Weekly Reviews

I've fallen behind with many of my planned reviews for this blog, so I thought that a good way to get back into things would be to write some shorter capsule reviews every week. I'll bet you readers are doubtlessly clamoring to know what superhero comics I bought this Wednesday, and it'd be the height of indecency to keep quiet.

Glory #33 by Joe Keatinge and Ross Campbell
I had originally intended to write a much more elaborate analysis of Keatinge and Campbell's excellent revamp of Rob Liefeld's Glory, but unfortunately I never got around to doing it and now the series is wrapping up. While I'm dismayed that things are coming to a close, it's been a great read.

In this penultimate issue, Glory assembles an army of superheroes to do battle with an extradimensional monster of frightening size and power. Ross Campbell has provided all these old Liefeld properties with impressive makeovers, and in many cases these characters are more fully realized than ever before.  The battle scenes are loud and explosive in a way that ostensibly "realistic" widescreen-style comics can never achieve. Tokyo (appropriately enough) is ravaged by wonderfully bizarre monsters, and Glory and her allies bring down brutality upon them. There are sincerely sad moments intermeshed with astonishing violence, and it concludes with a quiet, unsettling cliffhanger.

I eagerly await the final issue and I also look forward to future collaborations between these Keatinge and Campbell. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to review their run on Glory with the attention that it deserves.

I just hope that Prophet keeps trucking along.

Savage Dragon #185 by Erik Larsen
Larsen brings his usual idiosyncrasies and strong storytelling to this issue as the eponymous Dragon is placed on trial for the death and destruction that he caused while under the malign influence of an evil alter-ego. Obviously, the story deals with many ongoing plot threads, but I think that those unfamiliar with the title will find it surprisingly easy to get into; as opposed to the tangled gnarl of continuity that the corporate superhero comics have become. Despite involving aliens and gods and freaks, and despite having been in continuous publication since the early 90's, Savage Dragon has always had down-to-earth and relatable characters. The trial is nicely suspenseful as Dragon's fate hangs in the balance, while his son and step-daughter are forced to cope with this crisis and the other day-to-day drama that gets thrown their way. There are also some old-fashioned superhero punch-ups, and appearances by some old villains. This is the best straight ahead ongoing superhero comic available and deserves a larger audience. Check it out.

Sex #1 by Joe Casey and Piotr Kowalski
Joe Casey has made it his mission as a writer of superhero comics to constantly push the concept into new directions. When I heard that he was writing a comic called Sex that featured...well, presumably superheroes fucking...I was thought it sounded like a rather obvious attempt at a polemic. And maybe it would've been if somebody else was doing it, but beneath his frenzied, rock n' roll approach, Joe Casey is a very thoughtful writer. Sex isn't a comic sustained by the supposed novelty of superheroes getting it on. Instead, it investigates the undeniable sexual undercurrents of superhero characters, with particular emphasis on the "urban vigilante" type. In this debut issue, we are introduced to Simon Cooke, who has retired from his life as a hard-edged crimefighter. His drive to defend his city against various evils left little time or energy for normal human pursuits, especially sex. As a result, Cooke is alienated from regular people and unsure how to proceed in his new life. Appropriately, the artwork by Piotr Kowalski feels solemn and uneasy. In the hands of the other artists, the scenes of big city life and Cooke's tentative exploration into its sordid underbelly of sex shows and prostitutes would be depicted with superficial glamor and a sleazy sheen, but not here. The reader is submerged into Cooke's sad confusion.

Despite the density of the dialogue in this issue, comparatively little happens, but it leaves me very curious as what will happen next and I trust Casey to deliver. This the kind of smart, well-made superhero comic that I love to read.

The Trouble with Heroes

I'll begin by standing on the soapbox, if you'll indulge me. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the most innovative writers of superhero comics have come from the U.K.

The world of superhero comics has traditionally been very insular, and the majority of writers were once fans. They spent their youth getting hooked on the exploits of certain superhero properties.  Later they made a career out of revisiting those stories. I've read so many interviews with nostalgic writers expressing their deep inner need to "do Spider-Man right" or "do Batman right"; devotedly maintaining an idealized status quo. American writers tend to be so reverent of superheroes; so firmly set in their notions of what makes a good superhero story that (when combined with the commercial restraints of the big publishers) the inevitable result is stagnation. We get endless riffs on old standards and call-backs to bygone eras.

