Author: multiple writers
Publisher: Dynamite
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by multiple artists.
This is a fun graphic novel based on the antique newspaper comic strip which began in the early 1930s, and continued in serial films and a movie as relatively recently as 1980, which was rather a bust. I have to confess that I have never been a fan of this original "Flash", but I always liked the idea of him and his name. Note that I'm being confusing here. This Flash has nothing whatsoever to do with the DC comics super hero, and precedes that one by six years or so.
This graphic novel reboots the story, setting up Alex Gordon as a bit of a dare-devil character who likes extreme sports and who somehow (we're not immediately told) becomes a pilot in a spacecraft, dodging the minions of Ming The Merciless, and managing only to escape through repeated use of his spaceship's 'jump' ability to move as if through a portal, from one planet to another. Finally, they're forced down on a forest planet not too dissimilar to the forest moon of Endor, featured in Star Wars episode six.
Normally I don't comment on covers since the author of a work has nothing whatsoever to do with the cover unless they self publish. This is different in the graphic novel world, however, where the artist also does the cover, so here I will just say that I found the cover disappointing and unappealing. The artwork inside, however, was very good.
Note to the letterers: your blue text doesn't work. In some panels, the text is rendered in light blue to signify speech from another source. This simply didn't work because the light blue text was pretty much illegible! This wasn't the only lettering problem. In the Bluefire Reader on the iPad, on page seven, all the speech balloons were blank. I checked this on the Adobe Digital Editions version, and all those same balloons had speech in them, so there's a huge problem there. I don't know what happened there, but it was only one that one page; the rest of the pages were fine (light blue text aside, that is!).
That said, I really liked this story and adventure. It was fun, light, interesting, with good art work and some fine classic chase scenes and 1950's style adventuring even though it's set (at least in the Dale Arden scene in the beginning) in contemporary times
