Space Smith - 'The Leopard Women of Venus' (Fantastic Comics #3, February 1940).
Fletcher Hanks was one of the most legendary oddballs in American comic books. Only active in the medium between 1939 and 1941, he created some of the most outlandish characters during the early days of the superhero genre, including 'Stardust', 'Fantomah', 'Big Red McLane' and 'Space Smith'. Quickly faded into obscurity, his work received cult status among later generations of comic fans. His grotesque creations are the testament of a time when censorship hadn't kicked in and the comic book medium was still inventing itself. Even though they were created for mainstream media, the comics of Fletcher Hanks still carry many elements of "outsider art".
Identity
For decades, nothing was known about Fletcher Hanks. Comic books during the 1930s and 1940s were largely made by anonymous creators, or by creators that used pen names. Sometimes, these were even company pen names, used by many of the artists that worked for a specific studio or publisher. Often it is impossible to single out one creator for a story, as most studios had separate writers, pencilers, inkers, letterers and colorists working on one single story. At the time, Fletcher Hanks was just one of many names that appeared in a credit byline. But still, these stories stood out for their unique style. Characters were often out-of-proportion, the stories weird and surreal, and the action violent and over-the-top. Stories signed with the names 'Barclay Flagg', 'Henry Fletcher', 'Hank Christy', 'Charles Netcher', 'C. C. Starr', 'Bob Jordan', 'Chris Fletcher', 'Carlson Merrick' and 'Lance Ferguson' had the same trademarks, leaving it no doubt that they were made by the same creator who also signed with Fletcher Hanks.
Panel from the Stardust story 'Wolf Eye's Vacuum Tubes' (Fantastic Comics #5, April 1940). The man in the front with the cigarette is a self-portrait by Fletcher Hanks.
Early life
It took until the early 2000s before Fletcher Hanks was rediscovered. Cartoonist and editor Paul Karasik began investigating the mysterious artist's true identity. He tracked down one of the cartoonist's sons, Fletcher Hanks Jr. (1918-2008), who gave him more information about the life and times of this extraordinary comic creator. But still, very little is known about Fletcher Hanks Sr., as the family had no more contact with him since the early 1930s. Fletcher Hanks was born in 1887, and grew up in Oxford, Maryland, a small town on the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His father was a Methodist preacher, his mother the daughter of English immigrants. Young Fletcher was fascinated by comics and baseball, but also turned out a "notorious neighborhood rascal" and eventually a "full-on rogue", as Karasik describes it. At age 23, he took a correspondence course from the W.L. Evans School of Cartooning and Caricaturing. After that, he earned a living by painting murals for wealthy patrons in Westchester, New York.
Most of his income was directly spent on booze. By the time he had his own family - a wife, Alma, and four children - his dependency on alcohol became such a problem, that he turned into an abusive, violent husband and father. To support the family income, Fletcher Jr. held several odd jobs, keeping the money in his hidden piggy bank. One day in 1930, he noticed that his earnings were gone, and so was his father. When he told his mother, she remarked "It's a small price to pay to be rid of the bum." All these events took place before Fletcher Hanks Sr. became a comic book artist. During his talk with Karasik, Hanks Junior mentioned that his father had also made a whole stack of unpublished comic strips about their family life, but his mother had thrown everything away when Hanks Sr. left.
Stardust - 'De Structo and the Headhunter (Big 3 #2, Winter 1941).
Comic books
Since no interviews with Fletcher Hanks Senior exist, it is unknown who his main artistic influences were. His comic art reveals inspiration from 'Dick Tracy' creator Chester Gould, who had the same flair for grotesque characters and sadistic violence. Coincidentally, Gould was a graduate of the same correspondence course. Will Eisner once compared Hanks' work with that of Basil Wolverton, who had started in the comic book industry one year before him. Hanks's superhero comics also evoke the work of Siegel & Shuster, who had just launched their 'Superman' character. In late 1939, Fletcher Hanks made his debut in the comic book industry. Much of his work was done through the Eisner & Iger Studio, a New York City packager that supplied fully produced comic books to publishers like Fox Comics and Fiction House. From the start, Fletcher Hanks was an oddball. While most artists in the early comic book industry were in their twenties, or still teenagers, Hanks was already in his fifties. And unlike his colleagues, who took care of only one part of the production process, Fletcher Hanks wrote, penciled, inked and lettered all of his stories by himself. In little over one year, he created 51 comic stories, using a variety of pen names to simulate either exclusivity for a publisher, or give the impression that there was a larger team of creatives producing all these features.
