Fletcher Hanks
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (2007)
You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation (2009)
I first became aware of Fletcher Hanks as a result of discussion on facebook, leading to online articles and my immediately recognising his style from the Tiger Hart strip in Planet Comics, as distinguished by characters with tiny heads on top of huge muscular bodies. Having discovered that there was more of this stuff to be had, I immediately knew that I needed it, for Hanks' work seemed to be the absolute distillation of everything I'd enjoyed about Planet Comics.
Fletcher Hanks, as Paul Karasik's introduction suggests, was never really an outsider artist despite the mythology. He took to writing and drawing his own comic strips at the very birth of the form in its modern sense, before the conventions of strip fiction were fully established. Additionally, it's worth remembering that the printing process and paper quality of Fantastic, Fight and other titles obliged artists to keep it bold and simple, nothing which would end up looking too scrappy on the page. Hanks' art is unusually stylised, but his flights of fancy are expanded from a powerful sense of realism and a keen eye for the solid form, with only a very occasional lapse of scale to muddy the waters; although admittedly his draughtsmanship is often eclipsed by the sheer weirdness of his work.
Hanks' audience required heroes of specific and direct type, men - and one woman - who have scrapes and adventures and who vanquish the bad guys. For the most part we have variations on Hugo Gernsback's science-hero as developed by E.E. 'Doc' Smith and others, and Fletcher Hanks' cast of characters are variations on this theme. Arguably the greatest is Stardust the Super Wizard, most likely created in response to Action's Superman. Stardust lives out in space, and his initial adventures mostly began with the reportage of some nefarious activity befalling New York revealed on his crime detecting space television. Each story therefore begins with a commute, but I suppose Stardust's living in outer space serves as a measure of how amazing he is more than anything. Stardust generally achieves victory by use of a seemingly endless variety of absurdly specific yet poorly defined rays which shrink, enlarge, render invisible, or otherwise effect an almost immediate resolution to whatever the problem may be, meaning we can get on with the closing pages of just desserts. Stardust comic strips typically spend half of their page count punishing the criminal by cruel and unusual means.
Someone on facebook recently described some noise act as a boy sat alone at the back of the class frantically scribbling scenes of wartime atrocity in the back of his exercise book, Stukas fly low strafing the crowd with bullets, blood everywhere… which is probably as good a description as any of the mood and intensity of Hanks' work. Biology is malleable, disembodied heads fly through the air, faces always seem to be turned away from the reader, fight scenes resemble ballet, and the image of objects and people mysteriously suspended in the sky occurs with surprising frequency; so while there's a touch of Basil Wolverton, it's Basil Wolverton in a landscape described by Giorgio de Chirico.
While Hanks characters tend to inhabit the same basic story, the variation of themes is surprisingly imaginative, and enough so as to demonstrate that this guy knew exactly what he was doing and was exploring the limitations of the form. Where Stardust has his special rays and extended scenes of urban poetic justice, Space Smith's adventures occur beyond the Earth and are much closer in spirit to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space series. Big Red McLane follows the exploits of a stout-hearted lumberjack defending honest enterprise by punching racketeers and corporate criminals from rival companies without a special ray or mysterious transformation to be seen; and the skull-faced Fantomah mounts a supernatural assault on those evil forces who seek to control the jungle, whatever the hell that even means. Towards the close of Hanks' two year career in comics he had begun to expand here and there - Stardust defends Chicago rather than New York, then has adventures in space; Red McLane leaves the forest behind and travels to San Francisco in search of a childhood sweetheart; and then Fletcher Hanks simply stopped. He is described by his son as an angry, troubled man and a violent alcoholic, so I guess his own itinerant existence finally got the better of him.
This work seems fairly typical of its time on first glance, and a skim through an issue of Planet Comics leaves the definition of Fletcher Hanks as unique seeming less than clear cut; and yet the more of this stuff you read, the stranger and more beautiful it appears - or maybe arresting rather than beautiful. Hanks' work has the random swerves and dreamlike ambience of van Vogt and a few others, but in comic book form and quite clearly aimed at a younger audience. I'm tempted to consider him as something in the tradition of Shaver or Robert Moore Williams but that may be overthinking it a little, and I suspect Fletcher Hanks was driven more by impotent rage than schizophrenic philosophy. More than anything, it's hard not to wonder where Hanks would have gone had he kept at it; but I suppose had he been capable of such, he never would have possessed whatever quality it was that drove him to create works of such twisted majesty in the first place.
