Comic strips

Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond … or Jim Keefe

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D. D. Degg July 30, 2022 1 minute 0 comments

Last Sunday’s (July 24, 2022) chapter of Flash Gordon in The Tournament of Death featured Alex Raymond art from the third Flash Gordon Sunday page (January 21, 1934) in the top drop tier.

Above: Flash Gordon July 24, 2022. Below: Flash Gordon January 21, 1934

© King Features Syndicate

But it wasn’t Alex Raymond art.
As Jim Keefe explained in the comments to that strip and at his Facebook page:

Couldn’t find clean line art, so ended up re-creating the Alex Raymond drawing for the top tier of the July 24th Flash Gordon Sunday on Comics Kingdom. Doing stuff like that always gives me an even greater appreciation of an artist’s work.

Compare Alex above and Jim below.

And somehow it is fitting that Jim included part of the third strip from the beginning, as this was the third strip from the end. The July 24, 2022 page originally appeared March 2, 2003. There would only be two strips of the original run after that.

So on August 7, 2022 we will see the final Flash Gordon comic strip from March 16, 2003 repeated. Though not what Jim originally created for the finale. (Scroll to the bottom of this page for that story.)

Then The Keefe Years will begin again (we suppose).