Number 2247: Fantomah’s secret pit of jungle horrors

Here we go again into the mind of Fletcher Hanks, who had a vengeful view of good vs evil. And characters. And his artwork.

Four white men in pith helmets are forcing Africans to work for them in a diamond mine. Fantomah, who can do things such as turn her face into a skull, and fly, and wiggle her fingers and make magic, wreaks her vengeance on them. In an unusual story development (“unusual” is the key word) Fantomah puts all the white men into one body. Such weird doings are known to pop up in Hanks’s stories. Fantomah then banishes the four-in-one bad man to the place of jungle horrors. Horrors is right! Besides strange giant green men, there are white cobras, looking like sex-education diagrams of sperms heading for the egg. (Maybe it’s just my comic book mind seeing things in pictures.)

There was only one Fletcher Hanks, and he left comics (or was asked to leave) early on. I wonder what his work would have turned into had he kept on drawing comics. I can imagine 1950s horror comics by Hanks that were never to be.

From Jungle Comics #7 (1940):

Number 1847: “Crime doesn’t seem to pay.”

The quirky, oddball art of Fletcher Hanks is covered in two excellent Fantagraphics books by Paul Karasik:  I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!  and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!  Karasik did research on the man himself, and gives us a bio of Hanks as an alcoholic with a mean streak who deserted his family. I think his personality disorders and addictive dependencies figured into his work.

Fantomah (by “Barclay Flagg”) is one of his creations. He apparently wrote, drew and lettered his own comics, so they had a singular vision. Fantomah dispenses justice in the jungle, and in this story to a couple of white hunters out to loot a jungle city of gold. Fantomah is magic, and her head turns into a skull when she goes to work on the crooks. (That is a unique characteristic, although The later Ghost Rider from Marvel comes to mind.) Hanks used tracings. He would repeat poses. When he got a drawing he liked he found it economical to trace it off and re-use it in the same story, sometimes on the same page.

I also noticed his writing. In this story, from Jungle Comics #3 (1940) the final panel is anti-climactic.
[SPOILER ALERT] The villains, who are spared by Fantomah after being transformed into giant green insect creatures, have a bland reaction: “Crime doesn’t seem to pay.” “You’re right.” I wonder if they considered how they would be perceived when they landed their plane and stepped out in their new bodies. Once done with the story Hanks just wrote finis without thinking of it beyond the final panel, except maybe how Fantomah was going to defeat the “wild legions of beast-men” in the next issue, as promised in the final caption.

Talented cartoonist Eric Haven has done a pastiche of Hanks in “Bed Man” — which not only captures Hanks’s absurdism, but also manages to one-up him. You can see it by clicking on the thumbnail:

Number 643


Fantomah, Daughter of the Pharaohs



We've come to the end of Jungle Girl Week. I've saved my favorite for last, because Fantomah was such a strange character, jungle girl or otherwise. Fantomah isn't wearing the regulation jungle girl bikini, but then I told you last Sunday I kind of like those harem outfits. (Probably a result of sneaking peeks at the back pages of my mom's Confidential magazines in the '50s, with their alluring Frederick's of Hollywood ads.)

When I first showed a Fantomah story in Pappy's #116, taken from Jungle Comics #15, she was billed as "The Mystery Woman of the Jungle" and she looked like this:

But that was from a strip by the noted screwball artist, Fletcher Hanks, who I assume wrote it as well (his stories had a weirdness about them peculiar to him). By the time of this Fantomah strip in Jungle Comics #29, 1942, she was billed as "Daughter of the Pharaohs," and had apparently given up the skullhead look. I really don't know a lot about Fantomah except what I've read on the Internet, and you can check her out if you read this.

Artwork on this story is attributed by the Grand Comics Database to George Appel.

Hope you've enjoyed our jungle girl week. We had a six-day week, but I deserve a day's rest and I'll be back on Sunday.

Chuck Wells is also featuring jungle girls this week, so check them out here.






Thanks to everyone for checking in this week. I hope we can do this again sometime. Thanks to Chuck Wells for being a great sport and making it twice the fun.

Number 116


Arachnophobic Comics!


Scared of spiders? Afraid when one of the little critters is crawling on your leg and you look down and are suddenly seized by blind panic? If you're that afraid of a tiny arachnid, what would you do if the spider was as big as your dog, or an elephant?

Well, you'd probably react like the people in these stories. Not very well!

First up is a Gale Allen story from Planet Comics. This 1946 strip is full of the pin-up panels that Fiction House was famous for. They were definitely going for the military PX, and teenage boy market. I don't know who the artist is.

Even discounting the giant spiders the story itself is ludicrous, but that just makes it more fun. How many rocket pilots, like Gale, also fill in on the switchboard?* It'd take too much space to have another character, an actual switchboard operator, call to Gale to tell her of a distress signal about giant spiders. The writer just made Gale the operator. Simple! You can't think too much about these types of comic books, you just enjoy them for their dopey plots. I also enjoy the attempts to make the story more "science-fictiony" with the use of words like "atmos-minutes" and a unit of measurement like "atres." Say what? Atres? Sizzlin' rockets!

The second story is a Fantomah story from Jungle Comics, drawn by the legendary Fletcher Hanks using a pseudonym, "Barclay Flagg." There is a book coming out soon from Fantagraphics on Hanks, and I can hardly wait. This Fantomah strip will be a good teaser to get us all ready.**

There is a hallucinogenic quality to all of Hanks work. Maybe it was the fact that he was alcoholic, but it could also be that he could draw, kind of, but just not what people expect of comic book art. He traced. Panels of the villain, Org, especially in the first couple of pages, look to have been traced and flipped, then re-traced. That's true for the giant spiders, too. His composition is also strange. Look at the two panels on page 1 where Org and Fantomah are eyeballing each other across the gutter between panels. I suspect that Fletcher Hanks was inspired by the art of Basil Wolverton, but like all Wolverton admirers didn't quite have the talent to pull it off in his own work.

I downloaded the Fantomah story from the Internet a few years ago and I don't know who to thank for doing the scanning.

Read these stories, arachnophobes, and just be glad that little brown spider crawling on your arm isn't bigger.

Gale Allen, Planet Comics #41, March 1946

Fantomah, Jungle Comics #15, March 1941

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*I also enjoy seeing the future from the vantage point of the past. Instead of using some sort of device like telepathy or wireless communication, the writer just transferred some 1946 technology to the future.

**Hey, I said Fantomah was a "strip teaser," yuk-yuk.