Flash Gordon is one of those pop culture names everyone's heard of, although most would be at a bit of a loss as to why exactly they recognize that name. Dan Schkade is ... not one of those people. As the man behind the King Features reboot of Flash Gordon in newspapers, Schkade has wowed readers of the usually lumbering industry with a fast-paced, action heavy style that works surprisingly well in the comic a day format. Dan Schkade was gracious enough to agree to an interview with theComics Journal.
WILLIAM SCHWARTZ: Thank you for this, Dan. Is it OK for me to call you Dan?
DAN SCHKADE: Absolutely! I’ve got a tricky last name, I like to pair it with an easy first one.
So let's start from the beginning. How did you get this job? Did you pitch the reboot, or was King Features just looking for somebody, anybody to use the Flash Gordon intellectual property?
As I understand it, they had their eyes set on a new start for the strip well before my name came up. Near the end of my Webtoon series Lavender Jack, I reached out to King Features editor Tea Fougner to express my interest in potentially transitioning to a daily strip, specifically one of their legacy strips. I felt I’d developed a lot of technical and creative muscles over my four years with Lavender Jack and I wanted to see if I could apply those to a preexisting property. Strangely enough, my pie in the sky hope was that I’d get a crack at the detective strip Rip Kirby, another Alex Raymond creation. I definitely didn’t expect to be asked to pitch for a project of Flash Gordon’s pedigree. Of course, once Tea asked, I was immediately interested. I spent a couple weeks diving deep into the original canon and slowly started formulating a new take.
Let's talk about the literal beginning, which was what first raised eyebrows about the project. Instead of retelling the classic story of how Flash arrives through outer space reaching Ming and eventually helping to topple his empire, you condense that part to just a week's worth of strips and then start immediately thereafter. Why didn't you retell the original story in full?
Starting from scratch would’ve been a totally valid way to go, especially when you’re doing a new continuity. I imagine King saw other pitches that took that route. But when I thought of fresh takes on long running properties that I personally responded to, it’s things like Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman, David Yates’ Legend of Tarzan, Matt Reeves’ The Batman to a degree — comics and films that sort of speed run through a general understanding of the canon and then tell a new story from there. The idea of jumping right into the fall of Ming, the place where most Flash Gordon adaptations end, had an energy to that I found really compelling. All the toys are already unboxed. We get to do with them what we like, and there’s no way for the audience to know for sure what that’s going to be. It’s all fresh ground.
There was a second reason, too: Ming the Merciless is a capital-V villain who must be defeated at all costs, and that’s something of a moral "Get Out of Jail Free" card for our Flash and his allies. It’s easy to put aside your petty political differences when you’re up against the ultimate evil, but when you no longer have that to unite against, politics start to take over again. In a comic where a huge portion of the cast are royalty and/or heads of state, that seemed like a really interesting mess to drop Flash, Dale, and Zarkov in the middle of.
Flash Gordon went on far beyond that story in its original run too, with more generic space adventures rather than the politicking that’s become a trademark of your version. You don't seem to be any slouch when it comes to the lore – there's a full week of strips of reality shifts, where you draw the comic in the style of a different version of the character. Was any one version of Flash Gordon particularly influential to your vision?
I’m a big fan of the Buster Crabbe serials — when I was first getting my head around the franchise, that was my way in. They’re highly entertaining and surprisingly fidelitous to the original strips. I think they informed my decision to keep my version strongly rooted in those original Alex Raymond years, since that’s where the most iconic and well-adapted elements were born.
That said, I also have a lot of affection for the ’96 cartoon, where he’s a skater with a crop top and an Aaron Carter cut. It seems far from the Raymond stuff at first, but that core spirit is so clearly there. For me, the serials, the 1980 Mike Hodges movie, and the ’96 cartoon form that Batman ’66/Batman: The Animated Series/The Dark Knight-style triangle of media adaptations I needed to navigate my take on the characters.
You mentioned Lavender Jack inspiring you take on a legacy strip. Would you care to expand on what you mean by that?
I feel like Lavender Jack is the kind of series every creator would benefit from making, in that it was exclusively filled with character types, plot elements, and visuals that interested me intensely; great detectives, Edwardian fashion, political history, society drama, hard boiled mystery, martial arts, on and on. It’s like my Sin City. There was a lot of technical growth I gained through having to write, pencil, ink, and letter the equivalent of eight pages a week — but more than that, I was able to get a sense of who I was as a cartoonist when there weren’t any real restrictions placed on me. We did 123 episodes over three seasons, which is a lot of material to look back on and see where you came up short and where you nailed it, and I’m bringing all of that to this strip.
