An online post by my friend Bob Ingersoll called my attention to two changes that King Features Syndicate has made in its comic strip offerings as of today. One is the cessation of the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip. It started on January 3, 1977, written officially (and sometimes, actually) by Stan Lee and drawn by an array of different artists, some uncredited. The main credited ones were John Romita, Larry Lieber, Fred Kida and Alex Saviuk.
When Stan Lee passed away in November of 2018, production of the strip stopped and the last original one ran the following March. It shifted to reprint at that point and there was an announcement that this would be temporary and that new adventures would be forthcoming. I didn't understand why the pause since the artist was still alive and Roy Thomas had been ghost-writing it for Stan for years.
In any case, new stories never appeared and the last reprinted strip ran yesterday in whatever newspapers were still carrying it. It has apparently been scrubbed now from the King Features website which suggests to me that perhaps some contract with Marvel/Disney expired and was not renewed from one end or mutual decision.
Stan "wrote" the strip for a long time, which is to say that others plotted it for him and he composed the captions and dialogue. A couple of times, I turned down offers from him to do the plotting and in 2000, he offered — and I again declined — to have me ghost-write the entire thing for him. The following may be of interest to Stan Lee historians: At that point, he was not only writing the strip by himself but he was writing it full-script.
The man who invented the "Marvel Method" of comic book writing — having the artist draw it before he "wrote" it — had found that wasn't working for him so he figured out the plots, wrote a script and then it went to the artist. He may have later involved others but for a few months there, he did all the writing all by himself. Someone at the time told people I was ghosting it but I was not. All I did was to proofread a few weeks of those scripts. I have no idea just when he passed the job on to Roy.
So that strip is history…but today, Flash Gordon rose from the dead. That strip started in January of 1934 with the great artist Alex Raymond at the drawing board working with the uncredited writer, Don Moore. It passed through many hands over the following decades and the daily strip version ended in 1993 with the Sunday page continuing, produced by Jim Keefe (with occasional guest artists) from 1996 to 2003. Keefe's work has been recycled/reprinted since then and reprint strips never grow in popularity. Often, they're just placeholders until something new comes along.
But — surprise, surprise! — a few days ago, to the amazement of all of us who care about this kind of thing, a revival was announced of both a Sunday page and a daily one. Here's one panel from the first installment which is in newspapers (though probably not many) today..
The writer-artist is Dan Schkade and I think he's a real good choice…though die-hard Flash Gordon fans are already carping online that he doesn't work in "The Raymond tradition." No, it doesn't look like it did in thirties, forties, fifties and sixties and in this case, I think that's a necessity if this property is ever to have any life. A strip set in the distant future should not look like it was drawn in the distant past.
I'm going to follow it online, which I think I can do on this page. There are a number of once-great comic strips that turned into pale imitations of themselves and could do with a fresh approach. For a long time, I liked the Flash Gordon property not for what it was but what it could be. Jim Keefe tried updating it a bit but I don't know that enough people saw what he was doing for its popularity to increase much and King Features never gave it a daily strip. I'd love to see this attempt succeed.