One of the cool happenings of the comics scene in the 1960s and 1970s was the rekindling of interest and love for the movie serial, a weekly episodic adventure showing at your local cinema. Serials ran from 1912 (What Happened to Mary?) until 1956 (Blazing the Overland Trail). Each episode would end in a cliffhanger, an OMG scene involving a thrilling impending death along the lines of how the hell will he (usually a man) survive going off that cliff in a car, or jump out of the crashing airplane without a parachute, or not breathe his last (from toxic gas or rising water or lack of air ), or escape the insidious torture device, or avoid being crushed by (something big), or catch onto something as he falls off a building, and so on.
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were my favorite serials. Both had ray guns, death beams (Star Wars, anyone?), spaceships, robots, weird aliens, merciless evil adversaries, wild monsters, and sultry princesses and damsels in distress, and men and women in tights. One magazine that devoted pages to the appreciation of serials was Larry Ivie’s Monsters and Heroes. In issue 6 (1969 and only 35 cents!), he covered Flash Gordon. Here’s the article.
