What you see up there at the top of this post is the cover of one of my favorite novels when I was around 11 or 12 years old — middle-school age. While my friends were discovering Tolkien, I was devouring pulpier, frankly trashier stuff: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom tales, Doc Savage reprints, Alan Dean Foster movie novelizations, and anything relating to Flash Gordon, the space-adventure hero who started in a newspaper comic strip when my grandparents were still children, and who seems destined to undergo periodic revivals every couple of decades. (The latest, a misfire of a TV series, came and went in 2007.)
Massacre in the 22nd Century was the first of a series of six Flash novels that came out in 1980 and ’81. They were written by a guy named David Hagberg, although I never learned that until decades later, after the Internet came along, because his name curiously does not appear anywhere in the books themselves. While I remember them as entertaining reads, their connection to the universe originally conceived by Alex Raymond is tenuous at best. There is no Ming the Merciless in Hagberg’s books, no planet Mongo. And even though the characters at the center of this series are named Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov, they are significantly “off-model.” I won’t bore you with the details of how Hagberg deviates from the traditional Flash backstory; suffice it to say, I’ve long theorized that these books began as fairly generic space-opera adventures and some editor convinced him to change his protagonists’ names in an attempt to cash in on the notoriously campy Flash Gordon movie that was released around the same time. (Christopher Mills, who runs the incredible Space: 1970 blog, asserts that the Hagberg novels bear some resemblance to a Flash television series that was done in the 1950s, but I’ve never seen that version myself, so I can’t say.)
Even so, I have very fond memories of the first two books in Hagberg’s series (somehow I never got around to reading the others). And one of the things I especially loved about them was their cover art by the master illustrator Boris Vallejo. In general, I’ve always gravitated more toward the work of Frank Frazetta; his style generally has a rougher, wilder edge to it, and his fleshier women push my buttons a bit more than Vallejo’s, which seem to me a bit too smooth and perfect to be believably human. But the covers for the Hagberg books really appealed to me for some reason. I’m not ashamed to admit I spent long evenings during my adolescence closely studying the one above, lusting for Boris’ lovely red-haired take on Dale, and imagining myself as the bare-chested, noble-looking hero standing protectively behind her. It was an ideal I could never meet, of course… but even today, this image evokes so much aspirational yearning in me. It reminds me of who I wanted to be before I discovered who I actually was.
A few months ago, I stumbled across the website of Boris Vellejo and his wife Julie Bell — who is also a commercial illustrator of some note — and I learned that prints of pretty much every cover piece he ever painted are available for purchase… and Boris will even sign them for no extra charge! I’ve been babbling to The Girlfriend about this discovery ever since, certain that I wanted to get something from the site, but vacillating indecisively between the art from Massacre — which Boris incongruously titled “Future Land” — and the cover of the second book in Hagberg’s series, War of the Citadels (officially called “Flash Gordon“), of which I’m also very fond.
Well, I guess she finally grew tired of my dithering, because she took the decision out of my hands and surprised me for our 20th anniversary with this:
She made a good call, from the choice of the print to the red matte (her pick again — I was thinking of a plain white one, myself, but in retrospect, she was right about the red making the colors in the painting pop). I absolutely adore this, and can’t wait to hang it up. Anne may not be Dale Arden, and god knows I’m a long way from anything resembling Flash Gordon… but she awakens many of the same yearnings this painting always has. I’m thankful she’s still standing with me in this strange future land in which we’ve found ourselves…
