Stardust, Fantomah, Big Red McLane and Space Smith. Just some of the superheroes created by American cartoonist Fletcher Hanks (December 1, 1889 – January 22, 1976) in a two-year flurry of creativity in which he wrote, penciled, inked and lettered 51 stories.
As Joshua LH Burnett writes in a profile of the artist, when Hanks was writing comic books Superman was only a few years old, while Fredric Wertham (1895 – 1981), a psychiatrist best-known book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which asserted that comic books caused youth to become delinquents, and the subsequent Comics Code Authority were still a decade away. “In this Golden Age, the very concept of what a superhero was and what superhero stories were about was still forming, nebulous and unpredictable, from chaotic clay.”
And few were more out there and bizarre than the characters created by Fletcher Hanks, no less so than when they were dispensing justice to transgressors.
As Burnett notes in his profile of a man who cuts as an unsympathetic, one prone to bullying and alcoholism, an artistic career was kickstarted when at 23, his mother paid for him to take the W. L. Evans correspondence course in cartooning.
In 1939, Hanks began creating comic books for Eisner & Iger, the agency run by artists Will Eisner (1917-2005) and Jerry Iger’s (1903 – 1990) that produced on-demand comic books and strips for a host of publishers. Hanks also wrote and drew under the aliases Barclay Flagg, Bob Jordan, Charles Netcher and Hank Christy. Only his Stardust (‘The Super Wizard’) stories were published as “Fletcher Hanks.”
And there was Fantomah, ‘Mystery Woman of The Jungle’, who lays claim to. being the First Female Super Hero. When riled by wrongdoers, her skull is revealed as she offs them with no mercy.
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Little is known about Hanks’ life after 1941. He moved back to his hometown of Oxford, MA and served on the town commission in the late 1950s. In 1976 his frozen body was found on a park bench in Manhattan. Fletcher Hanks died cold, alone, and penniless.
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