Rip Kirby...
..By Alex Raymond.
My pal Cully Hamner suggested a few weeks back I start a series of posts about artists I love.
This is the introduction I delivered several years ago for the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS collection of RIP KIRBY, by Alex Raymond. It is, all true, with one understandable, albeit regrettable omission; that is, the strip was entirely carried by its visuals. The scripts were never worthy of Raymond’s visual inventive brilliance.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was famously quoted as saying “There are no second acts in American lives.” Clearly, in hindsight, he was justifying his own inability, whether as a result of drunkenness, loss of conviction or whatever, to continue into the 1930s and 1940s the ascendancy that had made him a great American novelist of the 1920s. he died in 1940 embittered and drunk, doubtless convinced of the truth of his own glib remark.
Well, god knows you couldn’t prove that by the great adventure strip cartoonists of the 30s and 40s. For every Harold Gray staying on LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, or Chester Gould’s lifelong run on DICK TRACY, or Al Capp’s more than a quarter century’s work on LI’L ABNER, you had Harold Foster moving from TARZAN on to PRINCE VALIANT, Roy Crane leaving CAP’N EASY for BUZ SAWYER, and Milton Caniff passing TERRY AND THE PIRATES on to work on STEVE CANYON…
…Which brings us to Alex Raymond. This guy was the archetypal overachiever. While the above mentioned gentlemen all had one, maybe two great strips to their names, Raymond, in the mid 1930s, moved from SECRET AGENT X-9 to produce a classic double play—JUNGLE JIM as the topper, with what is regarded as his masterpiece, FLASH GORDON, as the main attraction.
And what an attraction it was.
Like Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie, Flash Gordon was a franchise, generating all sorts of ancillary product—toys, games, clothes and the like. But in a much bigger way than those others, Flash Gordon made it to Hollywood.
Sure, the Flash Gordon movies were miserably low budget serials, but hey—it was the movies. And it was those dreadful serials that kept the memory of Flash Gordon alive, long after Raymond had moved on.
And thanks to Chuck McCann on WPIX, who showed those serials, pronouncing it Larry “Buster” Crabbay, I was hip to Flash Gordon when Woody Gelman’s Nostalgia Press first republished that oblong edition of the strip.
To a kid of fifteen, Raymond’s work in the thirties was gorgeous, sexy and intimidating. It remained so, until I learned about the Clark brothers, Matthew and Benton.
Raymond’s work back then leaned very heavily on the influence of the Clark brothers. Now, these days, when artists rip each other off, and if they acknowledge it at all, they call it homage. This may not seem like much, but it effected the way I felt about Raymond in general, and Flash Gordon in particular.
Don’t get me wrong, the work was still gorgeous, sexy and intimidating. It just no longer felt so seminal, so special. And beyond the artwork, the debt Flash Gordon owes to Edgar Rice Burroughs can never be repaid.
Which brings us back to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and those second acts that don’t exist in American lives.
In the early 1940s, Alex Raymond leaves Flash Gordon in the not entirely fabulous hands of Austin Briggs, his assistant, who will go on some years later, after a year of woodshedding and reinvention, to become one of America’s greatest and most influential illustrators.
Raymond joins the Marines, and produces artwork for the corps, with the intention of becoming an illustrator for the slicks. Things didn’t quite work out that way…and as fans of the American comic strip, we can be eternally grateful for that.
Raymond leaves the service, and, after being stymied by his failed attempts at taking the magazine world by storm, he creates a new strip—a strip as different from his previous work as anyone could possibly imagine.
Whereas Caniff, Crane, and Foster, in their shifts from one strip to another, made their switch with a strong continuity of visual and textual elements, Raymond completely reinvented himself from the ground up. Needless to say, beyond its creator, Rip Kirby has nothing in common with Flash Gordon.
While Flash Gordon was baroquely romantic, harking back to an almost 19th century heroic ideal, Rip Kirby was completely modern, utterly contemporary—delivered in a graphic style that seemed to come from out of nowhere. Rip, Honey Dorian, Desmond and the rest of the cast were perfect reflections of America’s idea of sophisticated living in the greatest city in the world.
It was New York in its golden post war moment. Tudor City, Park Avenue, Central Park West, Sutton Place. Nightclubs, the theater, transatlantic voyages. It was the fantasia of New York fed to their readers daily by columnists like Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Earl Wilson and Leonard Lyons.
Rip Kirby was a perfect example of a well paced narrative, illustrated in a new style that nobody had ever seen before on the comic strip page.
Crisp blacks, pure whites, and well chosen cross hatching beautifully delineated a convincing take on the life of a well to do bachelor, USMC vet, and private detective, the beautiful women in his life—and the high and lowlife menaces that made a midcentury man’s life so damned interesting.
The originality of Rip Kirby can neither be overstated, underestimated, or overvalued. Certainly, Flash Gordon was far and away his most popular creation—but with Rip Kirby, Alex Raymond created a brand new thing. By design or happenstance, Raymond had functionally invented the photo realistic newspaper strip.
Where Flash Gordon inspired marginal imitations like Brick Bradford, Rip Kirby opened the door for Stan Drake’s HEART OF JULIET JONES, Leonard Starr’s ONSTAGE, Lou Fine’s PETER SCRATCH, John Cullen Murphy’s BIG BEN BOLT, Alex Kotzky’s APARTMENT 3G, Neal Adams’ BEN CASEY and many others.
Soap operas. Crime. Romance. Medical drama. A multitude of genres, all tracing their roots back to Raymond’s seminal creation.
So Alex Raymond had confounded Fitzgerald’s quote, and found his own second act—until that second act was cut tragically short by the automobile accident that ended his life. The greatest irony of that horrible day is that Stan Drake, one of the first artists inspired by Raymond’s work, was in the car with him.
Raymond spent less than a decade on Rip Kirby. The work itself was extraordinary—but beyond the obvious beauty of the material, we owe him an astonishing debt for creating a visual language that would serve the comics page for nearly three decades—and continues to inform the better work being produced in our medium.