BY A LEGEND, ON A LEGEND

Al Williamson got to be a legend by working for EC Comics in its glorious heyday, often in collaboration with another legend, Frank Frazetta. Williamson got to be a living legend by doing that — living and being the last of the EC gang to be still working in comics. Williamson’s idol is Alex Raymond, and Raymond’s Flash Gordon is Williamson’s all-time favorite character. Although Williamson was initially inspired to do comics by others, it was Raymond’s Flash Gordon that sealed the deal, sustaining the inspiration to become a professional cartoonist, and when Al became one, he seized every opportunity that presented itself to re-visit the Raymond creation with his own pencil and pen.

And those two legends, Williamson and Flash, will be brought together in one place by Flesk Publications in Al Williamson's Flash Gordon: A Lifetime Vision of the Heroic. The book presents virtually all of Williamson’s published (and several unpublished) Flash Gordon pages and strips — “Everything we can get into 250 pages,” said Mark Schultz, Williamson’s friend and occasional collaborator, interviewed by Michael Lorah at newsaramra.com. “It has all his comics pages and the covers that he did, and that includes the classic King Comics Flash Gordon from the mid-60s; the Flash Gordon adaptation for the 1980 film that starred Sam Jones as Flash Gordon, including a few pages that were rejected and redrawn; and the final comics story is the Marvel miniseries from 1995. Interspersed with all that are other Flash Gordon projects, like a series of advertisements he did for the chemical company Union Carbide. He produced five Flash Gordon strips for the ad campaign, full page advertisements featuring the characters in comic strip adventures shilling Union Carbide products.

"He also has the original artwork for a record album cover he drew that featured Flash Gordon. And the book has various pieces published in fanzines and a lot of work that he did just for his own enjoyment, a whole raft of that stuff. And Al did extensive preliminary drawings preparing for the panels that he eventually committed to the page. Unfortunately, there's just so much of that material that we couldn't fit everything in. There's a lot.” Most of the artwork in the book is reproduced from original art: “Al has retained at least 90% of his Flash Gordon material,” Schultz said.

More about Williamson, his career and his passions, can be found in the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 243.