Last month, myself and some of my fellow artists at Mutable attended a convention at the University of Oregon that focused on the superhero genre in comix. This was no Comic-Con event, more academics in tweed and a smattering of students dispersed throughout the lecture halls. We were the only freaks there, by which I mean, we were in a full-body spandex superhero costume the entire time.
Names that stuck out were Charles Hatfield and Douglas Wolk, the former for his lecture on “Jack Kirby and the Sublime,” and the latter for his talk on “Eschatology and the Marvel Universe,” specifically that here’s a world that’s often on the brink of destruction, but never destroyed, even when it is in fact destroyed.
I also found Wolk’s discussion of the Marvel superstory fascinating. As you may already know, throughout the Marvel superstory images will resurface and characters reappear, Wolk saying characteristically that the only characters not to re-appear are Jimmy Olsen and Uncle Ben, then proceeded to pull out a comic with Jimmy Olsen written all over it. But why were we here at Mutable there at that superhero convention?
Because we happened to be in the middle of making a superhero sitcom called Spirit Friends that would never in fact air. I was dressed in a Deadpool outfit (this is before the films, and actually I had no idea who Deadpool was) and calling myself Tarantula, a thespian crimefighter who traverses on his arms and legs, with his body angled upwards at all times like a kind of contortionist gimp, although for the lectures in question, I was sporting a scarf over my spandex and angled at a rakish tilt in my seat near the back of the auditorium. (Which didn’t stop Douglos Wolk from giving a shoutout, I’m pleased to see we have Deadpool in attendance. That was the first time I had ever heard that name.)
But getting back to the conference at hand.
One woman compared the superhero to the everyman lost in a world without God. She spoke on Nietzsche, Derrida, and Tolstoy in relation to Superman, Batman, and others, but the images accompanying Charles Hatfield’s talk on Jack Kirby struck yours truly more than any fancy talk concerning the death of God, Derrida, and Batman’s stance against nihilism. Because at their best, comic books have a look not dissimilar to the more widely known outsider artists, a childish misconception concerning space, standing instead as a wild re-imagining of the known world, or a visual dream journal.
An artist who was not represented at the convention, but who I think captures this best, would be Fletscher Hanks. Hanks was active in comics between the years of 1939 and 1941, but in those years he created mini-stories that would have appealed to a ten year old—could very well have come from the mind of a ten year old. Lots of exclamation marks and deformed monochrome creatures. The stories are simple but the images can be striking somewhat in the same manner as Henry Darger’s images can be striking. Not as perverse and fanciful as Darger’s hermaphroditic little Victorian girls, Hanks’ characters are more caricatures of the villains and heroes of the comic book age, obscene parodies of Superman and his kind of extraterrestrial uber-man living in a world of impossibly vibrant colors.
Just as Darger unravels his enigmatic archetypes into floral tapestries that tantalize and disturb in equal measure, much of the charm of Fletscher Hanks is his dreamlike storylines: alien hordes with no head but just a single eye in the center of their chests; or a gang leader whose body shrivels down to leave only his wrinkled head which is then flung into space where it secures itself to a headless giant whose body slowly devours it, the head sinking into his flesh.
There are certain signatures of Hanks, such as the short exclamatory sentences with which his heroes talk and the large-necked heroes themselves, but it’s the sudden and unexpected twists that keep you reading, and the blockish garishly colored panels portraying simplistic explosions, or the juxtaposition of panels, each one jumping dramatically, from two-dimensionally lush scene to two-dimensionally lush scene. My favorite hero is probably Fantomah, the queen of the jungle, whose face turns into a skull when she becomes angry. In every story she foils of the plans of white oppressors hoping to rape the jungle of its wealth.
(I can’t help wondering whether there’s any intended or unintended connection to Fatimah, the first of the prophet Muhammad’s wives, and often presented as an ideal of Muslim womanhood, but be that as it may...)
Jack Kirby was just a sort of well-schooled Hanks, with Stan Lee ironing out his thornier corners. Both had an idiosyncratic vision. Sure, his storytelling is a bit more credible and the graphics somewhat more mature, but the sentiment is the same. This is exactly what makes Hanks so alluring. He has distilled comix down to their most primal elements of retribution and a kind of adolescent male dream state.
But whereas Kirby had a long and successful career at Marvel, little is known of the personal life of Fletcher Hanks, but that he abandoned his family in 1930, was reportedly an abusive spouse, and was found dead on a park bench in New York City in February of 1976.
Most of my background and interest is in the weird-o comix of the 60’s, 70’s and beyond. I loved Raw, the comix periodical from the 80’s edited by Art Spiegelman, and although Hank Fletcher was banging about at the same time as Marvel and DC were getting their start, his aesthetic is more like R. Crumb et al., as in the underground comix scene in the 60’s. Taken out of context, his work has a similar feel as some Frank strip by Jim Woodring. Of course, the drawings are not as finely crafted, but they have a kind of brutalist charisma to them. This aesthetic has been hammered out with a sledgehammer.
The larger story here is the classic difference between the amateur and the professional. Through repetition and the refining influence of the marketplace, an artist that “makes it” will be forced to daily and endlessly refine their craft. Their earlier crudenesses will be smoothed out into something more stylized and exact over time, but an artist who cannot “catch on” finds themselves trapped in an endless amateurism by the rigorless world they inhabit.
Very rarely, however, in this world of the amateur a person comes who retains enough of an obsession to perfect their vision as they see it and the world be damned—such as Fletcher or Darger—who capture a place their more refined colleagues never could because it exists in a more personal universe—where their dreams are allowed to flourish away from the prying eyes of the audience.
As I said, we were making a sitcom that no one would ever see, in which four spandex clad locals fight crime in their small town, although mostly they just drink and complain. It was meant to be a cross between The Office and Kick-Ass. We did hours of unscripted interviews. My brother was the superhero’s trainer and wore a mask of Sunbear, the leader of the group, over his own face. The Governess, one of the villains, claimed to have the ability to make anyone sit down whenever she chose. We filmed at Tiny’s, a dive bar in downtown Eugene, OR, and at a farm outside of town. We made a pilot episode, but then showed it to no one.
And when I’d first moved to Oregon, it was to an anarchist compound in Saginaw—which itself’s just a mill, a convenient store, and a trailer park. Roadkill was commonly on the menu, the bad green meat stripped away and the remainder hung out on the cemetery of dead cars out in the yard where it collected bees for some reason and Himalayan blackberries always encroaching from the corners with their toothy thorns. Then a summer of wildland firefighting, a winter slinging fish in the Bering Strait, a year spent starving in Chicago, and another summer fighting fire, and it was on one of those runs that the four of us decided that we should make a sitcom called Spirit Friends. Point being, we were the ultimate amateurs.
Comix exist in a world between film and novel, like a storyboard of our dreaming. These dreams can be refined into blockbusters or they can have the simplicity of a knock knock joke, but what made Fletscher Hanks stand out is that his dreams were not refined at all. They captured a universe as-of-yet undivided, where the egg has yet to be separated into the yolk and the white, where there is not yet a distinct Asgard, Valhalla, and Jötunheimr, but a more dynamic world of the pre-formed entities that lurk just below consciousness. It is a mythology in embryo, and this is exactly what is so alluring for the amateur aesthetic in general.
It is always as much a thing that could be as a thing that is.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
