Alex raymond biography

Best known for creating the science fiction adventure comic strip "Flash Gordon" for King Features Syndicate in I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration -- since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business -- he is playwright, director, editor, and artist at once.

Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. His style was romantic, the protagonists' features impossibly heroic, and the settings exotic and fantastic. Largely due to the popularity of his artwork, the characters Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim were soon appearing in film serials, later followed by films and television programs.

Raymond is also the credited author of some Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim books, though these are likely the work of ghostwriters. He has also described his style as "precise, clear, and incisive. The boy was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. His father was a civil engineer and road builder who encouraged his son's love of drawing from an early age, even "covering one wall of his office in the Woolworth Building " with his young son's artwork.

He attended Iona Prep on an athletic scholarship. There, he played fullback on coach "Turk" Smith's football team. Raymond's first job was as an order clerk in Wall Street. In the wake of the economic crisis he enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art in New York City and began working as a solicitor for a mortgage broker. Approaching former neighbor Russ WestoverRaymond soon quit his job and by was assisting Westover on his Tillie the Toiler comic strip.

As a result, Raymond was "introduced to King Features Syndicate ", where he later became a staff artist, [ 11 ] and for whom he would produce his greatest artwork. Raymond was influenced by a variety of strip cartoonists and magazine illustrators, including Matt Clark, Franklin Boothand John La Gatta. InKing Features assigned him to do the art for an espionage action-adventure strip, Secret Agent X-9[ 11 ] scripted by novelist Dashiell Hammett[ 10 ] and Raymond's illustrative approach to that strip made him King Features' leading talent.

Towards the end of[ 5 ] King Features asked him to create a Sunday page that could compete with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century[ 10 ] a popular science fiction adventure strip that had debuted in and already spawned the rival Brick Bradford in Alongside ghostwriter Don Moore, [ 11 ] a pulp-fiction veteran, Raymond created the visually sumptuous science fiction epic comic strip Flash Gordon.

It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration—since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business—he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once. Lost in the worthwhile effort to distinguish comics as an art form, the romance, sweep and beauty of Raymond's draftsmanship, his incomparable line work, is dismissed.

To many, it's just pretty pictures. Somehow or another, it's OK for people like Caniff and Eisner to borrow from film. But for Raymond to study illustrators, well, that's just not comics. Debuting on January 7,Raymond's first Flash strip introduced the "world-famous polo player", improbably roped into a space adventure alongside love-interest Dale Arden and scientist Dr.

Hans Zarkov. Early inHammett decided to depart as writer of Secret Agent X-9 in order to pursue a career in Hollywood. While it has been presumed that Raymond took on the writing duties of the strip until a replacement could be found, biographer Tom Roberts instead believes that the strip was written by committee during editorial conference, a view R.

Harvey believes is supported by the strips themselves. Raymond's work on X-9 is said to particularly reach for "the feel of the best pulp interior art of the time," a style that would evolve with his own so-called "great flourishes" and "later blossom to full effect in Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim ". Harvey argues that "despite Raymond's great talent as an illustrator, his deployment of the comic-strip medium on X-9 was not very impressive.

Raymond's sensual artwork—for which the artist particularly "studied popular illustrators," including pulp artist Matt Clark, whose work Raymond's male figures particularly evoke [ 12 ] —outshone its borders and "attracted far more loyal readers than Combining this with a removal of dialogue from speech balloons to captions at the bottom of the panel afforded Raymond the space to create detailed and atmospheric backgrounds.

Against these spacious backgrounds, the placement of characters in heroic poses "lent the entire enterprise a mythic air. Flash Gordon gained a daily strip inillustrated by Austin Briggs. Barry also took over Sunday duties after Raboy's death in Jungle Jim was "set in contemporary alexes raymond biography and the exotic Malay peninsula of islands, [but] was intended to hark back to the original tales of KiplingHaggard and Burroughs ".

Raymond took the war in Europe seriously enough to incorporate it into his strips, with Flash returning to Earth in the spring of Jungle Jim found himself involved in the conflict too, fighting in the U. Raymond was becoming "restive about doing his duty", a alex raymond biography increased by the knowledge that four of his five brothers were already enlisted.

Marine Corpscommissioned as a captain and serving in the public-relations arm. Raymond is quoted as stating "I just had to get into this fight I've always been the kind of guy who gets a lump in his throat when a band plays the 'Star Spangled Banner'". Shortly thereafter, he "was sent to Quantico for training in the curriculum of the Aviation Ground Officer's School," and was soon producing "posters and patriotic images from a government office in Philadelphia.

He was demobilized as a major in King Features were not prepared to usurp Austin Briggs from the Sunday strip and pointed out that Raymond had left voluntarily to enlist. Relatives of Raymond recall the artist as resenting this decision, which left him feeling "cast off with so little regard.

Alex raymond biography

Raymond's "police daily strip," [ 5 ] named after its central character — J. Running alongside the post- World War II reintegration of America's military into civilian life, Rip like Raymond was "an ex-Marine," who "set himself up as a private detective" a vocation tailor-made to provide daily thrills. Described by Stephen Becker as "modern and almost too intellectual", [ 22 ] the strip eschewed many of the pulp fictional detective tropes e.

Instead, "[Rip] did more cogitating than fisticuffing, and smoked a leisurely pipe while he did it;" "had a frail, balding assistant Stylistically, "Raymond turned to the Cooper Studio- Al Parker advertising style for inspiration, spurring a new generation of comic artists to follow a fresh direction", that of "glorify[ing] contemporary post-War American life".

Circulation of the strip rose steadily, and it was the artist who was apportioned most of the praise — including being awarded the fourth Reuben Award in InWoody Gelman reprinted in hardcover some of Raymond's earlier comic strip work under his Nostalgia Press imprint. Raymond drew many of the people at the wedding. By this time, he knew he wanted to pursue a career in cartooning; the King Features bull pen would be his launching pad.

Continue reading from The Comics Journal. Alex Raymond Encyclopedia Britannica. Rip Kirby Library of American Comics.