Fletcher Hanks: Comics and the Outsider Aesthetic
The story of Fletcher Hanks is one of those revisionist tales that historians of the arts have fallen in love with over the past 30-40 years or so.
As the academy was opened up to blacks and women, the standard story of the “history of art” had to be rewritten to allow their work to be assessed alongside typical “Western” art (even if they were making Western art). And as this revisionism took hold, anyone who was an “outsider” or “the other” could stake a claim (or more typically, have claims made on their behalf by historians and students of the arts) in art history. Henry Darger comes to mind, though I wish he didn’t.
In fact, entire bodies of work came under serious review for the first time, including comic books. (This coincided with the rise in comic book collecting as well as the appropriation of comic imagery by Pop artists.) Comic books themselves were an outsider arena: a disreputable hybrid of newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines, often published by fly-by-night operators. They’d been around 30 years before real work was done on the subject of “funny books.”
The process of revision has been ongoing and continues today. Case in point: the rescue from obscurity of Fletcher Hanks, most visibly in a new book edited by Paul Karasik.
First unearthed for contemporary audiences by Art Spegilman and Françoise Mouly for RAW magazine, Hanks is now celebrated in Karasik’s collection of 15 his stories.
Here’s an abbreviated example of Hanks’ rudimentary style:
Hanks worked only from around 1939-41, when comic books were still new and superheroes, as epitomized by Superman, had only just taken hold of the industry. Hanks fascinates because, in this early period when rival publishers struggled to fill pages with anything that might attract a reader and the superhero genre was not yet codified and solidified, his imagination was allowed to run amok.
Hence, crude but distintive art combined with a bizarre fixation on retributive justice meted out by weird superheroes became Hanks’ stock in trade.
One heroine, Fatomah, resembles a movie goddess — she’s actually goddess of the jungle, a real pulp throwback — until she calls upon her powers to stop and, indeed, destroy those who would harm the jungle and its inhabitants. At that point, her face becomes that of a skull, for no apparent reason.
His other major hero, Stardust (seen in the excerpt above), is more typically “superhero-ish” in appearance, with a nasty habit of showing up after the story’s criminals have caused destruction and death (quite gleefully depicted by Hanks) at which point he uses his almost unlimited powers — he can do whatever is needed to tell and then conclude a story, it seems — to punish the criminals in sometimes, um, unusual ways.
The appeal here is to the strange, the unfamiliar; to work that was created by an individual not by committee; to entertainment that has not been heavily edited or even well thought out; to small pleasures that pre-date present day product from multinational conglomerates. You can almost experience the illicit thrill kids may have felt reading this junk in 1940.
One can get a little carried away with this sort of thing, though. Fletcher’s Hanks’ work was also included in the recent anthology of obscure comics, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969. This collection, edited by Dan Nadel, includes artists who are not unknown at all, even if their creations are now forgotten by the general public. (By contrast, Hanks seems to have never had a public until recently.) For example, Garrett Price, brother of longtime New Yorker cartoonist George Price, is represented by his lyrical Sunday newspaper strip White Boy — which is justly celebrated at least in comics circles, and was featured in The Comics Journal a few years back. The book is also an example of a troubling trend toward making comics reprints into objects of art — and expensive. It was published by Abrams.
Though Art Out of Time is full of gems, not every unknown comic is a work of neglected genius. It’s too easy to fall into that trap, trying to one-up everybody else by finding the next great once-known unknown.
But unearthing the comics of Fletcher Hanks has been a service to fans of pure, unadulterated comic books.
Note: Follow the first link above for Fletcher Hanks resources, including stories to read online.
Purchase I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks at Amazon.
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