Fantomah, the Thriller Girl of the Jungle, on the quilt of Flip Unfastened Our Dying Rays and Kill Them All! (all photos courtesy Fantagraphics)
When Superman debuted within the first challenge of Motion Comics in 1938, its success spawned a storm of imitators, to the diploma that a complete business cohered in a dizzyingly quick time. Newly shaped corporations configured a Fordist course of to mass-produce comics and draw the eye (and spare change) of America’s youngsters. For each now-iconic character, there are dozens extra that did not catch on with readers and have been discarded to the dustbin of collective reminiscence. And on this early period of comics historical past — now known as its Golden Age — few marginal cartoonists burned as brightly as Fletcher Hanks.
From late 1939 by way of the summer season of 1941, Hanks created characters like Tremendous Wizard Stardust, Area Smith, and Fantomah, the Thriller Girl of the Jungle (one of many earliest feminine superheroes, predating Surprise Girl). He give up the business after this transient stint for causes unknown (like a lot else about his life), and his work fell into obscurity for many years. However his work drew curiosity in countercultural circles within the ’60s and ’70s, with a few of Hanks’s tales getting reprinted in alts like Uncooked.
Fantomah predates early feminine superheroes like Surprise Girl.
One among his greatest fanatics is cartoonist, historian, and onetime Uncooked editor Paul Karasik, who has make clear lots of the particulars of Hanks’s enigmatic life. Karasik has edited two compilations of his comics: I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets! (2007) and You Shall Die by Your Personal Evil Creation! (2009). Now, Hanks’s full corpus of 51 tales has been collected in a single quantity, additionally edited by Karasik, titled Flip Unfastened Our Dying Rays and Kill Them All! (Fantagraphics, 2025).
Karasik’s introduction to the compendium lays out all of the ways in which Hanks didn’t match the mildew of the common comedian e-book creator of his time. Many writers and artists have been extraordinarily younger then, of their 20s and even teenagers, whereas he was in his late 40s and early 50s. Those that knew Hanks described him to Karasik as an incorrigible troublemaker from a younger age, an alcoholic, and bodily abusive, and he deserted his spouse and 4 youngsters in 1930. His time in comics is likely one of the few components of his life that doesn’t stay a thriller. In the end, he’d die destitute and alone, his frozen physique discovered on a Manhattan park bench in January 1976. His household had no concept of his comics profession. As Karasik relates by way of an illustrated epilogue to the compendium, when he tracked down Fletcher Hanks Jr. within the 2000s and confirmed him a few of his father’s work, he didn’t see what all of the fuss was about.
Paul Karasik’s comedian rendering of a gathering with Fletcher Hanks Jr., by which he identified his father’s self-portrait in an illustration
The Golden Age of Comics was a time of widespread experimentation, as artists working within the nascent medium have been nonetheless determining what labored on the web page, and there was plenty of error amid all these trials. Even by these requirements, Hanks’s tales are visually off-kilter and discombobulating. The proportions of his human varieties are virtually at all times askew — everybody’s jaws jut, Stardust’s head is just too small, limbs are too lengthy, fingers are too large. The characters contort unnaturally to make their gestures legible, but his motion panels typically really feel weightless. One among his constant visible quirks is to depict a flying character with stiff arms at their sides, which conjures up the other of the awe of seeing Superman in flight.
In his foreword to the brand new compendium, novelist Glen David Gold writes that “if no one moves your eye across a page like Jack Kirby, no one stops it dead like Hanks.” Certainly, Hanks had no intuition for learn how to lay out panels or tempo a narrative’s motion throughout them, and his sense of dialogue financial system is nonexistent, peppered with commas and dashes that create an odd, halting scansion. A consultant speech bubble, describing Stardust, reads: “His scientific use of rays, has made him master of space and planetary forces—the gas of a certain star, has made him immune to heat or cold.” Usually the dialogue and paneling are unintentionally comedic. On the finish of 1 story, Stardust declares: “Now I’ll break up the world war on Mars!” As he flies off within the subsequent panel, an onlooker cries: “There goes Stardust! It looks as if he was headed for Mars!”
The proportions of Hanks’s human varieties are virtually at all times askew.
Flip Unfastened Our Dying Rays and Kill Them All! delves into one other ingredient that set Hanks aside from his friends. At a time when the comedian manufacturing course of was extremely stratified, he made all his comics himself, writing, drawing, inking, and lettering them. He thus stands as one among comics’ earliest auteurs. These tales usually are not simply bizarre; they’re totally his inventive imaginative and prescient. The strangeness of Hanks’s work and the obscurity of his life have drawn comparisons to artist and author Henry Darger, with each Gold and Karasik mentioning the similarities between them of their respective introductions. Karasik disavows this on the grounds that Hanks, working totally inside an business, can’t in any sense be known as an “outsider artist.” However, he produced tales that defy typical concepts inside that machine, and even some 85 years later, they nonetheless make the attention cease.
Flip Unfastened Our Dying Rays and Kill Them All! (2025) by Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik, is revealed by Fantagraphics and accessible on-line and in bookstores.
