 | | |
| I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! | 
 enlarge | Author: Fletcher Hanks
Creator: Paul Karasik
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $13.57
You Save: $6.38 (32%)
Buy New/Used from $11.66
Avg. Customer Rating:  (20 reviews)
Sales Rank: 113339
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 124
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 1560978392
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9781560978398
ASIN: 1560978392
Publication Date: June 20, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A dizzying collection from the Ed Wood of comics.
Welcome to the bizarre world of Fletcher Hanks, Super Wizard of the Inkwell. Fletcher Hanks worked for only a few years in the earliest days of the comic book industry (1939-1941). Because he worked in a gutter medium for second-rate publishers on third-rate characters, his work has been largely forgotten. But among aficionados he is legendary.
At the time, comic books were in their infancy. The rules governing their form and content had not been established. In this Anything Goes era, Hanks' work stands out for its thrilling experimentation. At once both crude and visionary, cold and hot as hell, Hanks' work is hard to pigeon hole. One thing is for certain: the stuff is bent.
Hanks drew in a variety of genres depicting science-fiction saviors, white women of the jungle, and he-man loggers. Whether he signed these various stories "Henry Fletcher" or "Hank Christy" or "Barclay Flagg" there is no mistaking the unique outsider style of Fletcher Hanks.
Cartoonist Paul Karasik (co-adapter of Paul Auster's City of Glass, and co-author of The Ride Together: A Memoir of Autism in the Family) has spent years tracking down these obscure and hard to find stories buried in the back of long-forgotten comic book titles. Karasik has also uncovered a dark secret: why Hanks disappeared from the comics scene.
This book collects 15 of his best stories in one volume followed by an afterword which solves the mystery of "Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks," the mysterious cartoonist who created a hailstorm of tales of brutal retribution...and then mysteriously vanished.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 "Stardust, whose scientific knowledge has made him the most remarkable man ever... " December 31, 2008
Fletcher Hanks was no undiscovered Will Eisner or Carl Barks, but his often bizarre comics has fascinated many anyway. To tell the truth, there is some strips in this collection that just are plain, bloody bad! But the Stardust stories are worth the price alone. Crudely drawn, heavily written of utter eye-for-an-eye justice. Villains are crumbled together, thrown around, transformed or frozen down by the abnormal build Stardust and his outrageous arsenal of rays! The greatest is perhaps a very prophetic story, where Stardust stops an invasion of USA by a unseen man who we know is Hitler! In the end a man who could be Roosevelt ask the question: "Can it happen again?"
Also included is a comic by editor Paul Karasik about the uncovering of the obscure cartoonist.
 Vengeance is mine and I shall repay July 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Fletcher Hanks's bizarre comics for Fiction House from the very early part of the Golden Age of comics are indeed something to see. In his two most memorable series, "Fantomah" and "Stardust," he basically took the idea from the Jerry Siegel-bernard Bailyn series "The Spectre" from National Comics of a nearly all-powerful superhero meting out grim justice to evildoers and ran with it... I mean really ran with it. Both Fantomah and Stardust spend nearly half their time in their stories exacting about as imaginative of punishments as ever anyone could dream up; calling them "Jacobean" hardly does them justice. Coupling this with Hanks's unbelievably strange drawing style (his villains all look like Dick Tracy villains, his heroes all look like eight-foot tall department store mannequins, and everyone always has the exact same facial expression throughout the story) makes his work seem especially surreal. It's been profitably compared to outsider art, and there does seem something not a little bit crazy about this dream world of Hanks's. It's beautiful, too, in the way outsider art is usually beautiful, but its derivativeness and its incessant repetitiveness keeps his work from being quite at the level of that of the very best outsider artists (such as Henry Darger).
What brings this very interesting volume up another notch, though, is the supplementary story told (in the form of sequential art, natch) of Paul Karasik, who becomes a huge enthusiast of Hanks's work and goes to uncover a "Fletcher Hanks" he goes to interview. What he discovers at the interview makes for a great story, which only enhances your understanding of what you've read previously in the edition. Collectors of the truly strange and unusual won't want to pass this up, and it is work that truly stays with you... albeit sometimes not quite in a good way. (The Hanks stories are in their way the stuff of extremely vivid, repetitive, and unsettling dreams.)
 Great Early Golden-Age Stuff! July 11, 2008
With art that looks like something Basil Wolverton might've done if he'd drawn used his feet & keeping his eyes closed this is a great collection of early '40's superhero comics. Plot? Characterization? No way! This was when action & good beating evil were what superhero comics were all about. And I've seen enough G-A stuff to know that this may not be the best but it sure ain't the worst (wait til Marvel reprints USA Comics #5, now THAT was the worst!).
Oh, its also very well made and the story about Fletcher Hanks himself is both touching & disturbing as well as a change from the usual text format.
outsider art May 31, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Wonderfully bizarre naif stories. The final chapter recounting the background of the creator is as interesting as the actual stories.
Twisted and strange, but in a good way February 17, 2008
If you enjoy strange and forbidden comics like The Monster of Frankenstein then Mr. Hank's odd 4-color creations will not disappoint you. The comics are almost as odd as the artist himself!
|
|
|
| | |
