So everyone who was interested probably saw the new Flash Gordon series on SCI FI by now, and has already realized it really sucks. However, Flash Gordon afforded me the opportunity to work on the most unusual assignment of my freelancing career thus far: I was hired by the SCI FI Channel to research and write a series of quizzes based on the historical iterations of Flash Gordon. The first of these (and I assume future quizzes) can be found here: http://www.scifi.com/flashgordon/quizzes/. As you might guess, mine is the one labeled “Historical: Flash Gordon’s Roots.” I didn’t write the other one, as I hadn’t seen the new show in advance of its premeire. I’m pretty happy with this one, but I wrote five quizzes total and I think some of the others are more entertaining.

I was initially wary of the assignment at first, as I was no great lover of Flash Gordon (in fact, I knew almost nothing about it), but it was fun doing the research and coming up with the questions. One thing I discovered during my research is that by far the most enjoyable version of Flash Gordon I came across was the original comic strips. They’re not *good* or anything, understand, but I found them much more palatable than any other iteration (including the new series, which might be the worst of them all–hey at least the serials have the excuse of being made like 70 years ago!). If you’re interested in Flash Gordon’s history, the original comic strips are available in a series of graphic novels from Checker Book Publishing. They’re nice volumes; my only real complaint with them is that they’re kind of a rip-off–each book is only 90 or so pages and they cost $20 each. At that page count, Checker could have easily put the strips together in a nice large omnibus, but instead they went the price-gouge the fans route. It’s too bad–they’re nice books otherwise.