Fletcher Hanks’ career in comics lasted just over a year, from the end of 1939 to the winter of 1941. In that short period, he produced, in the words of the cartoonist Paul Karasik, “the most twisted comic book stories of all time.”
First rediscovered in the 1980s by Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, where Karasik was associate editor, Hanks both fascinated and alienated comics creators, all of who asked the same question: Where did this come from?
Two decades later, Karasik came back with answers.
In the aughts, Karasik co-edited two volumes of Hanks’ complete work, I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! In 2016, Fantagraphics published the collection in a one-volume edition, Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!, and last month, they re-released the book for another half-generation of readers. Karasik’s oeuvre includes a graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and, with Mark Newgarden, the landmark study How to Read Nancy—but for me, his attempt to solve the enigma of Fletcher Hanks may be his most important achievement.1
Hanks, he discovered, was a man rooted in a very different culture than the one which shaped the Roosevelt-ian humanism of Golden Age superheroes. His was a world of violence, masculinity, and stern religiosity. It was nasty and all too American.
“What’s remarkable is that in story after story he comes up with new ways of depicting holocausts,” Karasik told me. “He never repeats himself in terms of his visual language.”2 Giant spiders devour the inhabitants of an African city. Disembodied hands murder men, women, and children. The punishments are the stuff of Dante. A Fifth Columnist transforms into a Bosch-ian man-rat. A mass murderer is jailed out in space in a “prison of eternal ice.” “You shall become a frozen spacite, able to see and think, but always motionless!” Stardust, the Super Wizard, tells him. “In your frozen condition, you’ll live forever—to think about your crimes!”
Hanks’ heroes alienate. They lack the goofy charisma of Superman or Batman. They are not your friendly big brothers and they are not objects of your pre-adolescent sexual fantasies. Stardust stands at least three regular humans wide and four humans tall, and his expression is creepy and stoical. Fantomah has a muscular frame and the face of a sweet starlet, but her visage transforms into a skull when she indulges her powers.
Hanks’ villains, with their oversized heads and gargoyle features, recall the rogues gallery of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. They are Hitlerian, far more than the debonair Germans in Warner Bros. melodramas, and their schemes defy in both narrative and visuality the most batshit worlds of Hanks’ contemporary Surrealists.
Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay turns the Golden Age comics creator into an archetype. He is a Jewish boy in his teens or very early twenties, unpretentious but precocious, a genius and a kibitzer. He can’t get a job on Wasp-dominated Madison Avenue, but he can find freedom working in a medium that lacks respect. His stories have subtext: New Deal politics, a celebration of the American immigrant, a deep love for New York, memories of the Old World Yiddishkeit, homosexuality, and heterosexual kink.
The full story of the era is even richer, more complicated, and it includes several tragic characters, superfluous men cast out of the American economy. Most remain anonymous. Karasik learned about Hanks, who didn’t leave much of a paper trail, from his son, Fletcher Hanks Jr. Hanks, it turned out, was a brute.
Born in 1889, Hanks grew up the son of a Methodist minister in Oxford, an oystering town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His father’s sermons were apocalyptic, the society of Oxford mean. In his early twenties, his mother gave Hanks money for an art correspondence course, and it led to a decades-long pattern. Hanks would take trips to Westchester County, New York, paint murals for wealthy householders, and then return home to waste his pay on drink.
Hanks trespassed against God and man, his community, his family, and his children. He refereed wrestling fights in the woods, one of which led to a man’s death. He crushed the bones of his wife’s face and demanded that her injuries be left to heal on their own. He threw his four-year-old son down the stairs. And he was petty. One night, when he was 40, right at the dawn of the Great Depression, he stole the change from Fletcher Jr.’s piggy bank and took off for New York.
Karasik locates Hanks everywhere in the comics, both the minister’s son and the adult sinner. His heroes, good-looking men who achieve a manly ideal, are aspirational. His villains have damned themselves. Is the skeletal face of Fantomah a portrait of the woman he disfigured? Does Hanks desire, maybe even need her retribution?
When I first attempted to write this essay a year ago, I tried to make sense of what I felt to be a connection between Fletcher Hanks and MAGA ideology. At first glance, to this urbane, agnostic liberal, Hanks is born of the soil that produced our moment, but no—the apocalyptic fantasies of nineteenth-century America are vivid and grand. They demand that the worshipper listen and reevaluate everything about his body and soul, that he stare straight at the Devil, refuse his temptations, and then seek out the undeserved love of God. The aesthetics of MAGA, in contrast, are tawdry. The avatars of the current administration—a fascist Defense Secretary obsessed with male grooming, a monomaniacal xenophobe with a skull-like face—are not all that weird, just shallow and pathetic.
When Karasik showed Fletcher Jr. his father’s comics, the son saw the father who had robbed his piggy bank—not in metaphor as Karasik would as he pieced together the artist’s biography—but literally, on the page. He appears as a regular G-Man, a human extra, a decent fellow, neither a hero of a serial feature nor a German Expressionist grotesque. Perhaps, during his quiet, steady moments, when Hanks forgot the words of his father’s sermons, and the need for drink felt less urgent, that is all he wanted for himself.
Hanks’ comics are rooted in an America that has little to do with today’s rising authoritarian state. Hanks is a citizen of a New World rooted in the Old Testament. He sees, wholly feels greatness and evil, but unlike a MAGA bully, he secretly yearns for a country in which neither extreme exists, a land in which he can live in peace.
Buy the Book
Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All! The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks
