By William Schwartz
One of the earliest examples of international popular culture crossover in the 20th century comes not from a hegemonic intellectual property like Marvel, but from a mostly dormant brand: Flash Gordon.
Currently on display at George Washington University’s Textile Museum, this kain panjang, or hip wrapper, almost elides association with western media entirely. At first glance it seems hardly appropriate to associate this with Flash Gordon, given that none of the characters on it obviously represent images from a franchise that began as a newspaper comic in the 1930s.
The similarity is much more obvious, however, if you have a sample of Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond’s classic art in front of you. Despite Flash Gordon being non-stop full color Sunday action, if you look at any panel in isolation, and just see, say, a foreground character in profile, or admire an alien monster that has yet to notice its prey, the figures of the tapestry are clearly drawn in the same style. But whereas the sort of comic character dress you might see at a present-day convention is based on the image of the characters themselves, this hip wrapper, to most people who saw it, was merely imaginative art from a different culture.
Imaginative is not necessarily a word we often apply to American comic culture, where superheroes have achieved such a baseline international normalcy it’s often easy to forget other kinds of comics even exist, or that the distinctive nature of the art itself was just as important as the stories, if not moreso. Indeed, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon is often quite awkward to actually read in a modern context. The title character’s chief motivation most of the time is rescuing his leading lady Dale, who he barely even knows at the start of the comic, from forced marriage to an alien regent. I’m hesitant to call her a full-on damsel-in-distress given that Flash Gordon himself often has the same problem with female regents seeking impromptu nuptials, requiring rescuing of his own.
This isn’t even getting into the colonialist overtones, with the main villain coded as an evil intergalactic feudal mandarin literally named Ming the Merciless. If the Indonesian person who made this hip sash had any notion of any of these aspects of Flash Gordon being problematic, it certainly doesn’t show in the oddly calm rhythm of the art. In the upper left of the tapestry, there’s a character with a strong resemblance to Ming the Merciless that, if anything, looks far more like an Orientalist stereotype than the version that Alex Raymond drew. Yet like every other character in the hip sash, the pseudo-Ming is just quietly standing around minding his own business, not even looking out of place in a jungle otherwise populated with serpents and barely clothed people.
Flash Gordon‘s importance to the pop culture canon is indisputable. He’s the first character we can really call a sci-fi action hero, or at least, the first one with such huge reach that anyone in the 1930s had at least heard of him, and his appeal stretched all the way to Indonesia. But by the fifties, Flash Gordon had quickly fallen out of the spotlight. Alex Raymond was no longer working on the newspaper comic, which no longer featured the most iconic imagery of alien worlds filled with hawk-men, lion-men, and witches. Instead, the comic pivoted to space adventures centered around science, ray guns, and semi-realistic depictions of space travel mirroring post-Sputnik American obsession with the space race as the United States and Soviet Union competed to reach the stars.
Relative to other genres, science fiction has long had a chauvinist reputation. The West’s presumed “natural” superiority in real-world science not only bled heavily into sci-fi narratives, but also gave some the impression that other cultures cannot produce as much science fiction – even if the main issue for a lot of great non-English sci-fi has been that it seldom gets translated into English. Your typical native English speaker probably didn’t even realize there was such a thing as Chinese science fiction until Three Body Problem emerged out of nowhere to win the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, despite the serialized novel ending its two year run in the Chinese sci-fi magazine Science Fiction World all the way back in 2008.
Of course, the lack of translation has often been a historical two way blockage. Flash Gordon is obscure in China, to say the least. The Douban entry for the 1980 Flash Gordon film (飞侠哥顿 (豆瓣)) has only 721 reviews, most of whom are only there because of Queen or, weirdly enough, because that particular version of Flash Gordon featured in the Ted movies by Seth MacFarlane. For what it’s worth, I doubt the 64,000+ IMDB reviews of the film come from viewers of much more refined cultural context. Flash Gordon may be the antecedent of sci-fi adventure flicks like Star Wars, but it’s hardly required reading for that purpose.
Flash Gordon enjoys a better history in Europe, spreading through comics magazines in Italy, Spain, and France in 1934, 1935, and 1936. This change of format, from weekly newspaper comic to serial comic magazine, altered the very structural interpretation of the character. What was originally enough intense action to let the imagination run wild for a week became a nonstop adrenaline adventure when published all at once, likely contributing to Europe being more comics-obsessed in general about American characters that would seem obscure anywhere else. Carl Barks, for example, had no idea how outrageously popular his Scrooge McDuck comics were until quite late in life (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twzAQcF7HdI). The Phantom by Lee Falk was, until quite recently, probably the single best known American comic superhero in Europe. He traveled well too, becoming a popular figure on the indigenous tribal shields of Papua New Guinea to people apparently quite oblivious to the problematic white savior interpretations of the character more commonly seen these days on the rare occasion he’s discussed at all (Papua New Guinea War Shields – The Phantom).