The comics culture of the U.K. is different from America in many ways, and superheroes are only a small part of a broader genre landscape. Superhero titles are also overwhelmingly American imports. The result is that U.K. comic readers are not in the constant pop-icon shadow the superhero, and those readers who later become writers can study the superhero more objectively (and with varying levels of affection). Accordingly, they have few qualms with bucking tradition and experimenting.

One of my favorite superhero comics was written by a man who had zero affection for superheroes. Known mainly for creating the now-famous 2000 AD with John Wagner and for his uncompromising World War I story Charley's War, Pat Mills' work was all heavily informed by his left-leaning politics and dark sense of humor. In 1987, he partnered up with artist Kevin O'Neil (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) to create a superhero comic for Marvel's Epic Comics imprint. In the wake of Watchmen, the publisher was hoping that Mills and O'Neil could make something similar. What they delivered was a vicious satire that not only skewered superheroes but the entire American heroic ideal on the 1980's. 

This wasn't superhero deconstruction. This was superhero demolition. The twisted, burning wreckage was called Marshal Law.

The story takes place in a nightmarish future version of San Francisco, which has been largely destroyed by an enormous earthquake. Re-branded as San Futuro ("the City of the Future"), the heart of the city is a sprawling wasteland of toppled buildings, collapsed highways, and smashed cars. Those unfortunate enough to live in this hellhole are terrorized by the freakish super-soldier veterans of a barbaric war. Some of these monsters were driven insane by the carnage of battle, and by the side-effects of their unnatural powers. Others were just psychos from the start. They've gathered together into gangs and have bloody turf battles, all while enforcing their demented brand of "justice" on any bystanders that they run into. To keep these crazed "superheroes" in line, the San Futuro police department hired a "hero-hunter" to do the job. This is Marshal Law.

Clearly inheriting the fashion sensibilities of that other fascistic super-cop, Judge Dredd, Marshal Law's costume pushes things to the extreme and he's both horrifying and ridiculous to behold. He wears bullets in his hat-band and his mask has a permanent Antichrist scowl. FEAR AND LOATHING adorns his chest in blood-red letters and his black leather uniform is covered with jagged lightning bolts, skull studs, and chains. He has no right sleeve, and his muscular arm is instead wrapped in tight coils of barbed wire.

This is our hero. 

Like the men he hunts down, Law was once a soldier and was given inhuman strength and resistance to pain by military scientists. He's consumed with self-loathing and has a pathological hatred for superheroes. However, he reserves a special rancor for the Public Spirit, a square-jawed Superman analogue who is worshiped as America's greatest hero. One of the original supermen engineered by the military (and by far the most famous) the Public Spirit inspired a generation of young men to become super-soldiers and fight in a senseless war in South America. Law was one of these men, and now he blames the Spirit for the horror he lives through. Only Marshal Law can see the corruption behind the Public Spirit's facade of piety and patriotism. He knows the Spirit is a true bastard and lives for the chance of payback.

The story opens to one of a series of brutal serial killings. Several women have been raped and murdered by a terrifying figure called the Sleepman, the worst of all the "superheroes" that haunt San Futuro. He's a superhuman sadomasochist; a giant wrapped in black plastic with his face concealed under a greasy paper bag. His hands are lethal, Freddy Krueger-claws. All the Sleepman's victims have been dressed in the costume of Celeste, the slutty superhuman fiance of the Public Spirit. Convinced that the Spirit is somehow involved in the killings, Marshal Law doggedly pursues his prey and neither the military nor his own police department are too happy about it.

Like any superhero, Marshal Law has a secret identity, and when his work day is over, he clocks out, unravels the barbed wire from his arm, and removes his leather mask. Surprisingly, he isn't a scarred-up, grizzled soldier or a some dead-faced fanatic. Instead, beneath the mask is Joe Gilmore, whose appearance is that of an ordinary guy. Despite that he's capable of such intense violence, he has soft, gentle blue eyes.

