Fletcher Hanks has been called “the Ed Wood of comics,” and that’s as apt a description as any. Like cinema’s most notorious hack director, Hanks worked in his medium at a level just a hair away from total competence. But because he was so sincere in his work, it’s a joy to read. Laughable, yes – but Hanks had a style uniquely his own.

If you’ve never heard of Hanks, join the club. Although his work was featured on the cover of MEN OF TOMORROW, he’s all but an enigma to today’s readers. Some would argue that’s for the best. But I defy you not to be sucked in by the primitive charms of his work – from 1939-1941 – collected for the first time in Fantagraphics’ amazing new book I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS!: THE COMICS OF FLETCHER HANKS.

Most of the 15 adventures within – from such forgotten, Z-level rags as FANTASTIC and JUNGLE – center on two recurring heroes: Stardust and Fantomah. Stardust is a man of science and musclebound might, despite however out of proportion he’ll appear from one panel to the next. His stories fall into a distinct formula: Stardust discovers a crime about to be committed on Earth; said crime is usually nonsensical (i.e. stop the planet’s rotation so everyone will fly off into space); Stardust punishes the bad guys in increasingly torturous ways (i.e. freezing one for all eternity in an ice chamber, or making a guy’s head expand and then throwing it onto the body of a headless giant).

Fantomah is like the female Stardust, except she lords over the jungle and, when flies, becomes a disembodied skull. This is not explained, which is part of the beauty of it. Her troubles lean toward the giant-spider variety, and she, too, has an odd sense of penalization.

The best example of this is when she merges four mine robbers into one body and places him in a “pit of horrors,” where he is chased by green monsters, then is attacked by a giant paw – just a paw, mind you – that appears from nowhere, then falls into a tornado, which places him smack in the middle of a cavern of white cobras. “This is end of me!” he exclaims. But nope, Fantomah’s got more in store!

In other words, these stories are insane!

In all his comics, Hanks has an unusual tendency to draw people from the rear. He also uses a line or two of narration is nearly every panel, ending each with an ellipses … or four sets of ellipses – whatever it takes to get the lines to right-justify. And apparently, he never met an awkward hyphenation he didn’t like. Ditto a nonsensical story, any one of which could have been written by a grade-schooler.

There’s so much nuttiness going on that you’ll wonder why editor Paul Karasik doesn’t open with an introductory essay to give you any kind of perspective. Turns out, there’s a good reason for it, which you’ll get in his illustrated afterword – an account of his meeting with Hanks’ elderly son. If you knew the truth about Hanks’ real life, you might not want to read his stuff at all.

But then you’d miss out on one wild, colorful journey through the twisted mind of one of comics’ most marginal of players. He may not have worked for many years, but PLANETS doesn’t contain all of it, so more, please, Fantagraphics. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.