The All-New Flash Gordon Begins Sunday

King Features Syndicate, which introduced the character in 1934, will relaunch the comic strip “Flash Gordon” beginning Sunday after a two-decade absence — featuring a new look and a new artist. (The Sunday and daily strips will be available online and in print.)

The Daily Cartoonist broke the news earlier this month and now King Features Syndicate confirms that a rebooted Flash Gordon comic strip returns October 22, 2023. Michael Cavna at The Washington Post carries the story.

More from Cavna:

Guiding the new enterprise will be Dan Schkade, an Eisner-nominated cartoonist in his early 30s best known for his work on such comics as “Will Eisner’s The Spirit Returns,” “Lavender Jack” and “Saint John.”

Schkade won a competitivetryout earlier this year to script and draw the strip, shortly before King announced a licensing deal with Mad Cave Studios, which will begin publishing other original “Flash Gordon” narratives, graphic novels and comic reprints beginning next year.

“The initial version of Flash I pitched was a little more purposefully a himbo,” Schkade said,comparable to Disney’s version of Hercules — but King sought a more classic, straightforward hero. So in the revised pitch, Flash landed somewhere between Captain America/Steve Rogers, and Marty McFly of “Back to the Future.”

Amid Flash’s world that the artist calls “a grab bag of monsters, death rays, energy effects and sometimes outright horror,” [Schkade] believes it is the emotional ethos of the strip that makes it vital and relevant still, nine decades later.

Read Michael Cavna’s full article: Flash Gordon, American icon, returns to comics after a 20-year break

Question: Will the King Features Weekly Service continue with the Jim Keefe reruns?

Breaking news from the Michael Cavna report:

“Flash Gordon” reenters as King ends distribution of another adventure strip, “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Among the new clients is The Washington Post, which carried “Spider-Man.”