Peanuts and Flash Gordon Dailies (1959)

My favorite of all the comics for this week is Peanuts. Unlike the others, Peanuts has a particular format in which it tells a story within four panels or a page. Although there are many pages, there never be repeated stories. The stories are precise and fun, which reminds me of how advertisements usually are--quick and to the point. Another interesting thing is that I could see how the character develops over a period (I read Peanuts Vol 1 1950-52), and throughout the time, Charlie and Lucy went from action-directed stories--some short stories didn't even have words, to conversation based stories. There are more contents and shows more of their personalities. 

Another story I read was the Flash Gordon Dailies talked about Flash Gordon, who committed missions of protecting the earth and killing Skorpis in space. After he completed a task in space, Gordon came back as a celebrity among the astronauts. However, he has to go on another trip—which he said was the last trip. Before he went on the last trip, he proposed to Dale, but he met Ellta, a woman he fell in love with before. He didn’t get together with her again, but he was fallen on a weird planet. On the journey, he found more Skorpis and went on a battle with the Skorpis with his army. He faced a tension that he and his army might be killed there; it was Ellta who saved him and his staffs from the place to the earth. Upon their arrival, Ellta threatens Gordon to not marry his fiancé, or she would ask her army to destroy the earth. An incident happened that they found a lot of Skorpi spies on earth and so Ellta decided to move on and fight for another battle with the Skorpis, but it didn’t stop the new Skorpis landing on earth. 

I think the story plot is pretty common. It was mostly about the fighting against the Skorpis, and the romantic parts with his fiancé when he came back. The tension was usually when Gordon and his army was risking death before they killed the Skorpis. The art, on the other hand, is surprisingly very detailed, the characters’ faces are semi-life-like. However, I can imagine that it would be a popular story in the 50s because going into war, fighting against the enemies, and soldiers returning for the start of romantic stories are the prevalent themes.