Get ready, fans, the second volume of odd-ball 1930s comics creator Fletcher Hanks has hit the shelves. You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!completes the collection of Hanks’ work begun with the 2007 volume,IShall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!, edited by Paul Karasik, published by Fantagraphics Books and winner of the 2008 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project.
In an interview with PWCW upon the release of the first volume in 2007, editor/collector, Paul Karasik, devoted much energy to explaining who Hanks was and why on earth he’d decided to dig him out of obscurity. Hanks no longer needs an introduction in the comics community, but at the time even Fantagraphics v-p Kim Thompson, who Karasik said, “couldn’t have been more supportive of the project”, had no idea how successful the book would turn out to be.
Said Thompson, “We always thought I Shall Destroy would do at least fairly well, but nowhere near as well as Paul thought it would. It turned out he was right and we were wrong: four printings in two years and still going strong.” In a twist that surprised even Karasik, the book was adopted by a much broader reading public than just the “guy nerd comic collectors” he’d expected to buy it. In fact, Karasik remarked that at a MoCCA signing in June, at least a third of those buying the book were women. I Shall Destroy was also embraced by the literary world, receiving rave reviews in both The Believer and Bookforum.
So, what explains the success of these twisted, violent, and awkwardly drawn heroes and villains from the dawn of the comics industry? Karasik chalks it up to “the incredible graphic appeal of the work.” Witness panels showing an army of headless soldiers, each with a single eye at the center of his chest; blimp-like, bright red Martian destroyers zooming across the sky in crazy patterns; crowds of leopard women standing on the backs of flying reptiles while shooting comet fire from their helmets. These drawings, while often clunky, have a kind of primal "rightness" and a narrative logic so wonderfully bizarre that it wins over readers normally skeptical of the kapow, blam, boom sequences of superhero comics.
Beyond the comics themselves, though, it’s Karasik’s smart enthusiasm for the work that tells readers in no uncertain terms that here is something to get excited about. He does this with the titles of the books, pulling those oddly thrilling exclamations from the depths of early comics culture and foregrounding them, and he does it with his own contextualizing of Hanks and his work. In the first book, this took the form of a cartoon end-story, “Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks?,” itself nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Short Story, in which we see Karasik searching for information about Hanks. His discovery of Hanks’ son and the revelations about Hanks’ character—he was an abusive alcoholic who abandoned his young family—are followed in the second volume with a richly informative introduction. By now Karasik has unearthed further family relations, a stack of drawings from Hanks’ cartooning correspondence course, and even Hanks’ death certificate. This arc, in which we follow Karasik on his quest, has true detective-story appeal, and it frames the work with a narrative that’s a whole lot of fun to read.
But the larger story told by Karasik in his writing about Hanks, is of the birth of comics itself. Hanks’ career is, Karasik says, “a mini-history of the first three years of the comics industry.” At a moment when comics are attracting a broader reading public than ever before, and when comics themselves are exploding with innovation and experimentation, this is a story that more and more people want to hear.
Karasik describes the free-for-all approach to comics taken by the artists starting out in 1938. The work was “innovative and playful in layout, color, and content”, and it was often “bizarrely inventive”, Karasik said. Hanks’ work, with its endless array of imp men, Martian soldiers, jungle creatures, flying space-women, and justice-obsessed lumberjacks, fully embodied this spirit. And, as we see in the second book, his work also reflected the move away from the wild freedom of those first few years.
The industry became homogenized as more and more work was needed to fill the books that were selling so quickly. In his exuberant style, Karasik writes that by 1941, “The brutal clickety-clack of the press going full tilt around the clock exacted crude productions standards in early comic books.” The result of this push for quantity was less inventive work. Hanks’ final stories, much tamer than his early ones, reflect that trend.
You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! offers even more of what we saw in IShall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! “It’s important to note,” said Karasik, “that the first book wasn’t the best of Fletcher Hanks; those were just the stories I was able to get at the time.” Volume two, which completes the collected works, comprised of 51 stories in all, has twice the amount of material as the first. Karasik sees it as containing some of Hanks’ best stories, including, “a couple of great Fantomah stories I’d never seen before” and several from Hanks’ “realistic” series, Big Red McClane, King of the Northwoods. “These are basically slug-fests from beginning to end,” Karasik said of the Big Red stories. “Reading them is kind of like getting hit in the head with a jackhammer. I’m not sure if that appeals to everyone but, graphically, it’s amazing.”
Jackhammer or no, all those won over by Hanks’ odd work and odder life story in the first volume should be eager to dive into volume two. As Hanks would put it, “Let’s go! I’ll take you in my own speed ship!”