In a lot of ways my Flash Gordon is a sort of thematic sequel to Lavender Jack — the final season builds up to the Lavender League bringing down the series’ principal villains, one of whom is a gold-plated dictator, in a fiery airship crash in the middle of a world war. Maybe that’s a small part of why I wanted to start our strip with the fall of Ming. I was done with the rebellion story for a while, I wanted to move onto something new.
One aspect of a more graphic novel sort of style that's surprisingly well integrated into Flash Gordon your use of background and foreground. In general, you're limited to four panels, as per the newspaper comic format, but through good use of background and foreground, you can include secondary plot points without disrupting the pacing. I suppose that's not really a question so much as an observation. Do you have any particular insights to add about how and why you've been experimenting with this?
That’s another thing I credit Lavender Jack with, since the unchangeable real estate of the Webtoon format — where you never have any more space than a phone screen to work with at a time — often called for layering the information like that. I drew a lot of inspiration from American illustrator James Bingham, whose vertical magazine illustrations uses these same techniques. I also learned a lot of tricks for condensing information from Matt Wagner, who schooled the absolute hell out of me when we did Will Eisner’s The Spirit for Dynamite, as well as Whiteout/Superior Foes of Spider-Man/Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen artist Steve Lieber during my time at Helioscope. To name a few.
One particular talent you have that we wouldn't necessarily expect to see in a reboot is character creation. Could you tell us a little, without too many spoilers, how you came up with Bok the Dragon Man and whether we should have much hope of seeing him in future storylines? I'd also like to post the same question about Bones Malock.
Introducing new characters was a big part of my pitch. This is a fresh take on the strip, and accordingly Flash needed some fresh characters to bounce off of. I wanted to build out the more working-class side of Mongo, the grunts and servants and petty criminals who actually have to live there. Class dynamics have always been fascinating to me and, again, a lot of the classic Flash Gordon characters are literal royalty.
Bok was the main one I pitched. He’s based on a similar character I created for my one-off Flash Forward strip a couple years prior, this depressed foot soldier who realizes he has more in common with the Emperor’s enemies than the Emperor himself. With Bok, I added the element him of being someone who once tried to rebel against Ming and was absolutely dumpstered — there’s a wounded dignity to him, a protective pessimism he has to struggle to overcome. I loved the idea of a character with that perspective joining the main three humans. Everyone on Mongo falls in love with these heroic aliens from Earth the minute they meet them, but they actively look down on Bok. That can be very revealing — you can tell a lot about somebody from the way they treat the help. Plus I liked the idea of Flash having a male friend who was just, like, a regular guy, not a prince or a world-renown rocket scientist.
Bones Malock, on the other hand, was initially created just because I wanted Team Earth to go to this Deadwood style smugglers town and something I learned on Lavender Jack was that plot elements need a face in order to feel tangible. Then I figured, why not use this as an opportunity to find range on our new version of the strip by creating an antithesis to the classic, graceful Alex Raymond femme — older, gnarly, with they/them pronouns and a big hooded duster. To be honest, Bones ended up being maybe more of a Star Wars character, but I really dig them and I was pleased to see the audience did too. They weren’t even going to be in the second arc, but I realized the underground prison element needed some color and, hey, they’re a criminal after all. You don’t want to overuse a character like that, but I’m hoping we’ll see Bones and their galvanic cutlass again sometime soon.
I notice a lot of the new characters you've made for your version of Flash Gordon are ambiguous – less in the sense of good or evil, competent or not, but because they have their own motives to the point of being a liability, even when they're ostensibly allies with the leads. Relative to all the other work you put into this comic, how much time do you spend worldbuilding the galactic politics, just to make sense of who wants what and why?
A ton — but then I have to remember what limited narrative real estate we’re dealing with. So I simplify it as much as I can, ideally without sacrificing too much nuance. A big part of it comes from making broad, clear decisions as to what the different nations each have going for them: Frigia is isolationist and rich with natural resources, Sky City is militant and technologically advanced, the Capital of the Empire is a powder keg of conflicting interests barely held together by a political marriage, and so on. Most of these heads of state are just trying to make sure their people are safe, some of them are trying to capitalize on the chaos to gain power, and some of them are actively interested in breaking it all apart. Ambition, paranoia, indignation, there’s a lot of emotional factors working to turn these one time allies against each other again. With hundreds of millions of working stiffs caught in the middle.
That’s what makes Flash and the gang such useful characters — they’re not royalty, but they have the ear of the royals. They can walk in both worlds, which gives us a much more comprehensive view of what life on Mongo is actually like. And it’s not all bad, either, in fact there’s a lot about the planet that’s pretty amazing. There’s just also Death Patrols.