Eyes filled with guilt.

The only healthy, positive thing in Marshal Law's life is his relationship with Lynn, a young feminist radical, who sees superheroes as the ultimate manifestation of destructive masculinity. He's attracted to her fiery determination, and also her normality. In a world of superheroes, Lynn is perfectly human: cranky, forgetful, and with a fondness for junk food. Law has concealed his double-life from her, as she hates his ugly alter-ego.

Through a series of tragic circumstances, Lynn becomes a victim of the Sleepman. With his only connection to humanity severed, Marshal Law drowns his sorrows in rage. His anger propels him to the truth behind the Sleepman, and the truth comes with terrible, life-altering realization. He defeats his hated enemy, but the victory is hollow and joyless.

The reader is fully immersed in the brutality thanks to Kevin O'Neil's remarkable artwork. The comic is a sensory overload of shattered, sprawling disaster areas and grotesque superheroes. Everything is blanketed with darkly funny graffiti and biting, aggressive slogans. Appropriately enough, the colors are a clash of garish pinks and greens against gray smog. As the series progressed, his artwork only became more expressive and stylized, and by the conclusion things were truly dialed-up-to-11. However, no matter how exaggerated things get, O'Neil maintains impressive inter-panel continuity, offering multiple viewpoints of familiar wreckage and crumbling walls. This lends the comic a disturbing verisimilitude. 

This queasy awareness of reality lurking in the shadows gives Marshal Law its potency. At the time of its release, jingoism and fantasies of wish-fulfillment violence were mixing together in unsettling ways. Oiled action movie stars were busy retroactively winning Viet-Nam, while Reagan employed cowboy swagger in the face of a nuclear conflict, and gun-wielding vigilantes were popping up in the pages of superhero comics. The dominant heroic archetype was an ultra-masculine solider capable of righteous violence in the defense of the American Way.  Marshal Law viciously mocks this ideal, exposing its absurdities and hypocrisies. It demonstrates that believing in such heroes can only have tragic consequences. The lives and achievements of ordinary people are drowned out by the PTSD Rambos that tear through the post-apocalyptic world of San Futuro. Worse still, in seeking to become tougher, harder, and stronger than these monsters, the "hero-hunter" Marshal Law only perpetuates the madness.

The comic ends with Law standing by Lynn's grave, his eyes squeezed shut in grief. He looks defeated and small inside his bulky great-coat and his old battle slogans have been changed to PAIN, RAGE, and WHY. Another new addition to his costume is a crown of barbed-wire. After his final battle, it has become clear the Law is the new king of the super-heroes; the unwilling king of a generation of dangerous, broken soldiers. With newfound, agonizing, awareness, Law gives a final salute and then returns to police San Futuro, walking through the granite moments of fallen heroes. 

Despite that it was a perfectly contained story, the success of Marshal Law lead to subsequent mini-series. Sadly, these stories had none of nuance, pathos, or intensity of the original work. Mills had already said everything he intended to say, and these follow-ups saw Marshal Law descending into self-parody. Things came to a quiet conclusion after Law met up with Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon (a crossover that I doubt appealed to fans of either title) and made a bizarre encounter with Clive Barker's Pinhead.

Fortunately, the great quality of the original series (collected as Marshal Law: Fear and Loathing) overshadows these inferior sequels. While the paperback is out of print, it can still be found online. Marshal Law is one of the most troubling and uncompromising superhero comics I've ever read.  It deserves greater appreciation.

Further Reading

Pat Mills and Kevin O' Neil also collaborated on the similarly satirical Nemesis the Warlock.  Kevin O'Neil continues to illustrate the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (and at this point his  artwork is the only thing I  can recommend).  Mills still writes Sláine and ABC Warriors for 2000 AD.

Further Listening

Ministry "Stigmata"

Apocalypse and Transcendence

It's worth emphasizing that Rick Veitch's The One arrived a year before both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, but while they would become hugely influential, The One is usually overlooked. Originally published by Marvel's Epic Comics imprint in 1985, The One is audacious and exhilarating in a way that the latter two series could never be.

After exposure to Rick Veitch's artwork through 1963 (a collaboration with Stephen Bissette and Alan Moore) I was left very curious about his other comics. At the time, the internet yielded nothing but tantalizing snippets about The One, so I was very excited when I finally found a copy of the trade paperback. Based on what little information I had, I anticipated a grim horror story about freakish superheroes and the end of the world. I was surprised to find that, while apocalyptic, The One is an unapologetically optimistic comic.

The cover blurb reads "THE LAST WORD IN SUPERHEROICS." While it's hard to tell if Veitch was serious when making that hyperbolic claim, I don't think it's exactly accurate. The One doesn't really offer observations on the genre conventions of superhero comics. It's no more about superheroics than The Unforgiven is about cowboys. As I see it, Veitch makes superb use of the superhero concept as part of a broader exploration of salvation out of garbage. Like a network of arteries, themes of cheapness, excess, obsolescence, and accumulation/escalation branch through the story of The One. These themes are loudly advertised on the covers of the original mini-series, as each was designed to resemble a disposable item such as a pocket calculator, a pack of cigarettes, and a dripping Big Mac in a greasy styrofoam box. The One asserts that superheroes, with their origins in mass-produced juvenile pop-culture, are no different from these products. They're every bit as ubiquitous and ephemeral. Other examples of "low" culture that appear to have informed The One include Mad Magazine and Godzilla flicks. The world of The One is overflowing with physical and notional junk, and things have finally reached critical mass. Over the course of the comic, this terminal build up of flotsam is transformed into the resources for spiritual evolution.

The story begins in the near future (or at least the near future of 1985). After a war between the Soviet Union and the United States is instigated by a rancid old industrialist, metaphysical forces are accidentally set in motion that herald the end of the world. Two  entities are summoned into reality: the vicious embodiment of thoughtlessness and greed called the Other, and the personification of pure love called the One. They've been struggling against each other since the beginning of life on Earth, and their battle has taken the form of repeated cycles of growth and annihilation. This time the end has been started prematurely, but while the world is unprepared, the process cannot be stopped.

In the past the One has arrived in various beautiful, messianic forms, but this time he looks like a shabby Max Headroom with a tower of fiery hair, crooked teeth, and a garish plaid suit. Both the One and the Other enter the lives of a group of New Yorkers living together in a cramped apartment. There's an aging artist named Egypt (who still clings to outdated New Wave fashion), her idiot stoner boyfriend Jay-Hole, Egypt's little son Larry, hippie burn-out Doc, and his young black girlfriend Guda. As the world unravels around them, each member of this pseudo-family is drawn to the side of good or evil. Larry, Doc, and Guda accept the One, while Jay-Hole becomes a vessel for the Other, vomiting green slime like Linda Blair and shrieking demonic threats. Sad, conflicted Egypt becomes the focal point of the struggle between the two forces.

In an interesting spin on the superhero's secret identity, the One has a simultaneous second form: a silent, lithe figure whose otherwise featureless body is adorned with two concentric circles of radiating power. As people accept and join the One, they shed their outer appearance and become replicas of this figure, sharing his power. Those who join the Other become blank-eyed zombies; slaves to the petty whims of Jay-Hole.

Meanwhile, the governments of the US and USSR are determined to maintain their control and exterminate each other. With their arsenal of nuclear missiles defused by the One, they are forced to find new weapons. The President authorizes use of the Superiors, the product of a top-secret super-soldier program. Decked out in variations of Mary Lou Retton's all-American Olympic leotard (which adorned many a Wheaties box), they're a brother and sister duo named Charles and Amelia. Despite their attempts to be the wholesome patriots they were programmed to be, they're capable of extraordinary carnage. They also harbor incestuous desires, as the flesh of mere mortals is too frail for these indestructible people.

