Divine Justice of the Weirdo Gods
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17988_blvr46.qxd 7/4/07 9:13 AM Page 40 ROBERT ITO DIVINE JUSTICE OF THE WEIRDO GODS FLETCHER HANKS’S WEIRDLY PROPORTIONED FIGURES ARE PERFECT FOR A COMIC THAT RECALLS NOTHING SO MUCH AS THE SCRAWLINGS OF A RAGE-FILLED SCHOOLBOY. DISCUSSED: Heinrich Hoffmann, Giant Bipedal Rats, Fort Knox, Divine Justice, Bruce Lee, Paul Karasik, Clutch Cargo, Generic Humanity, Protecting the Jungle, Struwwelpeter, Drunken Bums, Flocks of Geese letcher Hanks, nicknamed stories. Hanks completed a few dozen of “Christy” after Baseball them between 1939 and 1941, the dawn of Hall of Famer Christy what is now considered the genre’s golden Mathewson, was, by all age. There are few remaining copies accounts, a louse. An alco- because the characters didn’t catch on with Fholic and a wife-beater, Hanks once kicked readers, and Hanks, as an artist, didn’t catch his four-year-old son, Fletcher Jr., down a flight of stairs. on with collectors. Among his creations were Stardust, an The punt and subsequent tumble left the boy unable to interplanetary crime fighter, and Fantomah, a white speak intelligibly for five years. “My old man didn’t like jungle-protectress. runts,” explained the younger Fletcher. The boy was This month, Fantagraphics publishes I Shall Destroy All runty, to be sure, and suffered from rickets, but his dad’s the Civilized Planets! The Comics of Fletcher Hanks. Edited by rage was something beyond reckoning. “My father,” he cartoonist Paul Karasik, who discovered the artist in the said,“was the most no-good drunken bum you can find.” early ’80s while he was an associate editor at Art Spiegel- When Hanks wasn’t pummeling his wife or abusing man’s comics review RAW, the fifteen-story collection his young son, he wrote and drew superhero comic-book boasts visual wonders freakish and rare. There are a rabid 40 Illustrations from I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (Fantagraphics, 2007) 17988_blvr46.qxd 7/4/07 9:13 AM Page 41 mandrill and a furry Venusian, ous ray.” Stardust makes his hand examples of poetic justice, but are asphyxiated magazine editors and grow to the size of a large skillet, they? Hanks seems to think so, as giant bipedal rats. Bombings, grabs Slant-Eye, then flies with him do the cartoon heroes who do his gassings,and islands turned waterside high above the villain’s island. He bidding. “You tried to destroy the down are all part of the Hanks land- uses his powerful “agitator ray” to heads of a great nation,” Stardust scape. Most peculiar of all, however, create a tidal wave, which swamps tells the evil De Structo, “so your is that, contrary to every rule of the the island. Stardust drops Slant-Eye own head shall be destroyed.”Upon genre, the stories are almost com- into an inland whirlpool, which closer examination, however, the pletely devoid of fights. sucks the villain down into a tropi- justice doesn’t seem so poetical, if Most traditional superhero cal cave.“Help! Help!!” cries Slant- for no other reason than that it all comics follow a predictable format: Eye. A “shining octopus of gold” feels so forced.The spiders don’t,for The villain does something villain- grabs the villain in his tentacles. example, feast on the villain of their ous. Hero and villain fight.The vil- “Ow-w,” yelps Slant-Eye. “This is own accord; he is delivered over to lain is captured, or beaten into sub- your fate,” says Stardust. “You the spiders by the jungle heroine mission, or is accidentally killed. craved gold, so here it is.” The Fantomah. De Structo’s head Within this tripartite structure, the golden octopus pulls Slant-Eye, for- doesn’t explode on its own because pre-conflict setup and post-conflict merly crying and yelping, now it’s been packed too full of evilness; comeuppance serve largely as book- “speechless with dread,” down into rather, Stardust flings it into the ends to the fight scenes, which his underwater lair, where, presum- greedy waiting hands of the Giant make up the narrative meat. In the ably, he is devoured. Headhunter.That’s not really poetic tales of Fletcher Hanks, however, Other stories exhibit the same justice—that’s vengeance, done there are hardly any fights at all— fight-free narratives and moral sym- with an eye to the poetic. It would few,certainly,of any consequence or metry. In one, a man leads an army be as if the younger Fletcher, now duration. Instead, there are extended of gigantic spiders into a jungle vil- grown, had returned to his family setups during which the villain lage, where they feast on panic- home and pushed his old man commits a variety of horrific acts. stricken natives “by the thousand”; down a flight of stairs. Understand- After a speedy capture (often with- in the end, the villain is eaten by able, yes; appropriate, maybe; poetic out a blow thrown) the reader is one of his own spiders. In another, justice—not so much. treated to panel after panel of the a wealthy pilot looses fifty thousand What it most resembles is divine villain being tortured, humiliated, gigantic panthers onto the streets of justice, but, if so, what weirdos these and tossed about. New York; later, he is eaten by the gods be! Fantomah is a Garboesque Here is one story: Stardust,“the fearsome felines. The didactic har- beauty whose head becomes a most remarkable man who ever mony between sin and punishment ghastly bluish skull when she be- lived,” discovers a plot to steal all reminds one of Struwwelpeter, Hein- comes angry. Stardust, a.k.a. “the the gold from Fort Knox. The evil rich Hoffmann’s nineteenth-centu- most remarkable man that ever Slant-Eye (despite his title, he is not ry collection of children’s stories. In lived,” delights in transforming his of Asian descent) plans to use the Hoffmann’s book,a disobedient girl beaten foes into rats, or midgets, or gold to establish a “modern pirate plays with matches and is burned to simply flinging them into space. If stronghold” on a South Seas island. a crisp, a boy refuses to eat his soup these are gods, they’re deities of the He and his henchmen drop gas and dies of malnutrition, a thumb- Old Testament variety, which does- bombs on the fort, then beat many sucker’s thumbs are clipped off with n’t make for the most sympathetic of the guards to death. Before the giant scissors.And so it goes. or nuanced of characters. Milton’s gangsters can steal the loot, Stardust At first blush, many of Hanks’s God was like this, which was why,in incapacitates them with a “mysteri- stories look and sound like classic Paradise Lost, everyone ended up 41 17988_blvr46.qxd 7/4/07 9:13 AM Page 42 rooting for Satan. something along the lines of Sodom don’t see it in their faces. What’s missing is some sense of and Gomorrah, or Bruce Lee beat- Which is a fortunate thing, since motivation (say, a god’s love for its ing on the Japanese in Fist of Fury— Hanks wasn’t much for such art- people), but neither Stardust nor but both heroes dispatch their foes school frou-frou as facial ex- Fantomah seems to have any people, with a kind of smug detachment, or pressions. Maybe they were too hard let alone any friends to speak of. the sternness of a parent scolding a to draw, or too time consuming? They protect generic humanity, or, three-year-old. If Stardust and Fan- The faces of Stardust and Fantomah in Fantomah’s case, the inhabitants tomah are having fun hanging their are marvels of immobility; in a twist of some unnamed jungle. Righteous foes from the tops of trees or turn- on the masked superhero, their own rage might spice things up here— ing them into icicles, we certainly placid faces resemble masks. Star- 42 17988_blvr46.qxd 7/4/07 9:13 AM Page 43 dust’s lips neither move nor open tion, perhaps even insulted. “I think bench in New York City,”he says. In even as the action swirls around he’s a great draftsman,” he says. the next panel, Karasik recalls a him—a kind of Clutch Cargo in “Would Martín Ramírez be a comic in which Stardust imprisons reverse. The faces of his villains are greater artist if he could draw bet- the villain in “the floating prison of equally static (except when said vil- ter?”Touché! 1 eternal ice.”“In your frozen condi- lains are being tortured by the And really,who’s thinking about tion,” says Stardust, “you’ll live for- hero), and tend toward the physiog- such details as head size, when there ever—to think about your crimes!” nomical: ugly, brutish faces equal are lions and elephants being chased If this were a conventional comic, ugly, brutish souls. through the jungle by enormous there would be an appropriate visual This, then, is as good a place as flaming hands? Who cares if or aural cue: a light bulb flickering any to discuss Hanks’s drawing nobody’s lips move, when there are on, or an audible whammo. Instead, skills. If judged purely on things like caverns crawling with white cobras, there is only an image of Karasik, an scale or proportion or realism, he and gigantic tornado machines empty thought-balloon dangling fails. Heads are too small for their threatening the people of Earth? above his head. Here, then, is the bodies, and there is little feel for The weird proportions and hulkish poetic justice that Hanks, the how people actually inhabit or figures are, in many ways, perfect for weirdo cartoonist, had been striving move through space.