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Fantomah, the Mystery Woman of the Jungle, on the cover of _Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!_ (all images courtesy Fantagraphics)
When Superman debuted in the first issue of _Action Comics_ in 1938, its success spawned a storm of imitators, to the degree that an entire industry cohered in a dizzyingly short time. Newly formed companies configured a Fordist process to mass-produce comics and draw the attention (and spare change) of America’s children. For every now-iconic character, there are dozens more that failed to catch on with readers and were discarded to the dustbin of collective memory. And in this early era of comics history — now called its Golden Age — few marginal cartoonists burned as brightly as Fletcher Hanks.
From late 1939 through the summer of 1941, Hanks created characters like Super Wizard Stardust, Space Smith, and Fantomah, the Mystery Woman of the Jungle (one of the earliest female superheroes, predating Wonder Woman)_._ He quit the industry after this brief stint for reasons unknown (like so much else about his life), and his work fell into obscurity for decades. But his work drew interest in countercultural circles in the ’60s and ’70s, with some of Hanks’s stories getting reprinted in alts like _Raw_.
Fantomah predates early female superheroes like Wonder Woman.
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One of his biggest enthusiasts is cartoonist, historian, and onetime _Raw_ editor Paul Karasik, who has shed light on many of the details of Hanks’s enigmatic life. Karasik has edited two compilations of his comics: _I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets!_(2007) and _You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!_ (2009). Now, Hanks’s full corpus of 51 stories has been collected in one volume, also edited by Karasik, titled _Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!___(Fantagraphics, 2025)_._
Karasik’s introduction to the compendium lays out all the ways that Hanks didn’t fit the mold of the average comic book creator of his time. Many writers and artists were extremely young then, in their 20s or even teens, while he was in his late 40s and early 50s. Those who knew Hanks described him to Karasik as an incorrigible troublemaker from a young age, an alcoholic, and physically abusive, and he abandoned his wife and four children in 1930. His time in comics is one of the few parts of his life that does not remain a mystery. Ultimately, he’d die destitute and alone, his frozen body found on a Manhattan park bench in January 1976. His family had no idea of his comics career. As Karasik relates through an illustrated epilogue to the compendium, when he tracked down Fletcher Hanks Jr. in the 2000s and showed him some of his father’s work, he didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
Paul Karasik’s comic rendering of a meeting with Fletcher Hanks Jr., in which he pointed out his father’s self-portrait in an illustration
The Golden Age of Comics was a time of widespread experimentation, as artists working in the nascent medium were still figuring out what worked on the page, and there was a lot of error amid all these trials. Even by those standards, Hanks’s stories are visually off-kilter and discombobulating. The proportions of his human forms are almost always askew — everyone’s jaws jut, Stardust’s head is too small, limbs are too long, hands are too big. The characters contort unnaturally to make their gestures legible, yet his action panels often feel weightless. One of his consistent visual quirks is to depict a flying character with stiff arms at their sides, which inspires the opposite of the awe of seeing Superman in flight.
In his foreword to the new compendium, novelist Glen David Gold writes that “if no one moves your eye across a page like Jack Kirby, no one stops it dead like Hanks.” Indeed, Hanks had no instinct for how to lay out panels or pace a story’s action across them, and his sense of dialogue economy is nonexistent, peppered with commas and dashes that create an odd, halting scansion. A representative speech bubble, describing Stardust, reads: “His scientific use of rays, has made him master of space and planetary forces—the gas of a certain star, has made him immune to heat or cold.” Often the dialogue and paneling are unintentionally comedic. At the end of one story, Stardust declares: “Now I’ll break up the world war on Mars!” As he flies off in the next panel, an onlooker cries: “There goes Stardust! It looks as if he was headed for Mars!”
The proportions of Hanks’s human forms are almost always askew.
_Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!_ delves into another element that set Hanks apart from his peers. At a time when the comic production process was highly stratified, he made all his comics himself, writing, drawing, inking, and lettering them. He thus stands as one of comics’ earliest auteurs. These stories are not just weird; they are entirely his creative vision. The strangeness of Hanks’s work and the obscurity of his life have drawn comparisons to artist and writer Henry Darger, with both Gold and Karasik mentioning the similarities between them in their respective introductions. Karasik disavows this on the grounds that Hanks, working fully within an industry, cannot in any sense be called an “outsider artist.” Nevertheless, he produced stories that defy conventional ideas within that machine, and even some 85 years later, they still make the eye stop.
Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All! _(2025) by Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik, is published by Fantagraphics and available online and in bookstores._
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https://hyperallergic.com/1056288/before-wonder-woman-there-was-fletcher-hanks-fantomah/