Russia races to develop its own superhero-weapon. An ambitious scientist turns to old Nazi experiments that once turned a lab-rat into a gargantuan creature called Übermaus. Using the same technique, they create Comrade Bog. His name comes from an old Slavic word for "god." It also nicely echoes "Gog" from the Bible's book of Revelations. Bog is a dimwitted stooge who spouts platitudes about the merits of Communism while rampaging through the streets. Due to a miscalculation, his metabolism is out of control and he's possessed by an insatiable hunger. As Charles is dispatched to demolish Russia once and for all, Bog is launched from a missile at New York. While scenes of mass destruction have unfortunately become commonplace in modern mainstream superhero comics, the havoc caused by Charles and Bog is every bit as horrifying as it was in 1985. Veitch imbues every panel with concussive force.

Inevitably, the American and Russian Superiors clash, and New York is shattered. Skyscrapers are toppled, streets are ripped up, and the Earth splits open. The city is reduced to a Hiroshima wasteland, and Charles and Bog continue to mutate into more monstrous forms as they smash each other. The bridges and tunnels are choked with millions of frenzied, screaming people. Many join the growing army of the Other. They mob together into an undulating landfill of humanity, with Jay-Hole riding on top; a new social and biological structure for mankind. In desperation, Egypt rides with the Other, but is saved by her true love for her son and finally becomes part of the One, joining a massive collective forming at the North Pole.

Bog is defeated, and in his death-throes creates a series of earthquakes that rattle the planet to its core. The old Nazi Übermaus rises from the ocean to dispose of the last remnants of civilization. In the end, the One cloaks himself in the swirling magnetic field of the Earth and departs into space, leaving behind a component to rejoin with the Other and begin the cycle anew. In the burning ruins of the Earth, Charles and Amelia are destined to become the Adam and Eve of a new race of super-humans. The One, meanwhile, enters a realm beyond comprehension to join with a Greater One.

The primary inspiration for The One came from a 1984 New York Times article reporting on a controversial statement made by a representative of the McLuhan Center. The principle idea was that nuclear weaponry could prove beneficial in that the prospect of mass genocide brought people together. This reasoning is at best debatable, but it did leave an indelible impression on Rick Veitch. Had The One been produced by any other person, it might have been an obvious parable about nuclear war; a grim funeral dirge. Instead, Rick Veitch was thoughtful enough to speculate that good can be drawn out of all things, even a looming doomsday. He saw the uncontrollable escalation as something that might bring about transcendence. Instead of a growing, lethal tumor, he saw a bud about to blossom. It's a particularly exciting idea that a simple adjustment of perception can mean the difference between extinction and evolution.

The comic is not without is faults. The characters tend to be broad and there are moments of ill-considered symbolism and ineffective humor. However, the only major problem that I have with The One is that (as with Grant Morrison's The Invisibles) revolution does not rise up from the ordinary people of the world, but instead is thrust upon them. The forces that cause a global paradigm shift are as out of their control as the corrupt activities of the President and Premier. The crucial element of choice and freedom is absent, aside from selecting allegiance to the dualistic agencies of all-that-is-good or pure evil. And while those that ascend into the One's gestalt find themselves in a paradise, they appear to be submerged within its vast consciousness and they have no real say about the further destiny of the collective. They dance inside of the One as he journeys through reality of his own accord. The decision is always out of their hands.

However, this was never intended to be a literal-minded rapture and much of The One is decidedly manic. The devastation is at once comically over-the-top and completely harrowing. This is one of the few superhero comics that conveys the incredible damage that an invincible man could inflict. To the Superiors, the world is a delicate place and even timeless icons fall before them. The appearance of Übermaus, hungrily gnawing at the Washington Monument like it was a discarded pencil, is a moment of mad brilliance, and one of my favorite parts.

Ultimately, The One is a shining example of how a talented storyteller can use the superhero idea to make striking observations about his time. While the world of the 1980's has long past us, certain dark aspects regrettably linger, ensuring that The One has lost none of its bracing potency. The One is a glorious comic and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Further Reading
Rick Veitch continued to work with the superhero concept through his own King Hell imprint, as well as writing and illustrating Aquaman and Swamp Thing for DC Comics. He also interpreted and illustrated his owns dreams in his Rare Bit Fiends series, which is a personal favorite and I encourage others to check it out.

