'Returraso': Flash Gordon returns as a contemporary novel

Unlike what can be thought, the first contact of an entire generation with the character of Flash Gordon was not with the iconic image of Sam J. Jones waving blonde hair to the wind while led a hawk-rack from a spatial motorcycle . A little before the Flash Flash Gordon of 1980, more remembered by Queen's music that for his cinematographic quality despite the fact that he has become a work of worship for staging the buds of that decade, a series of cartoons that was Widely spread by the autonomic chains during the 1980s. In this way, a generation discovered a character until then own American culture and that they only had knowledge in Spain interested in ancient comics.

And it is that long before the STAR Wars universe appeared and refound the fundamental principles of marketing and there was a broad tradition in the United States of what was known as Space operates a gender of science fiction in which adventures relating mixing Fantasy, futuristic technology and romance. Flash Gordon is born from the drawer feather Alex Raymond in January 1934 for the press agency King Features Syndicate as Sunday page and the first adventures of him were inspired by Philip Wylie's novel when the worlds collide. Then the character continued other outstanding scripts and cartoonists, as Dan Barry, who gave him his personal touch in the 1950s. Although it competed with another cartoon about space and travel in the future, the adventures of Buck Rogers (also converted In Culch Television Program in 1979), Flash Gordon enjoyed much more popularity thanks to its audiovisual diffusion in series and movies.

However, the appearance on television of Star Trek and then Star Wars in film, in two irreconcilable antagonistic sides within science fiction fans, relegated from the collective imaginary to Flash Gordon's character and all his companions in his visit to the mongo planet Like the reporter Dale Arden, the scientist Hans Zarkov, the tyrant Ming and his daughter Princess Aura as well as his allies in his struggle to save the land with Prince Thun of Lion men, Prince Barin of Areboria or Prince Vultan The floating city with its hawk men, among others.

Therefore, the recovery that makes the character the writer Alberto Moreno is a formula to connect with the current public returning to its essence. In the backover novel. The light I leave behind (Dolmen Editorial), the author transports us to a story in which Flash Gordon is in charge of a ship that must determine if the unknown object he has entered into the solar system can be a threat to the human race . All a reboot of the Flash Gordon Universe that allows the reader to be transported to clashes in distant galaxies with civilizations in extinction in which the characters despite carrying out hyperluminations follow the same archetypes of the classical stories of adventures with good very good, human in this case , and bad bad, mainly aliens. A declaration of intentions.

In an introduction in the book, Alberto Moreno affirms that it was fascinated with the Flash Gordon character by the version of the comics of the 50s who did Dan Barry and that it became it not in an "epic hero that led revolutions against long tyrants whiskers, or saved his fiancee from the jaws of alien beasts "but was" a professional, a technician, a man of science "and" a citizen of great human quality, terribly responsible, always willing to sacrifice himself to help who was That it was in trouble. With a reckless point, yes. "

For the author it became a symbol of justice and in a stimulus to overcome infant fears, such as hanging on the railing in the hole of a sixth floor, or fighting situations of inequality that was on the day to day as saving a Cat of the launch of stones of hooligans. He even associates the moral of the character with the delay in his "entrance in the most celebrated of adolescent pathologies". Therefore, already adult, they decided to novel one of the most famous stories of the space hero, who held almost a year in character-played comic strips, to pay tribute to this classic character of science fiction since admiration and the respect, much more interesting than Sam J. Jones autoparody in Ted's film, in which the teddy bear protagonist reminds his human friend that "Flash Gordon was the most important influence of our training years, he He taught us how to separate the right thing about the wrong, the good thing about the bad ".

Thanks to its scientific formation, Alberto Moreno wrote this adventure of Flash Gordon that retains a lot of the "charm, drama and rhythm" of the original comics but updated for the demanding palates of contemporary science fiction readers. For publication, he had the complicity of Editorial Dolmen that disseminates Flash Gordon material with a classic aesthetic in his collection without borders. Sometimes, recovering a genre goes by having clear its essence and be able to give it a touch of suitable modernity to attract the stars travelers.