Looking For a Good Book

GRAPHIC NOVEL WEEK

A thousand years from now, on a space ship acting as an ark preserving Earth’s fauna the young boy Dale Arden, who is the caretaker for the Ark, sees what he believes is a comet that comes crashing to the ground. He discovers it’s an escape pod of some sort and from the pod emerges a young girl about his age. She has no idea who she is or where she comes from. Seeing words on the pod, she assumes it can only be her name – Flash Gordon.

The ark is attacked and Flash and Dale are taken captive and brought to the capital of Omnia where they meet the Merciless Emperor. There, Prince Azimuth is both fascinated and irritated by the rambunctious Flash and Princess Aurora appreciates Flash’s spirit.

Flash rescues Dale who’s been imprisoned by the Prince, and the Prince discovers something special about Flash’s background.

This was … this was … I don’t know what to make of this.

I’m not against a reboot of a classic character, but what’s the point of this one? It’s one thing to make Flash a female and Dale a male, but to make them also barely teenagers? To make a book so … immature … that these classic characters are like their more familiar counterparts in name only, really, really does a disservice to the original creation.

I was sort of thankful that there was a VERY brief moment that suggested that this Flash and Dale were simply a part of a different reality (it’s one panel that features a more familiar Flash), but I cannot fathom why anyone would choose this Flash over any other version out there (the only thing worse would be if James Patterson wrote a new version of Flash Gordon).

There’s not a whole lot of dialog here and much of the action is depicted through illustration only. Scenes such as Flash’s fight with an eight-legged monster in an arena, has no dialog for four pages and I’m not entirely sure what it was that she did in order to defeat the creature (I think she stuck a broken sword between its teeth).

Judging by the story by Marguerite Bennett and the art by Bev Johnson, this book is intended for elementary and middle schoolers, for whom this is probably right on point. But when you change a classic this much (I refuse to consider this a reboot), you do a disservice to the reader. Should they really like this, they will be disappointed when they discover the original, or they won’t like this and will never seek out the original because of this.

But even putting aside my feelings about how this has changed a popular pulp era character, I just find the story extremely weak and the character building (I use the verb loosely) poor. Ironically, even though the ‘lead’ character is now female, it is Dale who is more interesting. He’s in charge of Earth’s last remaining life. Now THAT’S interesting. Flash is just a mysterious and rambunctious child who runs into a lot of luck.

Overall, this is really disappointing.

Looking for a good book? Flash Gordon: The Girl From Infinity Vol. 1 is a graphic novel that reboots the classic pulp-era comic strip hero into an immature girl.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Flash Gordon: The Girl From Infinity Vol. 1

author: Marguerite Bennett

artist: Bev Johnson

publisher: Papercutz

ISBN: 9781545818985

hardcover, 128 pages