I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets

A collection of comics work by the late, weird and wonderful Fletcher Hanks featuring the preposterous adventures of superhero characters like Stardust (a godlike 'alien' of indeterminate origin who fancies "crimebustin'" and looks like a gay Dolph Lundgren) and Fantomah (a godlike supernatural pinup girl who can transform herself at will into a musclebound, phantom skeleton-thing w/ fabulous hair) that make the wildest Superman story look downright plausible.

Ive been interested in these characters and Hanks for some time now and I've picked up a little info here and there and read two or three scans of Stardust and Fantomah stories, so I'm pretty grateful for this recent release (which includes a few other characters like mighty, lumberjackin' ass-kicker 'Big Red McLane' and Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers analogue 'Buzz Crandall of the Space Patrol').

The stories have a tenuity to them that's surprising even for Golden Age comics, but as the Crumb quote on the back of the collection opines, there's a rawness and immediacy to the work that's incredibly endearing (and more tolerable than continuity porn).

Stardust and Fantomah in their respective but damn near identical adventures come down like the hand of God in situations involving mad scientists who create giant chemical beasts who, save for their flaming purple claws, are invisible to the human eye and when legions of pinstripe suited gangsters devise a plan in a "dark basement" to overthrow America by conducting massive military campaigns involving thousands of warplanes, tanks and battleships, which they seemingly manage to orchestrate in a few short hours.

The protagonists are never under any threat, they're never overwhelmed or outgunned, they are GODS that just seem to be ad-libbing their powers from page to page and adventure to adventure. Seriously, if anyone decided to put either of these characters to film, they'd either have the shortest summer blockbuster ever made or a 90min. montage of shit just getting destroyed and physiologically unfurled.

Brilliant.

Thing is that these stories can never be mainstream, live-action films. They have no dramatic tension, the "stories" are nigh amorphous in quality and in terms of personality and to a large extent, abilities, Fantomah and Stardust are entirely interchangeable (neither hero has a supporting cast). What Hanks was doing, what makes the stories special and uniquely comic book, is that - and this is the most apt analogy I can think of at the moment - he was effectively writing a completely serious version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (which is perhaps an admission that one could animate them, but that's it).

There are episodes of Birdman and the Galaxy Trio that make more narrative sense than anything that appears in these stories, and that's what I love about them, there's no real precedence for them outside of the comic book medium. They belong to the medium and they are best experienced through the medium in all of their crudely rendered delirum; to translate or streamline this material for mass consumption would be to rob them of everything that makes them special.

Edit: By the by, though both characters kill people, Stardust causes a veritiable criminal holocaust in almost every story. The guy murders people by the thousands and often lays out these bizarre, draconian, metaphysical punishments for the ones he allows to live.