — the Frigian snowblade that Barin hoped to slice Ming’s head off with — and blows their cover. A lot of the Firth folks liked having Ming rule them and resent the alien usurper, you know?

While Our Heroes escape the scrum, it’s not without taking some damage to their ship. Fortunately, Arden pocketed an entropic anomaly, a glowy space egg capable of powering a city. Or through a whipping-up of superscience, a couple days of aircraft power.

In the jungles of Valkr the space egg runs out of power, and they crash land, as is Flash Gordon’s custom. Zarkov stays behind to superscience the egg and see if anything turns up. Gordon and Arden flee a space beast, as is their custom, and get saved by Imperial Airmen. Airmen who ask if Gordon and Arden want a life free of the Emperor Ming. They’d crashed in the jungle years ago with no way to contact the outside world. Their leader, Airman Sojas, has set up a cozy little space where Ming doesn’t exist.

And how do they take the news that Ming doesn’t exist anywhere? At least is deposed? … Not well. Sojas, not without reason, accuses them of being Ming’s spies and demands trial by combat, as is the custom. Gordon’s ready to fight but Sojas demands to fight Arden. This hardly seems cricket but, you know, new continuity, new art style, new rules. Gordon gives what advice he can, which amounts to “ … and then wait for something to turn up”. Turns out it kind of does, as Sojas leaves himself incredibly wide open and ready to get slugged in the gut.

The free airmen offer what they know: a sand skimmer did arrive a couple days ago, and a lone man emerged, spending his days fishing and alone. Who can it be but Prince Barin? Our Heroes run off to retrieve him.

He doesn’t want retrieval. He wants to mourn his disgrace. For Ming’s torture had, in fact, broken him, and Barin had surrendered. Just as Gordon’s ship crashed into the flagship. Gordon consoles him, and brings him back to the world of the living. Also to their windcraft, where Dr Zarkov’s sure to have whipped up some superscience to get them out of this fix.

Flash Gordon, recapping: 'A while back, a man called Ming the Merciless attacked the Earth. Dr Hans Zarkov rocketed to Ming's planet to fight for Earth's survival --- dragging two strangers with him. One was Dale Arden. The other was me ... FLASH GORDON. ... There was an explosion. It's messing with reality. Come on, Flash! Focus! There's a petty tyrant on a power trip. There's Dale, not giving an inch.' We see a series of panels and half-panels, Flash Gordon chasing Airman Sojak, who's holding Dale Arden, until Flash can catch and punch him out. The panels take on a sequence of art styles, from past to present. Flash narrates: 'There's *you* with two hands ... and air in your lungs. Doesn't matter what changes. Doesn't matter if it takes one day or ninety years ... you fight the FIGHT. And he next one. And the next. Until you've saved every one of us.' — Dan Schkade’s **Flash Gordon** for the 7th of January, 2024. And an appealing strip for how it encapsulates the previous week’s reality/art shifting, and Schkade showing off that while you personally might not care for the art style, he doesn’t draw it like that because he can’t draw “better”, that is, the way other people did. And it climaxed, neatly, on the anniversary of the comic’s debut, which is great.

Not so much. Actually, he’s got an ambush. Airman Sojas, driven mad by the idea that Ming might be gone, wants to bring it against the person inflicting the news on him. In the fight, Sojas stabs the Entropic Anomaly egg, and you know what that means, I’m sure.

So yeah, naturally, this sets off a burst of reality changes that last until the egg runs out of entropy or whatnot. Which would be a minor bother except that Sojas has grabbed Arden and Gordon figures he needs to get her back before reality does something really messy. And so we get a fun weeklong chase sequence, with the strip — art style, character models, even the format of the lettering — taking a tour of some of the many incarnations of Flash Gordon. This includes Alex Raymond’s original styling, the serials of the 1930s, the cartoons of the 70s and the 90s, the 1980 movie, and more eras of the comic strip up to Jim Keefe’s run, which ended in 2003 and had been the source of reruns up until last year. This climaxed with a retrospective the 7th of January, and the 90th anniversary of the strip’s debut. Good pacing.

The 8th of January saw a new day, and new story: Barin is returned, the day of the wedding, ready for finally something to go right. And it does, right up until an intruder does that usual stuff. It’s Ming II, come to claim the throne that his father had disinherited him from. Gordon kicks him out, and the wedding succeeds. But Ming II figures there’s no reason he can’t better his position and that’s sure to be a future development.

Next Week!

You know who’s not stuck on an alien planet some unknown bearing from Earth? Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, still planned to be reviewed next week. Unless something happens! Probably not a fresh Flash Gordon recap. That would be a little much.