Fletcher Hanks (December 1, 1889- January 22, 1976) was an American writer and illustrator of The Golden Age of Comic Books, infamous for his odd illustration style and plots and extremely brutal heroes.
Born to English immigrants in Paterson, New Jersey and raised in Oxford, Maryland, Fletcher Hanks was a troublesome child and young man, living off the wealth of his parents into his 20's. He took a correspondence class from W.L. Evans on cartooning and married shortly thereafter. According to information provided by his children and wife, he was an abusive drunk, pushing his son Fletcher Hanks Jr. down the stairs when he was four years old, and squandered the money he received from painting murals for the wealthy on beer and women. One day in 1930, Hanks simply left his home and never came back. He had stolen his son's savings as he left — Fletcher Jr recalled his mother said "It's a small price to pay to be rid of the bum".
Fletcher Hanks would re-emerge in 1939 to work in the comics book business at Eisner & Iger publishing house. His comics were short parts of larger anthology magazines, only 7 pages long on average. In contrast to his once highly-competent style, these comics featured crude, grotesque, yet highly detailed illustrations, featuring strange and often horrific imagery, as well extreme brutality well above the level even the darkest of the Golden Age illustrators would normally feature, with the deaths of millions of innocents being a common sight. His heroes were utterly invincible and inhuman, and would subject villains to highly creative and painful punishments. His most famous characters were Stardust the Super Wizard, an 8-foot tall humanoid god that lives on a star and possesses infinite powers, and Fantomah, notable for being one of the first female superheroes, a defender of a regionally-ambiguous reach of rainforest that was constantly attacked by poachers who murdered them in similarly brutal ways to Stardust and turned her face into a horrific skull to frighten them.
Fletcher Hanks would publish for only two years before vanishing again, likely as a result of his personality making him unable to stay invested in any one project for a particularly long time. He was discovered frozen to death on a park bench in New York City in 1976. He was 87 and died penniless. Since his death, Hanks' works have reached a status of Cult Classic, and his works have become part of the Public Domain, as well as republished by Fantagraphics in the compilations I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets! (2007), You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! (2009) and Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Destroy Them All (2016).
Works created by Fletcher Hanks include:
- Stardust the Super Wizard (His most famous work.)
- Fantomah (One of the earliest female superheroes.)
- Space Smith (A very obvious pastiche of Flash Gordon.)
- Big Red Mclane (The closest thing to a normal comic Hanks ever produced)
- Whirlwind Carter
- Tabu The Jungle Wizard (one-shot)
- Tiger Hart (one-shot)
- Yank Wilson (one-shot)
- Buzz Crandall (one-shot)
Turn Loose Our Trope Rays and Destroy Them All!:
- Anti-Hero: Viewed from a sane viewpoint, all of Fletcher Hanks' characters are at best very brutal examples of an Unscrupulous Hero, despite the fact that Hanks himself views them as being the Ideal Hero.
- Art Evolution: While never very exceptional, Hanks' coursework for W.L. Evans is that of a dependably talented and promising young cartoonist. By 1939, he had simplified his art style to work quickly and cheaply in the comics field; it would begin to subtly deteriorate over the next two years as his alcoholism worsened.
- Artistic License – Biology: Hanks was not great at drawing anatomy, though he had a better grasp of it in his correspondence school days. Stardust is over eight feet tall and has an incredibly tiny and misshapen head, and many characters bend and twist in impossible ways.
- Asshole Victim: Every single villain in Fletcher Hanks' series are depicted as jerks motivated solely by greed, power or sadism, and as such, the audience is supposed to see their punishments as completely deserved. Supposed to, anyways.
- Author Tract: His works taken in aggregate seem to reveal a highly unsettling and misanthropic picture of mankind as innately weak and helpless at best and cruel and selfish at worst, needing to be governed by an authoritarian, objective superman who exists solely to punish people.
- Black-and-White Insanity: Hanks did not view anyone who commits immoral actions as having any deeper motivation than being evil, and thought they deserved to be punished as brutally as possible. His comics frequently come off as if something that would be written by a Light Yagami-level Knight Templar.
- Black-and-White Morality: This seems to factor into Fletcher Hanks' personality morality, in viewing the world as a series of moral and good people against the injust, who do not merely deserved to be stopped, but instead actively punished for their crimes, usually with the most violent and brutal torture imaginable.
- Bond Villain Stupidity: Often exhibited by villains in his works, preferring to take the time to explain their evil plans instead of killing heroes when they had the chance - not that that probably would have worked, anyway.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Villains in Hanks' works tend to know full well how evil they are and not the least bit ashamed of it, actively taking pride in being as monstrous as possible.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: If you're a villain in Hanks' work, you won't simply be shot or killed quickly. No, you'll be subject to some of the most horrifying pain imaginable and there won't be a single thing you can do to stop it.
- Darker and Edgier: Comics during the Golden Age weren't as sunny and carefree as the Silver Age was by any means, but Hanks went many steps further. His villains annihilated entire planets containing millions of innocent people every issue, his heroes were horrifically brutal and went way past what was necessary by any means in order to punish the villains, and everything has a remarkable tone of coldness, inhumanity and bleakness.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Hanks just loved inflicting horrible fates on villains that inevitably end up being this regardless of his best efforts to portray them as deserved.
- Mind Screw: While his plots are easy enough to follow, his art is not, being mostly a collage of bizarre images and alien creatures.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: While Golden Age heroes were often more cynical than their Silver Age counterparts, they generally still leaned idealistic overall, with a few exceptions. Hanks, on the other hand, depicted most people as being pathetically weak and requiring a strong man to save them, and evildoers as being motivated solely by sadism and greed, requiring extreme cruelty inflicted back on them.
