The Golden Age of Marvel Comics

Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon & others
The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997)
I'm still half-engaged in researching the history of Marvel for something I'm soon to be working on, which I probably shouldn't mention in case I get bored of the idea and it never happens; but thankfully it's a loose form of research allowing for general impressions picked up from a greatest hits collection such as this. I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down expensive reprints incorporating everything right down to the adverts for sea monkeys. I'm not sure I would have the patience to read them, for that matter.

Marvel, as you probably know, began life as Timely Comics publishing its first title just a year after Superman first hit the news stands, so the myth of Marvel having been the lively young marmoset stealing the dinosaurs eggs derives mainly from their having changed the name so many times prior to Stan Lee - or possibly Jack Kirby - introducing acne and difficult homework assignments to the traditional superhero strip in 1961. This is what some of that stuff looked like before the characters took to agonising over teenage concerns.

It's probably fair to say that Lee's big idea - or possibly Kirby's big idea - at the beginning of the sixties was to shift emphasis from story to character, prior to which we had illustrated equivalents to the radio serials of the time wherein mostly hard boiled heroes identify bad guys before punching them squarely on the jaw, thus saving the day. The bad guys here were mostly boggle-eyed Nazis, shifting to boggle-eyed reds after the war, so it's fairly repetitive, trades mostly in clichés, and you can usually see the punchline forming before you've made it to the second page. About three quarters of the stories collected herein revolve around the theft of secret plans. Nevertheless, even within this fairly limited formula, there was a lot of invention, some truly screwy twists of imagination, and even at its most peculiar, the art is rarely less than arresting with panel after panel slapping the reader in the face with its relentless dynamic action. Later Marvel favourites such as Captain America, the Human Torch, the Vision, and the Sub-Mariner began here, and the latter is particularly interesting as he evolves from a triangular headed morally ambiguous enemy of mankind - more or less Tarzan underwater - to whatever he became in the sixties, which at least remained a far cry from the square-jawed guy who foils diamond heists to a daily schedule.

I'm not massively familiar with this era of comic book publishing, and for all their early promise, I guess Marvel were never quite so wild as - for one example with which I'm familiar - Planet Comics, and if there's some weird stuff here, there isn't anything which comes close to the like of Fletcher Hanks; yet there's a lot of charm, even if a little goes a long way, and I'd still rather look at this than Roy Lichenstein's version - or even Neil Gaiman cleverly subverting these tropes towards the usual ends.

Also, having read this lot, Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot now makes one fuck of a lot more sense.

Planet Comics volume one

Planet Comics volume one (2012)
A massive stack of these turned up in my local Half Price, numerous titles from the thirties and forties and entire runs of things I've never heard of reprinted over a number of volumes. I kept a distance, knowing my own tendency to collect complete sets, but curiosity overcame me. Just one won't hurt, I thought, and Planet Comics seemed closest to my interests. Apparently this thing ran to seventy-three issues, of which the first four are reproduced here, and aside from Will Eisner having drawn a couple of covers, I'd never heard of either it or anyone involved.

I guess from this that mainstream comic strips of the forties were in certain respects closer to silent film than the narratives with which we are familiar. The tales here comprise mostly a series of bold images, more summaries than stories, with text usually serving to emphasise or clarify what we're looking at and only occasionally to explain. The art is generally amateurish, but simple enough to survive crude printing on what probably may as well have been Izel toilet paper, and so strongly stylised as to rise above most of its technical failings. Of course, I'm looking at this stuff seventy-five years later, and that which I see as having novel or otherwise exotic qualities may simply be hack work and crap by ordinary criteria; and there's also the possibility that what I'm enjoying pertains to how closely it resembles strips which have parodied or emulated this sort of material - early issues of Viz, Reid Fleming, and particularly Flaming Carrot; but fuck it - it works for me.

The strips are mostly variations on the theme of the loosely Gernsbackian science hero in thrills and scrapes reminiscent of the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs or E.E. 'Doc' Smith - variations on Flash Gordon in other words, right down to the one-then-two syllable names - Flint Baker, Buzz Crandall, and Spurt Hammond, to name but three. The adventures tend to involve alien despots and female companions kidnapped or else terrorised by the same, and other planets of our solar system tend to bear a suspicious resemblance to Earth. Auro, Lord of Jupiter, for example, tells the story of Auro, a human child orphaned and abandoned on Jupiter and raised by a sabre tooth tiger to rule the planet - which seems to be mostly jungle - by virtue of his superior strength and intelligence. It has to be said that aside from the occasional space rocket, Auro is a lot like Tarzan.

As with Flash Gordon, most of our guys seem to inhabit a swashbuckling narrative of kings, queens, castles, and beautiful princesses, with a cursory mention of the tale being set on Neptune or Pluto to qualify it as science-fiction. A particularly bewildering episode of Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force takes our man to the planet Zog whereupon the local and inevitably troubled ruler informs him that he must fight a two-headed giant which has been inducing terror amongst the natives, and he must fight the beast whilst disguised as a character called Torro. Unlike Cole, Torro has a moustache and a mullet, and given that the reasoning behind this transformation is never explained, I've a feeling it may have been effected so as allow the artist to recycle an existing strip for the second half of this one. Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

Yet despite all of this, there is genuine charm in much of this material, and the better strips are almost hypnotically weird. Plots twist beyond reason and virtually without explanation in the majority of the stories, conclusions occur abruptly or not at all in a couple of cases, and we're left with the feeling that someone was either drunk or making it up as they went along. In other words, if you enjoy A.E. van Vogt, you shouldn't have too much trouble with Planet Comics.

Above all, regardless of narrative peculiarities, whilst the art remains awkward and angular thoughout, these tales are packed with arresting, even nightmarishly surreal images and an often powerful sense of design consistent with the era. Just about every panel of the amusingly named Spurt Hammond, Planet Flyer will pop your eyes from your head, and Henry Kiefer's artwork is genuinely beautiful even if he could have used a few more lessons in figure work. It's a shame Spurt didn't get a longer run in the title, lasting only up to issue thirteen according to Wikipedia, although I suppose at least it means I won't feel obliged to hunt down all eighteen or however many volumes, should I end up going down that road.

On a purely technical level Planet Comics is probably one of the shabbiest things I've ever read, and yet I find myself absolutely transfixed.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

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.