Freezing rain on top of all this snowpack -- stay off the fuggin' roads!

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Marseilles, France; Jamaica, New York; Dallas, Texas Nampa, Idaho; Comox, British Columbia and New Orleans, Louisiana (Could be my friend DJ Soul Sistah, or a visitor via Daily Kos -- I posted the words to Yes We Can there last night).

ROCK against Reaganomics at: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in the Saturday Matinees and Sunday Comics!





Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: Nancy Cawdrey's American Silk Road, The Collective Caravan, and Old West -- New Visions at the Hockaday Museum of Art. Tom English is doing a still life workshop this weekend -- normally he specializes in landscapes, but something different is called for in THIS weather! I made a new website advertising Fall for Glacier -- looks like a good time, plus it helps several programs that make Glacier National Park an awe-inspiring and pleasantly educational destination. The hundreth anniversary of the founding of the park is coming up!

Media Watch: The late Luciano Pavarotti on the radio -- an opera recorded in 1977, at the height of his vocal prowess. A few months ago they played an electrifying Maria Callas performance from 1958. More! More! More!

Spacing Out Again! Visit Outre Space Cinema

Alex Raymond's Princess (now Queen) Aura in 1935, during the War with Ming sequence, which would run on and off for another half-decade. Queen Aura was reintroduced after the Witch Queen adventure, and she's obviously ill at ease with her husband's alliance with Flash Gordon against her father. Bad feelings from previous times erupt in a battle with Dale Arden, who has caught her former rival actually betraying their military plans to Emperor Ming. A lot of Flash's cohorts die as a result of this treason.
(Shades of the Scarlet Pimpernel!)


(Click to enlarge the image.)
Raymond and co-plotter Don Moore stopped using Aura as a conflicted character after these panels. The movies did a better job with her the next year. This somewhat salacious girl-fight was thankfully about the last sado-masochistic fetish in this VERY mainstream strip. Raymond's long-stoke Middle Period would extend through the following Water World chapter, deep into 1937, after which his assistant Austin Briggs' crisp detailing style started to dominate the artwork.