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (2007)
You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation (2009)
I first became aware of Fletcher Hanks as a result of discussion on facebook, leading to online articles and my immediately recognising his style from the Tiger Hart strip in Planet Comics, as distinguished by characters with tiny heads on top of huge muscular bodies. Having discovered that there was more of this stuff to be had, I immediately knew that I needed it, for Hanks' work seemed to be the absolute distillation of everything I'd enjoyed about Planet Comics.
Fletcher Hanks, as Paul Karasik's introduction suggests, was never really an outsider artist despite the mythology. He took to writing and drawing his own comic strips at the very birth of the form in its modern sense, before the conventions of strip fiction were fully established. Additionally, it's worth remembering that the printing process and paper quality of Fantastic, Fight and other titles obliged artists to keep it bold and simple, nothing which would end up looking too scrappy on the page. Hanks' art is unusually stylised, but his flights of fancy are expanded from a powerful sense of realism and a keen eye for the solid form, with only a very occasional lapse of scale to muddy the waters; although admittedly his draughtsmanship is often eclipsed by the sheer weirdness of his work.
Hanks' audience required heroes of specific and direct type, men - and one woman - who have scrapes and adventures and who vanquish the bad guys. For the most part we have variations on Hugo Gernsback's science-hero as developed by E.E. 'Doc' Smith and others, and Fletcher Hanks' cast of characters are variations on this theme. Arguably the greatest is Stardust the Super Wizard, most likely created in response to Action's Superman. Stardust lives out in space, and his initial adventures mostly began with the reportage of some nefarious activity befalling New York revealed on his crime detecting space television. Each story therefore begins with a commute, but I suppose Stardust's living in outer space serves as a measure of how amazing he is more than anything. Stardust generally achieves victory by use of a seemingly endless variety of absurdly specific yet poorly defined rays which shrink, enlarge, render invisible, or otherwise effect an almost immediate resolution to whatever the problem may be, meaning we can get on with the closing pages of just desserts. Stardust comic strips typically spend half of their page count punishing the criminal by cruel and unusual means.
Someone on facebook recently described some noise act as a boy sat alone at the back of the class frantically scribbling scenes of wartime atrocity in the back of his exercise book, Stukas fly low strafing the crowd with bullets, blood everywhere… which is probably as good a description as any of the mood and intensity of Hanks' work. Biology is malleable, disembodied heads fly through the air, faces always seem to be turned away from the reader, fight scenes resemble ballet, and the image of objects and people mysteriously suspended in the sky occurs with surprising frequency; so while there's a touch of Basil Wolverton, it's Basil Wolverton in a landscape described by Giorgio de Chirico.
While Hanks characters tend to inhabit the same basic story, the variation of themes is surprisingly imaginative, and enough so as to demonstrate that this guy knew exactly what he was doing and was exploring the limitations of the form. Where Stardust has his special rays and extended scenes of urban poetic justice, Space Smith's adventures occur beyond the Earth and are much closer in spirit to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space series. Big Red McLane follows the exploits of a stout-hearted lumberjack defending honest enterprise by punching racketeers and corporate criminals from rival companies without a special ray or mysterious transformation to be seen; and the skull-faced Fantomah mounts a supernatural assault on those evil forces who seek to control the jungle, whatever the hell that even means. Towards the close of Hanks' two year career in comics he had begun to expand here and there - Stardust defends Chicago rather than New York, then has adventures in space; Red McLane leaves the forest behind and travels to San Francisco in search of a childhood sweetheart; and then Fletcher Hanks simply stopped. He is described by his son as an angry, troubled man and a violent alcoholic, so I guess his own itinerant existence finally got the better of him.
This work seems fairly typical of its time on first glance, and a skim through an issue of Planet Comics leaves the definition of Fletcher Hanks as unique seeming less than clear cut; and yet the more of this stuff you read, the stranger and more beautiful it appears - or maybe arresting rather than beautiful. Hanks' work has the random swerves and dreamlike ambience of van Vogt and a few others, but in comic book form and quite clearly aimed at a younger audience. I'm tempted to consider him as something in the tradition of Shaver or Robert Moore Williams but that may be overthinking it a little, and I suspect Fletcher Hanks was driven more by impotent rage than schizophrenic philosophy. More than anything, it's hard not to wonder where Hanks would have gone had he kept at it; but I suppose had he been capable of such, he never would have possessed whatever quality it was that drove him to create works of such twisted majesty in the first place.
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