Product Description

A dizzying collection from the Ed Wood of comics.

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' work stands out for its thrilling experimentation. At once both crude and visionary, cold and hot as hell, Hanks' work is hard to pigeon hole. One thing is for certain: the stuff is bent.

Hanks drew in a variety of genres depicting science-fiction saviors, white women of the jungle, and he-man loggers. Whether he signed these various stories "Henry Fletcher" or "Hank Christy" or "Barclay Flagg" there is no mistaking the unique outsider style of Fletcher Hanks.

Cartoonist Paul Karasik (co-adapter of Paul Auster's City of Glass, and co-author of The Ride Together: A Memoir of Autism in the Family) has spent years tracking down these obscure and hard to find stories buried in the back of long-forgotten comic book titles. Karasik has also uncovered a dark secret: why Hanks disappeared from the comics scene.

This book collects 15 of his best stories in one volume followed by an afterword which solves the mystery of "Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks," the mysterious cartoonist who created a hailstorm of tales of brutal retribution...and then mysteriously vanished.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36703 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 124 pages

From Publishers Weekly
One 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)
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From Booklist
Hanks, who plied his trade in the late 1930s and early 1940s, has been called the Ed Wood of comic books, but his narratives are far more bizarre than Wood's film scenarios, and his naive artwork resembles that of outsider artists like Henry Darger. His creations include jungle queen Fantomah, who morphs into an all-powerful, skull-faced avenger; he-man lumberjack Big Red McLane; and his chef d'oeuvre, Stardust, "master of space and interplanetary forces," a tiny-headed, barrel-chested, eight-foot superhero with limitless powers. Hanks definitely had a vision, albeit a loopy one. In every story here, justice is meted out in cruelly imaginative ways to "spies and grade-A racketeers," "a gigantic fifth column," and other miscreants. Stardust transforms them into icicles that melt away, or giant rats he then drowns. Hanks' crude but powerful draftsmanship makes such grisly executions laughably nightmarish. In a comics-format afterword as sensitive and nuanced as Hanks' work is harsh and blunt, compiler Karasik tracks down the fate of the elusive Hanks, who vanished from the scene after producing a handful of hauntingly demented works. Flagg, Gordon

Jules Feiffer
It's a pleasure to see this first published edition of his puzzlingly effective work.

Customer Reviews

Vengeance is mine and I shall repay
Fletcher Hanks's bizarre comics for Fiction House from the very early part of the Golden Age of comics are indeed something to see. In his two most memorable series, "Fantomah" and "Stardust," he basically took the idea from the Jerry Siegel-bernard Bailyn series "The Spectre" from National Comics of a nearly all-powerful superhero meting out grim justice to evildoers and ran with it... I mean really ran with it. Both Fantomah and Stardust spend nearly half their time in their stories exacting about as imaginative of punishments as ever anyone could dream up; calling them "Jacobean" hardly does them justice. Coupling this with Hanks's unbelievably strange drawing style (his villains all look like Dick Tracy villains, his heroes all look like eight-foot tall department store mannequins, and everyone always has the exact same facial expression throughout the story) makes his work seem especially surreal. It's been profitably compared to outsider art, and there does seem something not a little bit crazy about this dream world of Hanks's. It's beautiful, too, in the way outsider art is usually beautiful, but its derivativeness and its incessant repetitiveness keeps his work from being quite at the level of that of the very best outsider artists (such as Henry Darger).

What brings this very interesting volume up another notch, though, is the supplementary story told (in the form of sequential art, natch) of Paul Karasik, who becomes a huge enthusiast of Hanks's work and goes to uncover a "Fletcher Hanks" he goes to interview. What he discovers at the interview makes for a great story, which only enhances your understanding of what you've read previously in the edition. Collectors of the truly strange and unusual won't want to pass this up, and it is work that truly stays with you... albeit sometimes not quite in a good way. (The Hanks stories are in their way the stuff of extremely vivid, repetitive, and unsettling dreams.)

Great Early Golden-Age Stuff!
With art that looks like something Basil Wolverton might've done if he'd drawn used his feet & keeping his eyes closed this is a great collection of early '40's superhero comics. Plot? Characterization? No way! This was when action & good beating evil were what superhero comics were all about. And I've seen enough G-A stuff to know that this may not be the best but it sure ain't the worst (wait til Marvel reprints USA Comics #5, now THAT was the worst!).

Oh, its also very well made and the story about Fletcher Hanks himself is both touching & disturbing as well as a change from the usual text format.

outsider art
Wonderfully bizarre naif stories. The final chapter recounting the background of the creator is as interesting as the actual stories.