golden age
Robot Reviews: You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation
You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!
You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation
by Fletcher Hanks; edited and with an introduction by Paul Karasik
Fantagraphics Books, 232 pages, $24.99.
Perhaps it’s kismet, but Paul Karasik’s first collection of Fletcher Hanks stories, 2007′s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!, seems to have landed at exactly the perfect moment, taking advantage of a publishing trend where just about every classic comic strip and book (and then some) was being reprinted with lavish, loving treatment. Why not shine a spotlight on an odd, relative obscurity like Hanks? Who knows what imaginative power he might unleash on a modern audience?
It turns out quite a bit. Thanks to that book (and other works, like Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time) Hanks quickly became something of a household name among comic book fans, to the point where his name has arguably eclipsed some of his previously lauded contemporaries. As Jog pointed out recently, you know a character has entered the public consciousness to at least some degree when Alan Moore is referencing it.
Now we have the companion volume, You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation, which, I believe, gathers all the remaining material that the alcoholic, abusive Hanks did during his brief tenure as a comic book creator in the late 1930s and early 40s.
This second book definitely has a “here’s the rest” feeling that confirms the nagging notion that Planets was more of a “greatest hits” collection than a promise of genius in every story on every page. It’s not something that most Hanks devotees will mind that much — there’s still plenty of weird and wonderful tales to delight and disturb — but those hoping for a sequence equivalent to the evil De Structo’s head being thrown into space and then absorbed by the body of the Headless Headhunter might feel a twinge of disappointment.
- June 23, 2009 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Robot Reviews: Air Fighters Classics
Air Fighters Classics, Volume 1
Air Fighters Classics, Volume 1
Written by Charles Biro, Nathaniel Nitkin, and possibly others.
Illustrated by Harry Sahle, Bob Fujitani, and others.
Eclipse (1987)
I watched an old Robert Mitchum movie a couple of weeks ago. It was a war film called Gung Ho! about the formation of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion and its first mission against a Japanese garrison on Makin Island. I’ve seen a lot of war films in my life and many of them have disturbed me, but something about this one was especially unsettling. It felt real, and not just because of the excellent use of the stock footage. (I assume it was stock footage, but it was so well edited that it looks like it could have been shot especially for the movie.) It was the emotions that felt so genuine. Especially the anger and the hatred towards the Japanese.
A lot of the war movies I’ve seen were filmed years if not decades after the wars they depict were already over. Gung Ho! was filmed a year or so after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The hurt and the fear and the anger were all fresh and those feelings overshadow the entire movie. Watched today, you can either dismiss it as racist garbage or you can be powerfully impacted by it as an historical document; a time-capsule of what it was like to be a (non-Japanese) US citizen in the early ‘40s. I shouldn’t have to say – but I will – that none of what I’m talking about here is meant to excuse racism in general or the horrible atrocities inflicted on Japanese Americans during that period. Obviously I don’t approve of the way this country handled its feelings, but for the first time in my life I understand the feelings themselves.
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- February 6, 2009 @ 09:47 AM by Michael May