You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! More Comics of Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics, 2009).



Let's keep it simple, shall we? You see this panel here?



The whole book's like this. Every page. It's a nutty thing of beauty. You must buy it.

Oh, you want more? Okay. The follow-up to 2007's I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, this compiles every remaining known Fletcher Hanks comic from the 1939-41 period when he was in the business and there was a perceived market for the thrilling adventures of lumberjacks and space wizards. It's edited, again, by Paul Karasik and while the more completely insane adventures made it into part one, there are still more than enough examples here of gory punishments, fifth columnists, black market timber dealers, bizarre chants, brows furrowed in fury, floating vaults, transmitting belts, Saturnian castles and science so unbelievably whacked that the creators of freaking Buck Rogers were probably reacting against Hanks with their comparatively realistic and down-to-earth take on physics.

More than twelve pages of this and your eyeballs hurt. Every story is downright demented. You must buy it. Understand me?