Fantomah - 'Org's Giant Spiders' (Jungle Comics #15, March 1941).
Characters
Under the name Fletcher Hanks, Hanks introduced 'Stardust the Super Wizard' in the first issue of the Fox Comics title Fantastic Comics, cover-dated December 1939. Feared by criminals and other evil-doers across the universe, Stardust is presented as "the most remarkable man that ever lived", who uses his vast knowledge of interplanetary science to bust up spy mobs everywhere. Stardust was Hanks' most enduring character, as he produced fifteen stories with him throughout his entire comic book tenure. Under the pseudonym Barclay Flagg, Hanks used the same type of superlatives when introducing 'Fantomah - Mystery Woman of the Jungle', the "most remarkable woman that ever lived". First printed in the February 1940 issue of the Fiction House title Jungle Comics, Fantomah devotes her phenomenal powers to protecting the jungle-born. Whenever her "phenomenal sight" detects trouble, she transforms from a beautiful woman into a flying demon-like skull creature that brings her merciless wrath to whomever endangers the peaceful jungle life. Predating William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peter's 'Wonder Woman', Fantomah was one of the first female superheroes in comic books and one of the few Hanks features continued by other creators. After completing fourteen stories, the pseudonymous writer H.B. Hovious took over, presumably with the artist Robert Pious.
Big Red McLane - 'The Lumber Hijackers' (Fight Comics #4, April 1940).
For the Fox title Fantastic Comics, Hanks assumed the pen name Hank Christy to create 'Space Smith', a sort of Flash Gordon on acid. While on a dull inter-lunar space trip with his girlfriend Dianna, Space gets caught up in an evil plot of "The Brain", who wants all Earth people destroyed. In eight stories, Hanks created surreal worlds with the weirdest space creatures. Afterwards, 'Space Smith' was also continued by other artists, albeit still under the pen name Hank Christy. In the debut issue of Fiction House's Fight Comics (January 1940), another Fletcher Hanks feature saw the light. Credited to either Chris Fletcher or Charles Netcher, 'Big Red McLane - King of the Northwoods' was a regular strongman and a loyal lumberjack for the Great Bend Lumber Company. During his adventures, he is regularly confronted by lumberjacks from a rival camp, so-called "lumber hijackers", whom he has to reprimand with his iron fists. Hanks created nine stories with the character. In 1945, publisher Iwin H. Rubin reprinted one of the 'Big Red McLane' stories in his one-shot comic book Witty Comics, renaming the character 'Ted Kane' and its creator to "Tim Burr".
Additional Fletcher Hanks characters were more short-lived. 'Whirlwind Carter' (signed with C.C. Starr) appeared in two issues of Timely's Daring Mystery Comics, while 'Tabu the Jungle Wizard' (as Henry Fletcher in Fiction House's Jungle Comics), 'Tiger Hart' (as Carlson Merrick in Fiction House's Planet Comics), 'Yank Wilson' (as Lance Ferguson in Fox's Fantastic Comics) and 'Buzz Crandall' (as Bob Jordan in Fiction House's Planet Comics) all appeared in only one single story.
Fantomah - 'The Tiger-Women of Wildmoon Mountain' (Jungle Comics #13, January 1941).
