As I pointed out in my previous Raymond essay, Dale Arden's role in the series is one of the strongest deviations from the strip's putative inspiration, Edgar Rice Burroughs' JOHN CARTER series. It may be that Raymond chose to give his hero a female "comrade-in-arms" in imitation of the science-fiction strip with which FLASH was competing, BUCK ROGERS. Dale Arden is, admittedly, not an experienced warrior-woman like BUCK's Wilma Deering. Yet Dale is much more gutsy than any of Burroughs' Martian princesses.
For example, in the second FLASH strip, Zarkov, having built a spaceship to combat the onrushing world of Mongo, forces Flash and Dale to board the ship, after which he sends them all speeding toward the enemy planet. Flash fights with Zarkov, and though the hero slugs the older man unconscious in the next panel, Dale is seen grabbing a lug-wrench so as to crown Zarkov if necessary. And while Flash is always the main hero in the ensuing sequences, Dale frequently shows more than a little initiative. When Flash and Dale are held prisoner by the Hawkmen's king Vultan, Dale pretends to make up to the monarch in order to protect her beloved. Early in the "Witch Queen" sequence, Dale is seen ray-blasing Mongo-monsters as ably as her boyfriend could. However, since she is a woman, her priorities are not quite the same as the hero's, and on that the main plot of "Queen" hinges.
At the end of the sequence I termed "Tournament of Death," Ming awards Flash his own kingdom, but the hero has to tame it for himself. Flash, Dale and several Hawkmen provided by Vultan infiltrate this new domain, name of Kira. The first ten strips depict Flash's first efforts to extend his rule, in particular defeating a tribe of cannibalistic lizard-men. But at the end of the tenth strip, Dale takes issue with the male mode of continual conquest:
But Flash, if you keep finding new enemies, when can we hold our wedding?
This can't be dismissed as mere feminine pique, given that Dale was key to rescuing Flash from the lizard-men. Flash, being a man, gives Dale a sweetly reasonable answer that doesn't acknowledge her concerns (I suppose some today would call it "mansplaining"). Dale blows up: "I won't marry you now til you beg me to!"
As if summoned into being by this disavowal, Dale's next major romantic competitor, Azura the Witch Queen, enters the fray. Despite the slight similarity between the name of the queen and that of Ming's daughter, Princess Aura comes off as a poor second to Azura, an independent ruler with her own array of arcane weapons-that-look-like-magic. Azura appears before Flash's entourage, seeming to be such a "spectral figure" that the armed men are briefly cowed. Flash orders them to attack, but Azura has the situation in complete control. She uses explosives to trigger an avalanche, burying many though not all of the Hawkmen, while the queen uses sleep gas to take prisoner Flash, Dale and a Hawkman captain named Khan.
With the help of her soldiers, usually called "magic men" despite the fact that they too only use super-science weapons, Azura transports her captives to Syk, her "flame-guarded stronghold" (perhaps modeled on the folk-story of Venusberg). She seems to be unaware of Flash's intention to invade her territory, and is only interested in seducing him. Apparently her only reason for keeping Dale and Khan alive is to use them to keep Flash in line when he wakes up-- although it doesn't take long for Azura to take the next step: drugging the hero with a forgetfulness potion called "Lethium.." Flash easily buys into the notion that this sexy witch-woman is his queen and lover.
Ar this point, Azura really has no reason to keep Dale and Khan alive, and Raymond doesn't even resort to the most logical excuse: that Azura takes sadistic glee in seeing Dale suffer when Flash no longer knows her. Both Dale and Khan are given servile jobs as servants, but aside from a scene in which a female servant lets Dale see Flash kissing Azura, there's no direct attempt to humiliate. However, though Flash doesn't know Dale as anything but a serving-girl, he objects to seeing a member of the weaker sex whipped for a minor infraction. This illustrates Flash's innate gallantry, given that he remembers nothing of his previous life.
Meanwhile, some of the Hawkmen under Flash's command weren't killed by the avalanche, and have sent for military aid to Vultan. Soon a small army of Hawkmen, accompanied by the peripatetic Doctor Zarkov, assault Azura's "magic-men."
The Hawkmen lose the contest, but Flash takes Zarkov prisoner and brings him into Syk. This proves costly for Azura, for with his super-science Zarkov slays several magic-men and cures Flash's amnesia. Flash feeds Azura her own potion, so that she forgets her evil ways-- temporarily at least-- and aligns herself with his rulership.
However, just to keep the pot boiling a little longer, Azura's generals stage a coup. Flash, Dale and Zarkov are forced to flee Syk, somehow leaving the Hawkman Khan behind in prison, and in the absence of the heroes, Azura's old identity returns. Zarkov then uses his science to give Flash a "super-power," turning him temporarily into an invisible man, even though Raymond draws him as a shadowy figure. Thus Flash invades Syk again, launching a "one-man war" on Azura and freeing Khan. However, Flash's invisibility begins to wear off. He takes Azura hostage and drags her into "the Tnnnel of Terror" to escape. This proves a mistake, for the tunnel is inhabited by "death dwarves."
Just as Flash and Azura stand on the edge of being overwhelmed by the dwarves, Dale and Zarkov show up in the Tunnel and drive away the nasty fiends. However, because Flash and Azura thought themselves on the verge of death, the queen begged the hero for a last kiss, and he obliged, just as Dale showed up. Thus the story comes full-circle, for although Dale has reclaimed her lover, he's displayed a certain amount of sexual infidelity before her eyes. At last Flash is able to smooth over the troubled waters by relating his transgression to his Manifest Destiny. When Dale asks Flash if he liked the kiss, "I liked it because it meant her friendship-- it meant that this bloody business was at an end-- that I had won my kingdom and the right to marry you."
However, Flash manages to find another new war that keeps him from getting married, which also brings the story back to Dale's original protest. When Flash announces the taming of his kingdom to Ming via radio, the Mongo emperor refuses to acknowledge Flash. In the following sequence, this begins Flash's first major martial assault on the empire of Ming, but "Witch Queen" in essence sets a pattern that would mitigate against marriage for the rest of the comic strip's history. In other words, Flash and Dale would perpetually have their virtue attempted by this or that powerful figure of Mongo. It's a virtual certainty that male readers enjoyed it whenever some beauteous ruler tried to seduce Flash, while female readers didn't get nearly the same vibe from Dale having to fend off unattractive seducers like Ming and Vultan. Still, there may have been some pleasure for women readers in seeing Flash prove his faithfulness again and again in spite of massive temptation, for, to my knowledge, Flash always remains devoted to one woman, despite not ever quite finding time to marry her.
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