Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks by Paul Karasik book review

By nature, comic art has been unpredictable, its deeper meanings as often elusive as banal, but above all vernacular. It gets no respect—a stand-up comic’s phrase now itself grown old—and needs none. At least until recent decades when the graphic novel began to replace the art book in the libraries of those (mostly younger) readers, the minority of them who still have growing libraries.

Glen David Gold, in his preface to the troubled mind of Fletcher Hanks, gives us a wonderful glimpse into his own discovery of the forgotten comic artist. He refers in passing to Henry Darger, whose work is the epitome of “outsider art” discovered in recent years and lifted up into museum displays.The reference is a good one even if Hanks was closer in, almost an accepted comic artist. The weirdness factor, however, points elsewhere.

Paul Karasik, a noted comic artist and commentator, fills in the picture with a short introduction. Hanks, born in 1887, son of a Methodist minister in Oxford, Maryland, joined a cartoonist school-by-mail in his teen years, the same school that enrolled E.C. Segar, Hank Ketcham and Chester Gould at different times. Hanks pretty soon married, had four children, and meanwhile indulged himself in heavy drinking and carousing, including violence against his own family. He disappeared with the family’s cash in 1930, pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction, resurfacing almost a decade later, several states away.

The new comic book industry was booming by 1939, with more room for unknowns, dubiously talented nonprofessionals, than likely at other times. It was also booming with superheroes and exotic adventures, outer space to jungle, airplane adventures to more bizarre and almost inexplicable genre. Hanks, drawing under several names (publishers imaginatively expanded their supposed list of artists in this way), could be identified as suited to violence, revenge, and such-like behavior that would have brought any consulting psychological to a ready conclusion. Hanks disappeared from the trade and from sight two years later. The introduction suggests that the overly-indulgent aunt of his early life was replaced by another indulgent lady in 1941, and he could go on being as dissolute as he chose…until his luck ran out.

There must be more to it. Perhaps because I was asked to write an introduction to the reprint edition of The Boy Commandos (first appearance, 1943), a comic with plenty of anti-fascist violence, I took pleasure in nearly all of it—as directed, by the ragtag ethnic bunch, toward the genuinely evil ones. Hanks, an adult in 1939, could already see in the newspapers and more graphically, in newsreels, the looming horror of war violence. Hanks’s heroes, in contrast to the courageous teens of Boy Commandos, looks pretty much the same, strip after strip, whether the theme is cosmic or human. Big muscles. Not a big talker. Not a lover, either, although the occasional beset female, human or otherwise, sometimes appeals to his good nature.

Karasik points to a certain parallel of Hanks’s work with Surrealism in 1939, very much part of the art world and even a popular culture world, thanks largely to Salvatore Dali. The role of the unconscious, introduced or dramatized in art, finds a ready home in these comics, barely below the surface. The surrealists seemed to know what they were doing, more or less, and how it fitted into the world of art. If in doubt, they had leader-savant Andre Breton to explain it to them.

Hanks, hacking out a living over the drawing board in the cramped quarters of a comic publishers’ office, had no theorist or savant to explain or to offer him inspiration. We can guess why he began drawing comics, as an extension of a youthful hobby, but no one knows why he stopped, let alone what was going through his mind as he plotted and drew his oeuvre. Found dead on a park bench in Manhattan, he reminds me of the uncle I never met, reportedly on or near skid row, Chicago, possibly passing in the same year, 1976.

What did he leave behind? We move quickly past a few pages of trial efforts made for the school, and onto a Joe Palooka knockoff, “Moe M. Down, ‘King of the Canvass Kissers,’”  a “brainless bone-buster” with a woman manager. Hanks quickly hit his stride with SciFi superheroes and stays there for most of his two year run.

Every story, almost every panel, looks like he could have used another round of training as an artist. The faces are wrong, if not terribly wrong. The backgrounds appear done in a hurry, without any artistic intention whatsoever. Violence is the key. Stardust, known as “The Super Wizard,” has almost unimaginable powers. He is, after all, “master of space and planetary forces,” whose “scientific use of rays” protect him from all kinds of assaults.

As the “most remarkable man that ever lived,” he can break up the conspiracies of mobsters and not only by them. A “Fifth Column” of traitors seek to destroy New York with their terrible techno-weapons. Strardust comes to the rescue, finally turning the leader into a harmless human rodent. The last panel nevertheless warns in the last panel,  “America…Beware of the Fifth Column.” Was Hanks sneaking into the German-American Bund meetings still drawing crowds in 1940?

But this is by no means Hanks’s finest superhero. Fantomah, “Mystery Woman of the Jungle” and “the most remarkable woman that ever lived,” spends her time defending the jungle population of tribespeople, and likewise the animals, against militarized white invaders. She has the power to evoke nature’s revenge, and she reminds me more than a little of Aquaman, perhaps my own favorite hero.

Thus not only the usual lions, tigers, etc, but “beasts unknown to white men” and looking amazingly like dinosaurs, also “respond to her wizardry.”  Sometimes, moments of rage against the wrongdoers. she changes the form of her face that most remarkably becomes a skull seeking revenge for martyred Africans. And then…she becomes a beautiful blonde again!

There’s more here,in Hanks’ own bestiary, including a few continuing odd characters like two-fisted Big Red Maclane of the northern woods. Without space adventures, the wild imagination of Hanks becomes pretty mundane. Mere comic book filler.

But let’s look at these comics in a somewhat different light: they seem to offer a subconscious art, art of a certain kind, with garish colors, violence, and patterns of a troubled artist at a most troubling moment in modern US history. Amidst a very mixed scene of different painting styles taking the stage or gallery in 1940— and against the background of the rising comic book—older artistic fashions began to fade. The severely representative, historical-minded public art of the New Deal is losing its lure. Perhaps it was too positive or just too literal to appeal any longer in the same way.

Famously, for those who followed contemporary major art trends, Jose Clemente Orozco, a representative of Mexican super-realism, offered up ”Dive Bomber and Tank,” in glaring colors. An emerging pattern of “Symbolic Realism” took on  scary psychological themes. The moment saw what would become Abstract Expressionism on the rise, alongside the gloomy realism of Edward Hopper and George Ault, among others. Would Hanks, working on his comics in New York, the center of art interest and publicity in the US, have been unmoved by these widely-publicized examples?

Perhaps, with Hanks, comic art is already pointing toward the slightly more sophisticated brutality of Crime Does Not Pay, the leading popular series during the decade just before censorship. Or perhaps toward its chief rival in those years, and perceived enemy of children’s minds: horror comics. Born under the shadow of Fascism’s menace, drawn by men whose families often enough faced the worst of the horrors ahead, comic art could not very well avoid a kind of psychic crisis invading popular art. Here we find Fletcher Hanks.

Paul Buhle