Customer Reviews

You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!

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Fletcher Hanks, who also went by various aliases, was certainly one of the more unusual artists from the history of comic books. When comics were very new and very popular a lot of the artists used were frankly rather poor. It would be easy to overlook Hanks as just another of these crude early practitioners, and in fact that is exactly what happened to him until relatively recently. However Hanks' art really was not crude but it was very unusual. Fletcher realized right from the start that comics should be more then just real and everything should be pushed further then would be tolerable in any other media. For instance Hanks would make the hero so tall and massive that it would be hard to view him as an ordinary human, which was off course the whole point. Hanks' scripts reflect the same need for exaggeration; the title for the book comes from a line in an actual story. For example it is not enough for a villain to be defeated but terrible punishment would also be inflicted. It is safe to say that Hanks' stories are unlike anything else in comics.

Art restorations for both Hanks books are just terrific. The paper for the original comics has yellowed and the inks have faded. However the scans used in these books have all been restored to their original vibrancy with good clean white backgrounds. The restored scans are all nicely printed on flat paper in a book large enough to make for enjoyable reading. I wish everyone published comic book reprints this way and perhaps someday they will.

This book is meant as a companion piece to the earlier "I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!". For someone only interested in purchasing one book on Fletcher Hanks I would suggest the first volume. Not because the stories found in the first book are any better then the second, but because it explains Hanks' history in a graphical story by Paul Karasik. Karasik did a great job and what he reveals about Fletcher Hanks puts the artist in a totally new perspective.

Instead of a graphic story, "You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!" has an introduction by Paul Karasik. This introduction makes even clearer that Karasik comes from more of an academic then a comic book background. Here and in the previous book, Karasik makes much of the fact that Fletcher Hanks did all the scripting, drawing, inking and lettering himself. While the making of comic books is typically a division of labors, when comic books first started that often was not the case. For example before they teamed up in the earliest work of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon both artists did all these steps themselves as well. Further evidence of Karasik's academic background can be seen in his trying to answer the question of whether Fletcher Hanks was an outsider artist. It is not a question that would even occur to a comic book fan. There is no such a thing as an outsider comic book artist, at least until recently, because comics were popular publications that required cooperation between many individuals to go from the artist's drawing into the hands of the purchaser. No one person could truly do it all outside of the mainstream; a realization that Karasik does come to as well. That Paul Karasik does not come from a comic book background does not detract from his essay, he still has some interesting things to say including a short interview with Hanks' former employer Will Eisner. After all those years it is amazing Eisner still remembered Hanks. Hanks had also worked for Joe Simon but Joe no longer recalls him.

It has more variety than the previous book. It has a nice introduction that tells pretty much all that can be learned about Fletcher Hanks at this point. The biography is far from complete. What was he doing between 1930 and 1939? How did he wind up drawing comic books in New York? Why did he stop after only two years? What did he do with himself for 35 years until he was found dead on a park bench? We may never know the answers to these questions. All we have are the reminiscences of Hanks' children, and approximately 330 pages of comics.

And what about these comics? The intro asserts that Hanks should not be considered an "outsider" since he was a professional artist and was very much working "inside" the comics industry at the time. The intro also soberly reminds us that the comics we are about to read "were created by a man who once kicked his four-year-old son down a flight of stairs."

It was in this volume that I realized Fletcher Hanks could actually draw really well when he wanted to, and that therefore the crudity of style in the first volume was intentional, the result of a conscious decision imposed by the limitations of comics publishing at that time. It was in this volume that I really started to see and appreciate exactly what Fletcher Hanks was doing. Their bizarre appeal aside, these comics stand on their own as pure art. There's a certain naive, intense sincerity running through them which is rare in this medium. It hits you on an unexpected level.

Why did Hanks quit drawing comics? Perhaps more importantly, did he ever find personal redemption? Did he ever come to grips with his inner demons? In light of the scant information we have about him, one is tempted to view the story of Fantomah vs. the Jungle Demon (page 124) as wistfully autobiographical. It is equally likely that Hanks was nothing more than a hack, exploiting his own artistic talent to scrape up some booze money, and then quitting when he got bored or found a better racket. Maybe he went off on a bender and got fired for missing his deadlines. We will never know. All we have is two-and-a-half years' worth of truly strange comics. And maybe that's all we need from someone like Fletcher Hanks.

If you seek a monument, this book is it.

This book is a follow up to I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!. Taken together, the two books reprint the complete comic book works of Fletcher Hanks. Hanks worked in the comic book industry between 1939 and 1941, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. All his stories featured heroes battling dastardly villains. The most notable of his heroes are Space Smith, Stardust "The Super Wizard", Fantomah "Mystery Woman of the Jungle" and Big Red McLane "King of the Northwoods". The comics Hanks did were like nothing else or his era, or any other era for that matter. The first thing you may notice is that his male heroes had very long necks, but beyond that, his stories are very strange. In fact, the stories frequently make no sense at all! I realize I haven't done a very good job of describing the comics, but it's hard to describe the indescribable.

