Cover Illustration to “The Time Trap of Ming XIII.” Courtesy of Oasis Family Media.
Flash Gordon, the “space opera” science fiction hero, has appeared in many media. Beginning with an artistically-aware comic strip by master comic strip artist Alex Raymond, Flash has appeared in radio, television, and film series (including a Filmation animated production), a 1980 feature-length film, and multiple comic books. In the early 1970s, “Flash Gordon” was also a series of novels which balanced Flash’s vintage pulp origins with more contemporary and complex science fiction stories. The first four books are credited to Alex Raymond and Con Steffenson (the latter being the pen name of Ron Goulart), but were actually entirely the work of Steffenson/Goulart. The novels have recently received a new incarnation as audiobooks by Oasis Family Media as part of its “Paperbook Classics” series. The series is read by gifted voice artist Johnny Heller, who imbues aspects of performance