Further Listening
The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster "In the Garden"

The Power and the Terror

I remember feeling excited and apprehensive when I first began reading Paul Karasik's I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets. The book had a very striking cover: mostly white save for an oddly-attired musclebound figure, arms held rigidly at his side, flying inside of a comet. It looked ominous somehow and it immediately caught my attention. After reading the pull-quotes from sources as disparate as Kurt Vonnegut and R. Crumb, I decided to make a purchase. These comics were clearly something very special.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

The book presents the work of Fletcher Hanks, a cartoonist who produced comics in the late thirties and early forties before vanishing. While Hanks worked in a range of pulp genres (including jungle adventure stories and rocketship yarns), he is perhaps best remembered for his superhero comics; among the first in the primordial Golden Age of superheroes. However, it is impossible to discuss Hanks' superhero comics without first discussing Hanks himself, and everything that we know about his life comes from the determined detective work of editor Paul Karasik.

Karasik first became acquainted with the comics of Fletcher Hanks while he was working as an associate editor for Art Spiegelman's RAW Magazine. Hanks was one of many Golden Age superhero artists who had faded into obscurity, but his hypnotic artwork set him apart from all others. Intrigued by these bizarre comics, Karasik resolved to find out what had happened to the man. His mission eventually led him to Hanks' son, Fletcher Junior, now an elderly veteran. It was there that he learned the disturbing and sad truth.

Hanks was a drunken thug who beat and terrorized his own wife and children. A would-be newspaper cartoonist, Hanks earned a living by painting murals at the homes of wealthy New Yorkers, and would blow his wages on booze at every opportunity. In those days, Fletcher Junior was so traumatized that he had difficulty speaking and his teachers assumed that he was retarded. His father eventually abandoned the family, but not after stealing what little money his son has raised selling vegetables. Fletcher Junior would go on to become a courageous pilot during World War II. The elder Hanks, meanwhile, paid the bills by making comic books for Fox Feature's Fantastic Comics. Uncommon for the time, he wrote, drew, inked, and lettered his stories singlehandedly, and in the process created one of the most twisted, haunting superheros ever produced.

Making his debut in 1939, Stardust the Super-Wizard arrived on the scene shortly after the success of Superman. Similar to Superman, Stardust is another strange visitor from beyond, but unlike his forebear he arrives on Earth as a fully-developed crime-fighter. Stardust is a kind of interstellar lawman who battles against evil across the universe. Even before his appearance on Earth, his reputation for "busting spy mobs on a lot of planets" is well known. It's enough to make even hardened terrorists and gangsters stand silent in fear.

Both Stardust and his criminal adversaries are drawn in a comically exaggerated, expressive fashion. Anticipating some of the improbable anatomy of modern superhero comics, Stardust towers above ordinary Earth-men. His fists are the size of Thanksgiving turkeys, and his arms are like tree-trunks. On top his enormous chest sits a huge head, with a face frozen in a determined glare. The villains are a freakshow army of creeps and brutes, with names like Rip-the-Blood and De Structo. They all have bulging-eyes, cavernous brows, protruding lips, and mammoth chins.

The stories are every bit as strange as the artwork. Thanks to a breakneck production pace and Hank's own warped sensibilities, the world of Stardust is like a fever-dream. Each story is a variation on a standard scenario: Stardust is shown on his "private star" monitoring the Earth and zeros in on the villain announcing his intentions to create havoc. Super-weapons that might have been designed by Dr. Seuss are unveiled, mass destruction follows, and then Stardust swoops in via his "tubular spatial" to bring the bad-guys to justice. While that could be the plot to any Golden Age superhero comic, there are numerous distinctions. First of all, Stardust only arrives on the scene after the destruction has taken place (decades later, Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch's morally-dubious Authority would have the same sense of timing). Policemen are mowed down by machine-gun fire, cities are bombed, tidal waves smash down on ocean liners, volcanoes erupt, and innocents are asphyxiated. These scenes of death and chaos take up the bulk of the story.

