view R. C. Harvey believes is supported by the strips themselves. Saint author Leslie Charteris was hired to take over the writing of the strip in September 1935, but the pair would only collaborate on one storyline. By the end of 1935, "the [work]load was too much for Raymond," who left Secret Agent X-9 to artist , in order to devote more time to his meticulous Sunday pages. Raymond's work on X-9 is said to particularly reach for "the feel of the best pulp interior art of the time," a style that would evolve with his own so-called "great flourishes" and "later blossom to full effect in Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim". "Under his pen," writes Maurice Horn, his Sunday pages "became world famous (especially Flash Gordon)." However, historian and critic R.C. Harvey argues that "despite Raymond's great talent as an illustrator, his deployment of the comic-strip medium (on X-9) was not very impressive." Harvey feels that Raymond's work suffers in comparison to Milton Caniff's contemporaneous work, with Raymond's failings as a visual storyteller less noticeable on a weekly Sunday strip, where the space afforded played to his skills as an illustrator. Raymond's sensual artwork—for which the artist particularly "studied popular illustrators," including pulp artist Matt Clark, whose work Raymond's male figures particularly evoke—outshone its borders and "attracted far more loyal readers than ... [the] rather contrived and unconvincing adventure stories" his work depicted. Raymond swiftly became "among the most highly-regarded—and most imitated—in all of comics" for his work on the weekly strip, with Harvey declaring his work on the strip "a technical virtuosity matched on the comics pages only by Harold Foster in Prince Valiant." Raymond evolved the layout of the strip from a four-tier strip in 1934 to a two-tier strip in 1936, reducing the number of panels but doubling their size. Combining this with a removal of dialogue from speech balloons to captions at the bottom of the panel afforded Raymond the space to create detailed and atmospheric backgrounds. Against these spacious backgrounds, the placement of characters in heroic pose "lent the entire enterprise a mythic air." Flash Gordon gained a daily strip in 1940, illustrated by Austin Briggs. Raymond left the Sunday strip in 1944 to join the Marines, whereupon the daily strip was cancelled and Briggs assumed Sunday duties, continuing until 1948. Briggs was succeeded on the Sundays by Emanuel "Mac" Raboy, while the daily