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hakimbriki's review against another edition
4.0
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Here's a book that grabs you and shakes you !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
A book that makes you go What The F$£% at least 60 times !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Never in your life have you seen such a combination of psychedelic, happy, sad, good, bad, rock'em, sock'em action !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
A book that makes you wonder about the sanity of Fletcher Hanks, because never has there been a comic book like this !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring The Super Wizard STARDUST! whose vast knowledge of interplanetary science has made him the most remarkable man that has ever lived! STARDUST devotes his abilities to crime-busting and ass-kicking, torturing and transforming villains into rats ! For some odd reason, despite being an interstellar cop, STARDUST only seems interested in fighting crime in New York! But hey, we love him !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring FANTOMAH! Mystery Woman of the jungle! The most remarkable woman that ever lived! FANTOMAH devotes her phenomenal powers to protecting the jungle-born! FANTOMAH has such keen insight that she can see all that happens in connection with the jungle! FANTOMAH uses her wizardry to protect the welfare of jungle creatures! For some peculiar reason, FANTOMAH never interferes with the villains while they decimate entire populations; she enjoys taking her sweet time playing Voyeur before she appears out of nowhere to avenge the people she could have saved in the first place! Ah, what would we do without FANTOMAH ?
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring BIG RED McLANE! King of the Northwoods and loyal lumberjack for the great BEND Company! Isn't he a true sweetheart ?
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring BUZZ CRANDALL! of the space patrol! BUZZ CRANDALL lives on the highly civilized planet of venus, and is in charge of the inter-planetary secret service for both Venus and the Earth! BUZZ CRANDALL has become the top crime-buster of the Universe! Don't you just LOVE that blue suit ?
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
With heinous villains that will give you the whim-whams, and weirdos! With Magnetic rays, and oddballs! With anti-gravity rays, and weird-looking human beings! With fist-fights, planets heading for each other, and some pretty unusual stuff !!!!!
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
The comic book equivalent of an Ed Wood movie !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Never has Subversive literature been so APPALLING and EPIC !
Here's a book that grabs you and shakes you !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
A book that makes you go What The F$£% at least 60 times !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Never in your life have you seen such a combination of psychedelic, happy, sad, good, bad, rock'em, sock'em action !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
A book that makes you wonder about the sanity of Fletcher Hanks, because never has there been a comic book like this !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring The Super Wizard STARDUST! whose vast knowledge of interplanetary science has made him the most remarkable man that has ever lived! STARDUST devotes his abilities to crime-busting and ass-kicking, torturing and transforming villains into rats ! For some odd reason, despite being an interstellar cop, STARDUST only seems interested in fighting crime in New York! But hey, we love him !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring FANTOMAH! Mystery Woman of the jungle! The most remarkable woman that ever lived! FANTOMAH devotes her phenomenal powers to protecting the jungle-born! FANTOMAH has such keen insight that she can see all that happens in connection with the jungle! FANTOMAH uses her wizardry to protect the welfare of jungle creatures! For some peculiar reason, FANTOMAH never interferes with the villains while they decimate entire populations; she enjoys taking her sweet time playing Voyeur before she appears out of nowhere to avenge the people she could have saved in the first place! Ah, what would we do without FANTOMAH ?
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring BIG RED McLANE! King of the Northwoods and loyal lumberjack for the great BEND Company! Isn't he a true sweetheart ?
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Featuring BUZZ CRANDALL! of the space patrol! BUZZ CRANDALL lives on the highly civilized planet of venus, and is in charge of the inter-planetary secret service for both Venus and the Earth! BUZZ CRANDALL has become the top crime-buster of the Universe! Don't you just LOVE that blue suit ?
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
With heinous villains that will give you the whim-whams, and weirdos! With Magnetic rays, and oddballs! With anti-gravity rays, and weird-looking human beings! With fist-fights, planets heading for each other, and some pretty unusual stuff !!!!!
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
The comic book equivalent of an Ed Wood movie !
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets !
Never has Subversive literature been so APPALLING and EPIC !
sasha_in_a_box's review against another edition
2.0
My mind knows that this is a very valuable piece of work, this collection from one of the pioneers of comic books. And I did like the last chapter from the point of view of the guy who actually brought it all together. I appreciate the weird sense of justice and punishment that these heroes have. But I didn't enjoy it. The heroes are all-powerful and have no weakness, so there is no tension to any of the stories. I also don't get how, like other reviewers have pointed out, the heroes waited until thousands of people died before they jumped in and saved the day. Weird. But I know this was in the early days of comics, when the rules had to be made up on the fly. Just not my thing, didn't enjoy it.
Two stars: it was ok.
