Fletcher Hanks, The Ed Wood of Comics

Throughout the history of comics there has been no shortage of earnest incompetents outputting their weirdo psychoses onto the four-color page. Somehow, a medium dedicated to supermen running around in their underpants seems amenable to all that.

But according to David Thompson, there's never been a comic creator with as much demented charm as Fletcher Hanks, the Ed Wood of Comics...

Imagine, for instance, a hero named Stardust the Super Wizard – a man with a crime-detecting laboratory on his own private star, and whose “vast knowledge of interplanetary science” makes him the “most remarkable man that ever lived.” In addition to these formidable attributes, our hero has other improbable talents. He changes size arbitrarily from one panel to the next; his limbs, head and torso swell and distend for no discernible reason beyond alarming lapses in draughtsmanship. When not racket-busting or camouflaging the Earth with a giant, sculpted cloud of steam, our hero operates his “violently vibrating crime-detectors” and tosses foreign-looking villains down the mouths of active volcanoes. He’s clearly quite a guy.

Luckily, such staggeringly inexplicable genius is finally getting its own published collection, I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets!, due out August 1st. Pre-ordering!

The Ed Wood of Comics [David Thompson]