I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks
Welcome to the bizarre world of Fletcher Hanks, Super Wizard of the Inkwell. Fletcher Hanks worked for only a few years in the earliest days of the comic book industry (1939-1941). Because he worked in a gutter medium for second-rate publishers on third-rate characters, his work has been largely forgotten. But among aficionados he is legendary. At the time, comic books were in their infancy. The rules governing their form and content had not been established. In this Anything Goes era, Hanks'...
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Welcome to the bizarre world of Fletcher Hanks, the mysterious cartoonist who created a hailstorm of tales of brutal retribution from1939-1941...and then mysteriously vanished. His obscure and hard to find stories are finally collected here.Publishers WeeklyOne of the strangest cartoonists of American comics' Golden Age, Hanks had a short career-the 15 stories collected here were all published between 1939 and 1941-but the deranged, nightmarish vigor of his work has made it something of a cult item. Hanks created pulpy characters like Stardust the Super Wizard, "the scientific marvel whose vast knowledge of all planets has made him the most remarkable person ever known," and the jungle heroine Fantomah, whose face becomes a snarling skull when she uses her magic powers. The artist's manic obsessions turn up again and again: global-scale atrocities, miraculous rays and, most of all, poetically apt punishments. In a typical story, "Master-Mind" De Structo tries to suffocate America's heads of state with an oxygen-destroying ray, so Stardust turns him into a giant head, then hurls him into a "space pocket of living death" occupied by a "headless headhunter." Hanks's artwork is crude and technically limited (each of his characters has exactly one, wildly caricatured, facial expression), but nearly every page has some image that sings out with deep, primal power. In an afterword, editor Paul Karasik explains how he tracked down Hanks's son and learned a bit more about the artist's sad life and death. (July)Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
\ Publishers WeeklyOne of the strangest cartoonists of American comics' Golden Age, Hanks had a short career-the 15 stories collected here were all published between 1939 and 1941-but the deranged, nightmarish vigor of his work has made it something of a cult item. Hanks created pulpy characters like Stardust the Super Wizard, "the scientific marvel whose vast knowledge of all planets has made him the most remarkable person ever known," and the jungle heroine Fantomah, whose face becomes a snarling skull when she uses her magic powers. The artist's manic obsessions turn up again and again: global-scale atrocities, miraculous rays and, most of all, poetically apt punishments. In a typical story, "Master-Mind" De Structo tries to suffocate America's heads of state with an oxygen-destroying ray, so Stardust turns him into a giant head, then hurls him into a "space pocket of living death" occupied by a "headless headhunter." Hanks's artwork is crude and technically limited (each of his characters has exactly one, wildly caricatured, facial expression), but nearly every page has some image that sings out with deep, primal power. In an afterword, editor Paul Karasik explains how he tracked down Hanks's son and learned a bit more about the artist's sad life and death. (July)\ Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information\ \
