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I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Vengeance is mine and I shall repay
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.)
Rating:  - Great Early Golden-Age Stuff!
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.
Rating:  - outsider art
Wonderfully bizarre naif stories. The final chapter recounting the background of the creator is as interesting as the actual stories.
Rating: - Twisted and strange, but in a good way
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!
Rating: - Strangely interesting
On at least a superficial level, I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets by Fletcher Hanks is an unimpressive collection of comics from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it is apparent why the comics have remained obscure. The art is okay but the writing is definitely missing something, such as characterization or plot development.
The greatest number of stories feature Stardust, "the most remarkable man who ever lived." This blond giant lives on a distant asteroid where his seemingly omniscient technology detects evil doings on Earth, usually involving world conquest or mass murder. Equipped with strange and powerful weapons, Stardust metes out justice. He is so utterly powerful, however, that no foe stands a chance against him, and suspense is never really an issue.
Of only slightly more depth is Fantomah, "the most remarkable woman ever known," a jungle girl with vast supernatural powers which she uses to stop people from exploiting the people and beasts of the jungle. When she uses her fullest powers, she changes from beautiful woman to skeletal monster, but she is essentially a scaled down Stardust.
There are also standalone stories featuring lumberjack Big Red McLane taking on the Red River Gang and one with Buzz Crandall stopping Lepus the Fiend (who utters the line that is the title of this book) from forcing Earth and Venus to collide.
As mentioned before, on the superficial level, these stories are quite mediocre, but as I read through the book, I realized that they are not meant to have the standard qualities one would associate with good stories. Instead, they are tales of divine justice. With their near omnipotence, Stardust and Fantomah (in particular), punish evil with fierce, often ironic justice. For example, when Stardust stops one villain from robbing Fort Knox, he gives the crook his share of "gold" when Stardust feeds him to a monstrous golden octopus. (Unlike many superheroes, Stardust and Fantomah have no qualms about killing.)
The best writing is actually in the comic-form afterword by editor Paul Karasik, which deals with Karasik's attempts to find out more about the mysterious Fletcher Hanks. He tracks down the son, who describes his father as a thoroughly unpleasant man. Karasik (and the reader) get some insights into Hanks, but he remains mostly an enigma.
This book has a certain nostalgic charm but I don't know if they are really worth owning unless you're a real comics completist. If you are, then pick this up; otherwise, approach this book with caution.
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