There is an unspoken contract between an author and his audience; the audience wants to understand what the author wants to communicate, and both sides try their best to uphold their side of the contract. This is so boring and obvious that we take it completely for granted. Which is why a work like Fletcher Hanks'
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! is so unnerving. Fletcher Hanks refuses to honor this contract. His stories operate outside the law.
Most people I've told about this collection think that it must be a hoax. They're not;
Fletcher Hanks was entirely real, and the stories he created between 1939 and 1941--the genesis of the superhero comics era--were real, too. The thing is, it's easier to dismiss Stardust the Super-Wizard and Fantoma the jungle goddess as the work of a post-modern prankster than to accept them as a relic from comics' Golden Age. Hanks' stories violate the visual and narrative rules that readers have come to expect from comics, especially superhero comics. His stories feel like the product of a
Chinese box; meticulously crafted content, devoid of understanding or context.
Panels are unusually framed, often showing only the backs of characters' heads or stark silhouettes. Images of death and violent destruction are front-and-center. Hanks returns to several unusual motifs across the stories, including the surreal images of hundreds of bodies floating into the air, or of multiple people merging into a single body. His heroes don't bother fighting the villains, instead skipping straight to the dispensing of petulant and arbitrary "poetic" justice. These stories often spend longer detailing the bad guys' surreal punishments than outlining or executing their nefarious schemes. In one particularly memorable story, Stardust freezes a group of thugs, melts the rank-and-file, turns the ringleaders into rats, drives them out to sea, drowns them in a tidal wave, and finally returns a human head to the mastermind's rat body and deposits this deformed chimera at the doorstep of the FBI. Meanwhile, further down the newsstand, Superman is throwing cars at people.
As I read these stories, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick; not of his writing, but of the nightmarish, malleable worlds his characters inhabit. I felt like one of those characters, struggling to find a set of rules to explain my melting reality. Even though Hanks' stories make no sense, the human instinct can't help and try to understand. But you can't force a square peg into a black hole, and this is what gives his primal, awful stories their continued resonance today.
More images at:
http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2006/07/fletcher-hanks-fletcher-hanks-comics.html
