I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets: The Fantastic Comics Of Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik (B)
Amongst the sub-classes of comic fans, there's the group of hard-core nostalgia buffs who carefully and patiently unearth ancient comics to show off to each other. It's kind of like being a Yukon prospector, with the nostalgia buff carefully sifting through the mounds of accumulated detritus to pick out the nuggets of interest. Fletcher Hanks' work comes to us from the beginning of the Golden age of comics, where he had a very brief career in the lower end of an already disreputable publishing trade. (1939-1941)
Hanks' prospector in this case is Paul Karasik, Art Spieglman's assistant for Raw magazine, where a Fletcher Hanks story first re-appeared. The art is, on the surface, below journey-man at best. (It's pretty obvious where Hanks is just tracing backgrounds off of photos.) The stories, on the surface, are simplistic tales of Good taking vengeance over Evil. Actually, they all seem to follow the same tack: Evil commits atrocities, Good captures Evil and spends the rest of the story sadistically torturing and punishing Evil. I suspect it was the odd intensity of these comics which drew Karasik to them in the first place. 'Scuse me while I tangent...
I'm reminded of a bit on Robert Smiegel's 'TV Funhouse' where Smiegel takes on a forgotten T.V. cartoon of the late 60's called, 'Shazang'. The original story thread, I recall, had a friendly genie helping out two lost children trapped in the Middle East of olden days. A villain would threaten the kids, and the kids would call on Shazang to use his genie powers to save them, and perhaps humiliate the villan in the process.
What Smiegel did is to ramp up the genie's whimsical sense of justice to a pathological level of vindictiveness for comic effect. Here's the clip:
Back to Hanks. The only real difference between Hanks' body of work and Smiegel's 'Shazzang' is that there was a) slightly less poo, vomit, blood and cannibalism in Hanks' work and b) Smiegel was exaggerating for comic effect. You get the impression Hanks was like a Depression-era version of Travis Bickel. Don't take my word for it, though. Check out this eight pager, 'Stardust Vs. The Fifth Column Again'...
Amongst the sub-classes of comic fans, there's the group of hard-core nostalgia buffs who carefully and patiently unearth ancient comics to show off to each other. It's kind of like being a Yukon prospector, with the nostalgia buff carefully sifting through the mounds of accumulated detritus to pick out the nuggets of interest. Fletcher Hanks' work comes to us from the beginning of the Golden age of comics, where he had a very brief career in the lower end of an already disreputable publishing trade. (1939-1941)
Hanks' prospector in this case is Paul Karasik, Art Spieglman's assistant for Raw magazine, where a Fletcher Hanks story first re-appeared. The art is, on the surface, below journey-man at best. (It's pretty obvious where Hanks is just tracing backgrounds off of photos.) The stories, on the surface, are simplistic tales of Good taking vengeance over Evil. Actually, they all seem to follow the same tack: Evil commits atrocities, Good captures Evil and spends the rest of the story sadistically torturing and punishing Evil. I suspect it was the odd intensity of these comics which drew Karasik to them in the first place. 'Scuse me while I tangent...
I'm reminded of a bit on Robert Smiegel's 'TV Funhouse' where Smiegel takes on a forgotten T.V. cartoon of the late 60's called, 'Shazang'. The original story thread, I recall, had a friendly genie helping out two lost children trapped in the Middle East of olden days. A villain would threaten the kids, and the kids would call on Shazang to use his genie powers to save them, and perhaps humiliate the villan in the process.
What Smiegel did is to ramp up the genie's whimsical sense of justice to a pathological level of vindictiveness for comic effect. Here's the clip:
Back to Hanks. The only real difference between Hanks' body of work and Smiegel's 'Shazzang' is that there was a) slightly less poo, vomit, blood and cannibalism in Hanks' work and b) Smiegel was exaggerating for comic effect. You get the impression Hanks was like a Depression-era version of Travis Bickel. Don't take my word for it, though. Check out this eight pager, 'Stardust Vs. The Fifth Column Again'...
Whew! I suspect Hanks didn't take his acts of vengeance any further because he didn't have the imagination and his time in comic books wasn't rewarding enough for him in the long haul.
Karasik's afterword in the volume takes the Fletcher Hanks story into the macabre. An interview with Fletcher Hanks Jr. (who, really, deserves a book of his own -here's a profile) reveals that his dad was 'a no-good bum', an abusive alcoholic who left his family in 1930. After the elder Hanks gave up on comics, there's no information about him until 1970, when the police found him frozen to death on a park bench. Seems he wound up sharing the fate of his villains in his comics. It's this information about the man Fletcher Hanks that gives his work a dark, Freudian twist to it. Frankly, knowing what I know now, it really makes these simple-minded comics hard to read.
Karasik's afterword in the volume takes the Fletcher Hanks story into the macabre. An interview with Fletcher Hanks Jr. (who, really, deserves a book of his own -here's a profile) reveals that his dad was 'a no-good bum', an abusive alcoholic who left his family in 1930. After the elder Hanks gave up on comics, there's no information about him until 1970, when the police found him frozen to death on a park bench. Seems he wound up sharing the fate of his villains in his comics. It's this information about the man Fletcher Hanks that gives his work a dark, Freudian twist to it. Frankly, knowing what I know now, it really makes these simple-minded comics hard to read.
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