Two stars: it was ok.
egg_gremlin's review
1.0
Meh, too racist. It was occasionally wacky enough to be slightly entertaining, but the editor's note at the end just felt like this weird guy walking around, wondering why the world doesn't idolize this "flawed genius" as much as him.
kristennd's review
4.0
Very golden age, very weird. The epilogue really enhanced it. My favorite comics character is the Spectre, so the fates of the villains weren't all that unique/startling. He only had a couple basic ideas, but they were strong ones.
darren_cormier's review
3.0
This is not a review of the book of the same title. No, really, it's not. It's a manifesto, first espoused here on this semi-read blog, of how I, a mild-mannered thirty-something writer, considered polite by most, shall, in actuality, and with an abundance of commas, one day destroy all the civilized planets.
Seriously, that's what it is.
Why are you laughing?
Well, okay. It's not a manifesto, and I fully lack the world domination gene, so, I suppose... reluctantly and with much sighing... I should talk about the book of the same title. But this isn't a review.
I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! is a collection of comic strips of the cult figure Fletcher Hanks. Hanks is a legendary figure among comics historians and aficionados. His work appeared under many pseudonyms and in many publications in the 1930's, when comics were still in their infancy. He has been routinely characterized as an "Ed Wood of the comics world", a grossly inaccurate metaphor and primarily only used because it sounds catchy. Hanks was more the nascent comics world's Kilgore Trout, the struggling, pulp science fiction writer of Vonnegut's novels (an alter ego of Vonnegut himself).
Collected in this volume (and its companion You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation) are the complete archived material of Hanks, including his most lasting and popular creation Stardust, a supernatural superhero with unlimited strength and intelligence. The plot lines are always thin and formulaic: a group of gangsters conjure the most convoluted and ill-advised schemes to achieve world domination--invisible fusing fluid to freeze all transportation in order to enslave all Americans and take over the world; the creation of a tidal wave to drown every living creature--plots which are usually defeated by Stardust, who travels from his home planet to stop the crimes.
The most characteristic element of Hanks' works were the wildly inventive and violent means by which the hero, be it Stardust or Fantomah (the female ruler of the jungle), or Big Red McClane (the honorable lumberjack) or any other two-dimensional stock hero, uses to stop the crimes. The elaborate tortures are the results of Hanks' depraved and haunted, destructive mind, one that the editor of the collection, Paul Karasik, reveals in his afterword.
Karasik, in his efforts to interview this long-lost comics hero of his, discovers an address of a man named Fletcher Hanks Jr., himself a decorated air force pilot and writer of a memoir about his time serving as a pilot in WWII. It turns out this was Hanks' son, who proceeds to tell Karasik the real story of his father:
According to a review and feature article in The Believer from August 2007, "Fletcher Hanks, nicknamed “Christy” after Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, was, by all accounts, a louse. An alcoholic and a wife-beater, Hanks once kicked his four-year-old son, Fletcher Jr., down a flight of stairs. The punt and subsequent tumble left the boy unable to speak intelligibly for five years. 'My old man didn’t like runts,' explained the younger Fletcher. The boy was runty, to be sure, and suffered from rickets, but his dad’s rage was something beyond reckoning. 'My father,' he said, 'was the most no-good drunken bum you can find.'"
The senior Hanks abandoned his family in the 30's, stealing his son's money as he left. He was found frozen to death on a park bench in New York in the 70's.
The afterword, in fact, is the only semblance of emotion in the collection, other than the outsized rage and disturbing lengths of righteous indignation foisted upon the victims. Hanks did not rid himself of his demons on the page alone. It is an emotional reminder that sometimes the artist doesn't match up to the art itself. In the case of Fletcher Hanks, given the id-driven elaborate vengeance plots, we should not be surprised that the person and the art itself match. The work seems to be mostly a mechanism for Hanks to put on paper the more violently depraved machinations of his mind. The tragedy is that Hanks didn't stop at the page.
The work is strange, twisted, raw. But Hanks' influence on the future of comics cannot be minimized. The rise of Flash Gordon, the Justice League, much of the Marvel universe of the 60s can be seen as a result of Hanks' work, albeit much tamer.
In my trips to the library, I passed by this title in the graphic novel shelves frequently but would ignored it; it seemed raw, campy, D-list superheroes. However, I also like to consider myself a self-imposed champion of the obscure, of the outposts of literature, those forgotten works that no one else knows about.
The eminently humane Kurt Vonnegut wrote of this collection, "The recovery from oblivion of these treasures is in itself a major work of art." I like to delude myself that I'm in good company for having read this collection.
Seriously, that's what it is.
Why are you laughing?
Well, okay. It's not a manifesto, and I fully lack the world domination gene, so, I suppose... reluctantly and with much sighing... I should talk about the book of the same title. But this isn't a review.
