Civilized Destruction: Paul Karasik on Fletcher Hanks

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GOLDEN ERA COMIC BOOK stories (1930-1955) tend to be pretty cut and dried. A villain commits a crime and then Superman or some other avatar of justice gently doles out the comeuppance by swooping in and carrying them off to prison. The end.

But the stories of Fletcher Hanks were a little more vindictive. His heroes might turn that villain into a rat with a human face, or feed him to a golden octopus, or force him to hang suspended in the air forever next to the skeletons of his victims.

Hanks wrote and drew these bizarre stories for the first three years that comic books were in existence and then virtually vanished. But cartoonist, former Raw editor and Fletcher Hanks super-fan Paul Karasik used the Web not only to track down the artist's work but also to locate his son, Fletcher Hanks Jr., who was able to shed a little bit of light on the mystery of his father's fate.

Karasik has compiled the best of Hanks' stories into the collection "I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets" (Fantagraphics), and he will appear Wednesday at Politics & Prose to discuss the book.

» EXPRESS: When did you first encounter the work of Fletcher Hanks?
» KARASIK: I was the associate editor of Raw magazine. In 1986 or something we reprinted a Fetcher Hanks story. Its bold, graphic and edgy sensibility fit right in with the cutting-edge aesthetic of Raw. After that, I didn't think about his work for another 20 years or so. Then somebody sent me a link to these stories online and I started sniffing around on the Internet. In doing so I uncovered the truth behind the mystery of what happened to Fletcher Hanks.

» EXPRESS: Can you talk a little bit about the significance of Fletcher Hanks as an artist?
» KARASIK: Fletcher Hanks worked for the first three years that comic books were being published —1939 to 1941 — then disappeared. The first issue of Action Comics came out in 1938. Then, overnight, dozens of publishers popped up and they had to fill all of these 52 page comic books with fresh stories. This is why so much of the early comic book art is so terrible — because anyone could do it. It's hard sometimes to see how great he is when he's engulfed by talentless packing-pellets; his work is generally smothered in the middle of third-rate comic book art. Hence he was never really discovered until recently.

The early stage of comic books was a free for all. There was no censorship, no creative guidelines, no house style and certainly there were no marketing studies. Fletcher Hanks was completely left up to his own devices. He wrote, penciled, inked and lettered his own work — so his work is far more personal than the rest of the talentless hacks who were producing work at this time. Very few of the comic book artists were auteurs; Hanks is one of the very few artists in the history of the comic book who was a one-man band.

Given the fact that there was no censorship, no rules to be broken, and the fact that Hanks was a one-man band, his dynamic storytelling sensibility is undiluted and it's triple strength in both vision and execution. His stories are filled with a righteous sense of retribution, and simmer with anger. They also have their moments of surrealism and a very sophisticated sense of composition and design. Often people will look at Hanks' work and dismiss it as being naïve and will like it for its supposed campiness, but this is a very narrow-minded appreciation of the man's work. His storytelling is on par with any of the great cartoonists and his sense of design and color are peerless. So my book collects 15 of the best Fletcher Hanks stories and ends with a 16-page afterword by myself that explains the mystery of whatever happened to Fletcher Hanks.

It's a mistake to think this book as just another Golden Age comics compilation. The first part of the book resonates with the afterword and becomes some kind of literary gestalt. Ultimately, it's a haunting father-son story — if you like Raymond Carver.

» EXPRESS: What was it like to get to know Fletcher Hanks Jr.?
» KARASIK: I went in to this project, into this interview, meeting Fletcher Hanks Jr. thinking that this cartoonist was some kind of hero to me and the son was just somebody in between me and a stack of original art that I was dying to get my greedy claws into. During the course of my contact with Fletcher Hanks Jr., the tables were turned and the son became a sort of hero of mine for having survived villainous abuse by his father.

Now we've become quite friendly. I saw him about a month ago and I went to visit him and I presented him with a copy. He didn't know I had dedicated the book to him, so it was quite a thrill for me to see him look at the dedication page. But on another real level he's still mystified that somebody would be interested in his father's work. He doesn't understand why anyone would buy a book of comics, period — let alone comics by his father.

» EXPRESS: What do you think was going through Fletcher Hanks' head while he was drawing this stuff?
» KARASIK: I think they were fueled by egomaniacal anger and the whiskey bottle. He was older than everybody else doing comics at this time. He was in his 30s — Jack Kirby was 17 or 18.

» EXPRESS: Where does Fletcher Hanks Sr.'s work stand among other artists who were working at the time and are now well renowned?
» KARASIK: Most of the guys who were in this comic book game at that stage were very young and unpolished. Even from that first batch of cartoonists, none of them — including Jack Kirby — are as dynamic and, for my money, as important.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Wed., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness-UDC)

Written by Express contributor Aaron Leitko

Images courtesy Fantagraphics