Uncharacteristically well-drawn but typically weird

Fantomah was an obscure Golden Age character remembered (if 'remembered' is the right word) for two things. The first is being a female superhero (defining the term broadly) who predated Wonder Woman. The second is her creator, Fletcher Hanks, a cult figure among comic book historians. Hanks was known for crudely drawn but sometimes memorable stories featuring strange images and dialogue and little suggestion of narrative logic.

Assuming Hanks is the artist (Barclay Flagg was a house name), this is one of his more professional looking efforts, but dropping lions on paratroopers is certainly the sort of thing he'd come up with.








Check out the size of the lion relative to the parachutes on page 36.

Comics and Fine Art

There is a tendency to place comics creators of the Golden and Silver Age somewhere between folk artists and idiot savants, now and then managing something of real originality and value largely due to their complete ignorance of the way art is supposed to look. Call it the Fletcher Hanks model.

But for every Hanks there were any number of artists who were highly literate about the visual arts. Here's what the great Golden Age artist Mort Meskin said about the role of cinema in the field:

"Citizen Kane (1941) influenced us a great deal, all of us. We were very excited about it and spent quite a bit of time discussing it, employing its elements in our work. There was a contest as to who saw it the most times"

Some, like A.C. Hollingsworth even went on to great success in the world of fine art.

Which leads me to this wonderful piece from perhaps the best scholarly comics blog, the Comics Detective, about the blogger's search for the artist behind an extraordinary set of expressionist covers in the Fifties. Definitely worth a look:


With special thanks to Frank M. Young.