A very newspaper comic specific device that you have to use because of the way they're distributed is the Sunday strips- they can't continue the weekday story, since not all newspapers get the weekday and the Sunday strips. So, authors doing storylines either have to do separate storylines for the weekday and Sunday series, or they do recaps. You elected for the latter. Can you describe what exactly it is you do for these recaps, and why?
Flash Gordon has a BIG big cast, there’s no getting around it, and a pretty dense plot. Those original Alex Raymond strips really move, and I wanted to keep up that energy in our version. The Sundays give us an opportunity to take a minute, refocus, and reflect on that happened that week. For me, though, the main benefit of the Sundays is how every one of them gives us a different character’s perspective. We learn more about our enormous cast by seeing how they view the events of the week, sometimes revealing their own desires, biases, and anxieties in the process. In the top panel, which some papers drop, we can even peek into their backstories a little, flesh out our particular version of the canon. Even when we’re not learning about an actual character per se, like the strip from the perspective of an airship flight log, we’re still getting a fuller look at the world.
Personally I find these little asides quite informative for characterization in a way the more breakneck pacing of the daily strips can't really manage. It's also fun to try to guess who's going to be the perspective character for this week's voiceover, and why. I was a little disappointed when a week of being chased by the monster didn't lead to the monster's perspective, and surprised when a later perspective ended up being a local planetary tourism board, of all things. Are you at any risk of running out of new, fresh perspectives on the week's adventures?
Oh, not at all, in fact most weeks it’s hard to pick. There were at least two weeks this arc that were going to be from the perspective of a Frigian lancer, but each time I ended up deciding a different narrator would be better for the tone of that week’s events. At the same time, I’m not afraid to repeat viewpoints — each of the humans has done at least two, and I’m pretty sure Flash has done four. Even Bones Malock and Bok have doubled up. In all aspects of the strip, whenever I feel like some format I’ve established is starting to pinch, I change it up. I have a lot of freedom on this project and I try not to squander it.
It's a little perverse to frame it this way, but you go through ideas so fast some fans are a little worried about burnout. Although it's possible this is just the newspaper comic perspective talking – the Phantom, as you may or may not be aware, just finished a years' long story about a prophecy that didn't really go much of anywhere. How far ahead have you plotted the new adventures of Flash Gordon? How does this compare to your current buffer of strips you've actually written?
My buffer is thinner than we’d like, but I’ve planned pretty far out, although not so rigidly that things can’t shift around as needed. At every stage of the story, I’ve actually had to throw out ideas I wish I could’ve included, purely because there wasn’t space for them. I wanted to do more with Dova the half-lion serving girl, for instance, and I could’ve spent a month at Airman Sojas’ deserters camp. Doctor Zarkov usually suffers the worst from this, I’ve noticed, which I’m hoping to change a bit in this next arc. But overall I’m happy with what we’ve been able to include. Already some pretty big things have been set in motion, which I hope will culminate in some thrilling, shocking moments for the readers down the line.
While on the topic of other comics, are there any newspaper comics, or any other sorts of comics, that you consider yourself a fan of, or that are particularly influential to your work? What is it about those comics that speaks to you?
When it comes to the actual work of writing Flash Gordon, as in figuring out panel count and pacing, there’s two big places I keep looking at: John Allison, Lisa Treiman, and Max Sarin’s Giant Days and Paul Grist’s Jack Staff. John Allison comes from webcomics and he’s amazing at giving every page its own little narrative circuit, making for a highly satisfying page to page reading experience, which is exactly what you’re going for in a daily strip. Paul Grist is simply one of my favorite cartoonists ever, an influence so apparent in my work that it’s almost embarrassing, and you can really see his perspective-switching format in Jack Staff reflected in the way we do the Sundays.
On a macro level, I took a lot of cues from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, especially with how it handles the prior continuity. I also love the way it takes Magneto off the board from the jump, turning him into this presence that haunts the series by his absence (we’re not going to be doing a Xorn reveal, though. I promise Bok isn’t Ming in disguise). And as with everything I do, Will Eisner’s The Spirit is always there, informing my storytelling and keeping the perspective from getting too stale.
Well, those are all the questions I have for you. Are there any other topics I didn't bring up that you'd like to take a chance to discuss now?
Just that I’m thrilled with how the strip has been received so far. New readers have jumped on, prior readers have given me the benefit of the doubt and been rewarded for the largess, and it’s all incredibly thrilling. I hope we all stick around for a good long while.
The post <i>Flash Gordon</i> artist Dan Schkade on rebooting a classic: ‘It’s all fresh ground’ appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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