I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! is a collection of comic strips of the cult figure Fletcher Hanks. Hanks is a legendary figure among comics historians and aficionados. His work appeared under many pseudonyms and in many publications in the 1930's, when comics were still in their infancy. He has been routinely characterized as an "Ed Wood of the comics world", a grossly inaccurate metaphor and primarily only used because it sounds catchy. Hanks was more the nascent comics world's Kilgore Trout, the struggling, pulp science fiction writer of Vonnegut's novels (an alter ego of Vonnegut himself).
Collected in this volume (and its companion You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation) are the complete archived material of Hanks, including his most lasting and popular creation Stardust, a supernatural superhero with unlimited strength and intelligence. The plot lines are always thin and formulaic: a group of gangsters conjure the most convoluted and ill-advised schemes to achieve world domination--invisible fusing fluid to freeze all transportation in order to enslave all Americans and take over the world; the creation of a tidal wave to drown every living creature--plots which are usually defeated by Stardust, who travels from his home planet to stop the crimes.
The most characteristic element of Hanks' works were the wildly inventive and violent means by which the hero, be it Stardust or Fantomah (the female ruler of the jungle), or Big Red McClane (the honorable lumberjack) or any other two-dimensional stock hero, uses to stop the crimes. The elaborate tortures are the results of Hanks' depraved and haunted, destructive mind, one that the editor of the collection, Paul Karasik, reveals in his afterword.
Karasik, in his efforts to interview this long-lost comics hero of his, discovers an address of a man named Fletcher Hanks Jr., himself a decorated air force pilot and writer of a memoir about his time serving as a pilot in WWII. It turns out this was Hanks' son, who proceeds to tell Karasik the real story of his father:
According to a review and feature article in The Believer from August 2007, "Fletcher Hanks, nicknamed “Christy” after Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, was, by all accounts, a louse. An alcoholic and a wife-beater, Hanks once kicked his four-year-old son, Fletcher Jr., down a flight of stairs. The punt and subsequent tumble left the boy unable to speak intelligibly for five years. 'My old man didn’t like runts,' explained the younger Fletcher. The boy was runty, to be sure, and suffered from rickets, but his dad’s rage was something beyond reckoning. 'My father,' he said, 'was the most no-good drunken bum you can find.'"
The senior Hanks abandoned his family in the 30's, stealing his son's money as he left. He was found frozen to death on a park bench in New York in the 70's.
The afterword, in fact, is the only semblance of emotion in the collection, other than the outsized rage and disturbing lengths of righteous indignation foisted upon the victims. Hanks did not rid himself of his demons on the page alone. It is an emotional reminder that sometimes the artist doesn't match up to the art itself. In the case of Fletcher Hanks, given the id-driven elaborate vengeance plots, we should not be surprised that the person and the art itself match. The work seems to be mostly a mechanism for Hanks to put on paper the more violently depraved machinations of his mind. The tragedy is that Hanks didn't stop at the page.
The work is strange, twisted, raw. But Hanks' influence on the future of comics cannot be minimized. The rise of Flash Gordon, the Justice League, much of the Marvel universe of the 60s can be seen as a result of Hanks' work, albeit much tamer.
In my trips to the library, I passed by this title in the graphic novel shelves frequently but would ignored it; it seemed raw, campy, D-list superheroes. However, I also like to consider myself a self-imposed champion of the obscure, of the outposts of literature, those forgotten works that no one else knows about.
The eminently humane Kurt Vonnegut wrote of this collection, "The recovery from oblivion of these treasures is in itself a major work of art." I like to delude myself that I'm in good company for having read this collection.
vinceyface's review
3.0
A delightful collection of some of the very first comic book stories, delightfully dark and a bit crude by today's standards but still a fun read. The real selling point of this is the interesting short in the back where the curator of this collection has drawn/written a comic of the time he met Fletcher Hanks Jr.
theartolater's review
4.0
This is a very fascinating read, not so much because the comics are great (they are horribly, horribly dated), but that this is a bit of a historical document of a lost artist in a lost era. In a way, the story at the end by the editor who compiled this was the real meat of this, as we learn a bit about who Hanks was.
As long as you don't go into this expecting crazy great comics, you'll find a lot to love here. The importance of this is more key than the contents.
As long as you don't go into this expecting crazy great comics, you'll find a lot to love here. The importance of this is more key than the contents.
stevereally's review
4.0
I'm sure Fletcher Hanks drew these things, but I rather suspect he had a child write them. Any adult sense of how the world works at all is missing from these stories. On the other hand, the cartoonist's son called him a terrible drunk, and maybe he just created all these batshit nutso episodes when he was drunk out of his mind or something.
plaidbrarian's review
5.0
I gave this 3 stars at first, but the more I think about it over time, the more it grows on me, to the point where getting a copy of my own is now Priority A1 at New York Comic Con, so I think that bumps things up to a full 5 stars. Comics were never this bizarre before Hanks, and I don't know if they have been since him, either.