Style
Graphically, Fletcher Hanks's comic stories are clean and simple. The high production rhythm and low-quality paper forced him to drop the elaborate cross-hatching style he learned during his correspondence course, and settle upon basic graphics. To save time, Hanks seems to have traced certain elements, particularly the grotesque mugs of his villains, who appear to be exactly the same in several panels. Throughout his work, Hanks shows objects or characters floating in the sky, creating a surreal atmosphere. Plotwise, Fletcher Hanks's comics follow the same naïve good-versus-evil themes as other Golden Age comic book stories. But unlike his contemporaries, Hanks created heroes and villains who don't mess around. Before heroes like Stardust or Fantomah come to the scene, the villains have generally caused the most terrible mayhem and gruesome deaths. Their ambitions are never subtle, ranging from "destroying every large city on earth" to "ending democracy and civilization forever". These scenes of world devastation are shown by Hanks with graphic detail. In their retribution, the Hanks heroes are equally merciless. Instead of wise-cracking while giving the bad guys a good beat-up, they stoïcally give their enemies some of their own medicine, often several pages long.
As Karasik described it, they wielded "the fiery sword of (often poetic) justice with a whif of Old Testament hellfire and brimstone". Hanks seems to have enjoyed long-winded action and torture sequences, with visual metaphors being portrayed literally. In one story, for instance, a thug is captured who schemed to kidnap all the heads of state. Our hero punishes him by making his body shrink, so only his head remains. In another tale, a traitor is turned into an actual rat. Other villains suffer gruesome deaths, like a mad scientist whose own 'Super Gorillas' tear him limb from limb.
Stardust - 'The Fifth Columnists' (Fantastic Comics #13, December 1940).
Later life and death
In early 1941, Fletcher Hanks suddenly left the comic book scene, and was never heard of again. His final stories appeared in issues that were cover-dated March 1941. It is assumed that Hanks lived the rest of his life in poverty as an alcoholic. In January 1976, he was found frozen to death on a New York City park bench. It took several months before the remaining Hanks family in Oxford learned from his passing.
All in all, his children had no fond memories of their estranged father, and didn't even learn of his cartooning past until 2004. After his father had left the family home, Fletcher Hanks Junior lived an adventurous life himself. During World War II, he was a pilot for the China National Aviation Corporation. He flew 347 trips in unarmed C-47s delivering supplies to inaccessible areas of China using a path from India over the south ridge of the Himalayas called "The Hump". After the war, Hanks Junior went into the seafood packaging business. He was the inventor of the hydraulic conveyor clam-digger that still is in use today. The invention landed him an appearance on the television game show, 'What's My Line?'. In 1997, he returned to China, where he and a group of Chinese soldiers found the wreckage of the CNAC 53, the airplane piloted by American Jim Fox and his Chinese co-pilot and operator. He chronicled the plane's fateful trip in the self-published book 'The Saga of CNAC 53'.
Whirlwind Carter - 'Planet of Black-Light' " (Daring Mystery Comics #5, June 1940).
Legacy
In the 2000s, Fletcher Hanks Senior came back to the public attention, when Paul Karasik and Fantagraphics collected his stories in the volumes 'I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets' (2007) and 'You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!' (2009). In the back of the first volume, Karasik detailed his encounter with Fletcher Hanks Junior in an autobiographical comic story. In 2016, both books were compiled in the single-volume 'Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All: The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks' (Fantagraphics, 2016), which had a 2018 edition published in French by Actes Sud.
As an allround comic creator, Fletcher Hanks has left a highly personal body of work. In terms of weirdness and absurdism, he joins the ranks of other Golden Age oddballs like Basil Wolverton and Boody Rogers. During the Internet age, Fletcher Hanks has received a cult status. One of his celebrity fans was novelist Kurt Vonnegut (famous for 'Slaughterhouse Five'), who declared the decovery of Hanks' comics as "treasures (...) itself a work of art." And veteran cartoonist Robert Crumb once remarked: "Fletcher Hanks was a twisted dude".
For the 'SpongeBob Comics Annual-Size Super-Giant Swimtacular' issue #2 (2014), based on Stephen Hillenburg's animated cartoon series 'SpongeBob', Robert Sikoryak drew a 'SpongeBob' comic, scripted by Paul Karasik, in the offbeat style of Fletcher Hanks.
Space Smith - 'Planet Boodu' (Fantastic Comics #8, July 1940).