The other portion is reserved for Stardust's bizarre acts of retribution. He never just brings the villains to prison, like most superheroes. Some bad-guys are thrown off cliffs or fed to an enormous octopi. Others are dragged through space and stranded on distant, inhospitable worlds. Mostly, however, Stardust physically transforms the villains. The leader of a spy-ring has his body mutated into that of a rat. A brawny giant is reduced to a pathetic dwarf. Henchmen are fused together into a single person and then hurled away. Perhaps oddest of all is when Stardust makes a racketeer's body shrivel into nothing. The still-living head is taken to a "space pocket of living death" and is absorbed by a monster known as the "Headless Headhunter."

Crazy stuff.

Stardust the Super-Wizard appeared in fifteen stories. By 1941, publishers had imposed a panel-layout to enhance production speed and efficiency. Hanks' Tetris-tower of bright panels had become a pale grid. The publishers also began to exert control over the content of the comics. Stardust's angry grimace was replaced by an empty smile and he became far more inclined to punch the bad-buys into submission rather than twist and torture them. Eventually, Fletcher Hanks left the world of comics. The specific reason is unknown, but it's very likely that his rampant alcoholism was catching up to him. He was suffering from delirium tremens when he briefly re-united with his son, Fletcher Junior, to ask for money. Fletcher Hanks finally died on January 22nd, 1976, at the age of 88. His body was found by police in New York City.

He had frozen to death on a park bench.

Forgotten for decades, along with his comic-book creations, Fletcher Hanks gained new prominence thanks to Karasik's book. Stardust was now available to an audience that could not be more different from the children who bought those comics back in the "Golden Age." There followed an inevitable period of hackneyed, amateur psychoanalysis, often focusing on the Freudian implications of Stardust's "tubular spatial." As the character had long since moved into public domain, other comics creators began to make use of Stardust. He popped up in several webcomics, was re-interpreted by Madman creator Mike Allred, and even made a disappointing, rather pointless cameo in Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, having been imprisoned by a group of bland British superheroes.

However, much of the appreciation for Stardust is strictly on an ironic level. Fletcher Hanks is invariably compared to notorious z-grade director Ed Wood, and the comics are often held up as masterpieces of unintentional comedy. While there are undeniably goofy moments in Stardust stories, many comic-readers seem unable to look deeper and see the considerable artistic merit these comics possess. They are the product of a singular, vivid, disturbed imagination and they are compelling in much the same way as William Burrough's Naked Lunch or Henry Darger's In the Realms of the Unreal. 

Fletcher Hanks artwork has a fascinating ambiguity, as it blends seemingly incompatible qualities. Crude, and clearly produced by a man with a deadline,  these stories are at times stirringly beautiful. As missiles explode around him, a silhouetted Stardust graceful sails through the air, his arms spread out in front of him as if conducting an orchestra. A squadron of airplanes ascends from billowing white clouds. A swirling tornado threatens to engulf a city of rainbow-hued skyscrapers. These are moments of great violence, but they also have an icy tranquility to them.


As a character, Stardust is the closest thing to a god that superhero comics have ever produced. Hanks endowed his creation with a litany of absurd superpowers. Stardust is the master of all matter and can effortlessly re-shape it or destroy it. He burns through the sky on "accelerated thought rays." No evil can escape his nonsensical crime detection machinery on his private star. Effectively omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, he's also every bit as merciless and unknowable as the old testament god. From the moment Stardust arrives on planet Earth, it's clear that all events that transpire afterwards happen because Stardust allows it. Nature has been supplanted by the will of a demented alien superhero. The guilty are doomed. The innocent can only get out of his way.

Endlessly disturbing, hugely entertaining, and completely captivating, Fletcher Hanks Stardust is one of the most potent takes on the superhero idea that I've read. Track down a copy of Paul Karasik's I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets and experience them for yourself.

Be prepared.

Further Reading

Fletcher Hanks' other stories, including the jungle exploits of Fantomah (arguably the first superheroine, and every bit as warped as Stardust) and the manly lumberjack brawls of Big Red McClane, can be found in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, as well as its companion volume You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation. Editor Paul Karasik's other comics work include an adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, and The Ride Together, an account of living with autism co-authored by his sister Judy Karasik. Both are highly recommended.

Further Listening
Weather Report "Mysterious Traveller"