I SHALL RECOMMEND READING!

A recommendation.

I have recently purchased the second collection of comics by Fletcher Hanks entitled "You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!" The first volume was called "I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!" just to give you an idea of what we're working with here. I heartily recommend either of these books to anyone who is interested in comics, especially if they are at all interested in the psychology behind the creations.

Fletcher Hanks is an undeniably a fascinating character. Born in 1887 he grew up interested in art and in being a drunken bastard, in seemingly equal parts. In the introduction for You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! Paul Karasik (the editor of both books) relays a story of a weeklong bender gone awry. It seems that Hanks and his friends bought a barrel of whiskey to take to the woods for a bachanalean nightmare. While drunkenly refereeing a wrestling match between two friends, Hanks stood by while one fellow broke the others neck. Whoops! And things got worse from there as Hanks grew older, took a wife, and had children. At the end of the introduction of this volume, Karasik writes that the reader should keep in mind, while reading the technicolor dreamscapes Hanks has created, that this is a man who has kicked his four year old son down the stairs.

Taking this advice and keeping that fact in mind while reading reveals a pretty fascinating mind behind these seemingly disposable pop artifacts. Hanks stories, like many of the time, feature men doing evil for the sake of doing evil and authorities powerless to stop it. The difference being that Hanks protagonists are often unreasonably ruthless in meting out punishments. Stardust the Super Wizard, the primary super hero in these stories, is practically an omnipotent being and has a "ray" for ever purpose. Rather that taking gangsters to the police or leaving them webbed up like Spider Man, Stardust will deposit a criminal on an uninhabited planet and super charge the environment with a "vitamin ray" so that the criminal will never die. These villains are often literally punished for eternity, making Stardust much more like a vengeful god sentencing a sinner to hell than a standard super hero.

There's a pretty interesting psychology somewhere in there. A man who, by all accounts, was a total bastard creating worlds where human authority figures are totally impotent and violent men are severely and creatively punished. Is it too much to think that maybe Hanks thinks he should be punished in such a way, at least on some level? (He froze to death on a parkbench, drunk, old and unloved, by the way). There is a dark misanthropy prevalent in these comics that is impossible to miss and is hard to think of as a coincidence. The villains here are often grotesquely exaggerated figures with prominent underbites and simian brows. Another signature character, Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle transforms into an invincible avatar to fight poachers and such. This is visually represented by her face changing to a skull with a hideous rictus grin but she retains her long blond hair and shapely figure. The effect is off putting.

And yet, I find it hard to be entirely unsympathetic to the man, not as a person, but as a creator. These stories burst with batshit crazy ideas and I love that about it. In the first story of the second volume, some criminals, attempting to start a world war for no stated reason, attempt to trap Stardust in a whirlwind that will send him into a giant glue pit. In a story in the first volume, a criminal who kidnaps heads of state gets his torso and legs removed and is reduced to being a head that walks around on two feet. There is something irresistible to me about this kind of ideacraft. Karasik mentions that Fletcher Hanks was one of the few comic creators at the time who did everything start to finish, the story, script, penciling, inking, colors, lettering and layout. I have always been interested in the creative possibilities of working within boundaries and that certainly applies here. Unable to over think or over render anything, Hanks work is almost stream of conscious and that conscious seems haunted and complex.

I guess the point here, other than just to recommend the books, is that this is a very clear case of art reflecting the artist in interesting ways. Karasik draws the parallels better than I do but it's something I wanted to pass along. Buy these books!