All of this is achieved because vivid imagery defies the constraints of language. Slowly but surely, though, eggheads like Isaac Asimov and their hard, difficult-to-illustrate science slowly took over the genre which until then had been more dominated by the creative legacy to pulp novels and illustrations than real world scientific advancement. It exists in this unique little time bubble where the title character’s hyper-competence is due mainly to his athletic talents as a polo player instead of astronaut training.
Polo, if you recall, is the sport played on horseback with mallets. A few decades later the idea of serious polo play had become unusual enough that the 1980 film version of Flash Gordon changed him into a football player (for the infamous New York Jets – the only NFL franchise cursed enough to have their starting quarterback depart the earth to fight hawk-men on another planet). This wasn’t an unreasonable change to the extent of making Flash Gordon into a legitimate physical threat. But Flash Gordon wasn’t just a physically imposing action hero. He was consistently a smart one, capable of adapting to often ludicrous situations with whatever tools he had at his disposal; MacGyver in space. Something I can’t emphasize enough about Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon is that even without being able to understand the words contextualizing the situation, every panel is filled with intense, vivid action. A story where Flash is depicted as an invisible shadow is ominous and spooky and functions, as does most of his adventures, as an exercise in on the spot improvisation. Quieter panels maintain tension as even those often are just characters carefully planning their next move.
Compared to Star Wars, the effective successor to Flash Gordon in the realm of mainstream world-spanning science fiction, Flash Gordon is largely circumstantial. There’s no epic hero’s journey which defines Flash Gordon as a character. To the contrary, he and everyone else are largely static, with their competence and motivation largely unchanging throughout the story. The only stakes are managing to survive until next week, which they always manage to do very narrowly. As beautiful as the alien worlds of Flash Gordon are, there’s never any time to dwell within them or overthink their rituals. Questions like how Ming the Merciless came to power, or how these alien biologies came to be, are simply irrelevant. Reasonable explanations are presumed to exist but aren’t elaborated on since both beauty and urgency are ideas that exist chiefly in the moment.
Flash Gordon is not concerned with lore or brand identification. Ironically, this is what makes it so much easier to parse than most other American comic drawings of the time period–hence its immortalization on an Indonesian hip sash. Which is not to say that making a relevant, yet tonally accurate version of Flash Gordon in the present day is impossible. Dan Schkade started producing a new Flash Gordon daily comic in October of 2023, and this particular reboot took an unusual approach to the chronology of the series. Schkade’s version starts shortly after the defeat of Ming the Merciless, something which does eventually happen in the Alex Raymond run.
Curiously, Schkade’s version of Flash Gordon also appears to share more-or-less the same continuity with the Alex Raymond comics right up until this point. He’s gone out of his way to include panels and plot points from the Alex Raymond run, most obviously during the reintroduction of Thun of the Lion Men, Flash’s first ally. These references are far from overbearing. If anything, they’re easy to miss. But what they chiefly accomplish is establishing that the world of Flash Gordon is a world that existed before we started following the action, and which will probably continue when Schkade’s work ends.
I don’t mean this in the brand-conscious sense of how Flash Gordon will never die for the same reason Star Wars will never die, because there will always be people who think they can make money off of it. I mean that the alien worlds of Flash Gordon are dream-worlds that may have flowed from the pen of Alex Raymond but take new and strange shapes as they are seen and observed by others. Even Raymond himself was influenced by other sources.
Again, observe the Indonesian hip sash. How was this artifact even created? Did the artificer from Yogyakarta in Java have access to worn down newspapers that they used as a model for these comic characters? This seems a bit unlikely- there are so many characters in the sash the artificer likely would have needed dozens of completely different comics from several different years of the run. The more likely explanation is that the artificer was simply familiar with the style, redrawing the characters from their own memory and their own dreams onto a new tapestry, no doubt as The Phantom’s fans in Papua New Guinea came up with their own off-model versions of that hero.
Yet that sash’s history feels richer, in its more mysterious origins, than those shields do. The characters aren’t off-model. They are distinct from, yet clearly inspired by, Alex Raymond’s creations in a way that feels wholly original, to the point I’m left wondering how long in the history of its exhibition that this hip sash was even properly identified as being based on Flash Gordon. In one sense, that’s the greatest complement any author can receive- that their work can feel original when really, there’s no such thing as originality in the continuum of art. 