This dude is to superheroes what cancer is to health: some weird, hyperactive form of life that is ugly and stupid but powerful. What story? What characters? Just look at the disproportionate bodies and bizarre monsters. Pretty cool in a gross kinda way, and even better for apparently being unintentionally so.

Fletcher Hanks had a rather odd comics career. Although comic book writing was generally a young man's game in his era, Hanks didn't produce any comics till he was in his fifties, and he was done within a couple years, even though he'd live for over three more decades. That brief productive period of 1939-1941 is captured in its entirety in a pair of books: I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets and its successor (and the subject of this review), You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation.

This second volume has around three dozen stories, each just a few pages long, as well as an introduction by Paul Karasik that provides a biography (Karasik also provided material for the previous volume). The stories feature a number of different superheroes, but three stand out.

Stardust is "the most remarkable man of all time", a super-wizard who observes evil-doers from his remote star and then travels to Earth in his tubular spacial on accelerated supersolar light waves. He then uses his god-like powers to mete out justice against such villains as the Emerald Men of Asperus and Rip-the-Blood.

Fantomah is the most remarkable woman who ever lived. She protects the jungle and like Stardust, has power enough to stop villains such as the Scarlet Shadow, the Tiger Women (not to be confused with the Leopard Women of Venus) and Zomax, the Demonized Marine Scientist. When angry, she turns into a skeletal figure. Big Red McClane, on the other hand, is a lumberjack, but no mere mortal: he wins any brawl he gets in, no matter how many oppose him. These tales of the King of the North Woods are the only ones with any real continuity between stories.

There are also several stories featuring Space Smith (who fights the Leopard Women), a pair with Whirlwind Carter, and one-shots of Tabu, Tiger Hart and Yank Wilson. To a large extent, the stories are all pretty similar, with bizarre villains finding themselves thoroughly outclassed by superheroes. Stardust and Fantomah in particular act like gods, having few qualms about allotting divine justice, sometimes with death, and sometimes with a more ironic punishment.

Hanks to a large extent needs to be experienced as any description will fall short. His over-the-top writing fits in the so-bad-it's-good category, and his art has its own special flavor: it's straightforward and simple, but has a style that has it's own bizarreness. Several of the blurbs on the back of this book describe Hanks as the Ed Wood of comics, and this is not a bad way to describe him. Read this book or face the wrath of Fantomah!

I like this book a lot and some of the stories really are first rate. But some are just too "normal" compared to the other Fletcher Hanks stories inside "I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!". However, I found one of the Fantomah stories in particular to be very revealing. It isn't like any of the other Fantomah stories and based on the introduction to this volume and the story "Whatever happened to Flatcher Hanks" from "I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!" it seems to be autobiographical and quite sad.

While fans of Fletcher Hanks will certainly enjoy this volume as it seems that every comic he authored is now available in print, other people might be a little less enthused by this book.

With the publication of this book it becomes clear that Hanks had about 4 stories in him and repeated them over and over. The starkness of his vision makes the stories very bold and readable on their own but a sense of repetition sets in halfway thru this book. However, Karasik has done his research and lifts Hanks out of some of the hazy mystery the last volume had no choice but to leave him in. Hanks worked in the earliest comic art producing shops (one was run by Eisner!) and what initially seemed like a crude amateurness to his work now is more understandable as a by-product of short deadlines and the fact that unusually Hanks worked by himself from start to finish. And Karasik includes some of Hanks non-comic art which shows that he could produce some decent (if not outstanding) work. Hanks is still a drunken lout, nothing to change that.

I like this book a lot and read it in one sitting. I would recommend the first book if you are considering it as a gift.

Fletcher Hanks' two year run as a comic book artists is documented well in two companion volumes. Both are worth owning. The first volume is more focused, shorter and gleans out the high points of his work. The second volume has more content, some of it derivative of other's work, such as Alex Raymond - but with a severe edge and jacked up composition that really pushes emotional impact to an extreme.

There is a thin veneer of lurid color and stoic expressions that barely cover the fear, anger, violence and bigotry below the surface that the artist feels. Criminals and monsters are always deformed. There is almost always a secret conspiracy involved. In this aspect, as the editor of this volume points out, he is a lot like Chester Gould of "Dick Tracy" fame.

The plots are as minimalist as they come, because Fletcher Hanks wants to spend his time on the stuff that mattered - which is action, conflict and revenge. He is primarily a visual thinker, and that shows in his work.

He is at once a curious side-note in the early days of superhero comic books, but also a inspiration for design - he does things that you aren't supposed to do (recycling body posture and expression from once scene to another, flattening perspective) but makes it work. There is a brutal, direct simplicity to his work that shows that sometimes the most simple thing (again - composition, line and color) can be the most effective.

The ENTIRE Fletcher Hanks oeuvre is now in print for the first time! Who needs any other Superhero comics?

Karasik has done a crackajack detective job (NO there aren't any more missing Hanks stories-THEY ARE ALL HERE) and in many ways this anthology tops the previous for sheer, breathtaking lunacy and hypnagogic delineation.
Don't hesitate!