You can’t fool me, that’s Miracleman in different clothes on that cover.

So I don’t know where to even begin with the work of Fletcher Hanks, Golden Age cartoonist. He was only active for a couple of years, from 1939 to 1941, and it would be easy to dismiss his oddball superhero comic book work as naïve art, as Hanks’ stories rarely seem more than unfettered id unleashed upon a page with no mollifying influence between thought and execution

But also keep in mind the superhero genre was still in its infancy, with Superman his own self first appearing in print in 1938. The language and tropes of the superhero comic had yet to establish themselves, leaving Hanks free to interpret the genre in his own unfettered way.

If you’re unfamiliar with the man’s work, a quick Googling will pull up plenty of examples, or you can see an overview of a Stardust story here. And trust me when I say, that’s not even one of the weirder Stardust stories.

A thought that just crossed my mind: Hanks’ comics are like, what if the Herbie the Fat Fury stories were serious? It almost feels that way.

At any rate, Hanks’ work started get a lot of attention a decade or two back, thanks to a couple of nice paperback collections from Fantagraphics. That certainly made new fans of the man’s work. And that brought us to a couple of years back, when a book of new stories about Hanks’ Stardust character showed up on a crowdfunding site. Lots of great creators were involved, lots of perks for the supporters, it all looked great.

Unfortunately, it was a large number of creators, which is, to use the old expression, like herding cats, so the book took a little longer than intended to produce and put out. But supporters were kept in the loop, and worries were kept to a minimum.

At last, this month, they started to ship, and I got mine:

Haven’t had much more than a brief flip-through of the volume, but it’s very nice looking, beautifully colored and printed, and featuring some real top flight talent.

Unfortunately there is a page of A.I. art in the book, apparently being used by the “artist” on purpose to make a point about something, but I’ll never read it and neither will you. Doing A.I. “comics” is an insult to other actually talented creators involved in this book and should never have been allowed.

The other little thing that bugged me about this had nothing really to do with the book itself, but rather how one of the funding campaign perks was handled.

This is what I ordered for the shop:

That would get me three copies of the hardcover, and as it says right there in black and white, “all copies signed by Mike Allred.” Great, all the books will be autographed, I’m getting everything at a reasonable price, should sell great at the shop.

As it turns out, the books weren’t signed, and I instead got these separate bookplates with Allred’s signature:

…which, you know, “signed bookplate” is fine, too, probably easier for the publisher to get those shipped from place to place instead of mailing hundreds of books to Allred, or flying Allred out to where the books are and have him sign them there. But “bookplate” is different from “book signed” and that distinction should have been made more clear.

On top of everything else, said bookplates are wider and a hair taller than the actual book, so if you’re gonna but them in there, you may have to trim them down. And they’re not self-adhesive so you’ll have to glue ’em down yourself.

Sigh. I did drop a line to the publisher suggesting that he be more careful about this sort of thing in the future. Or maybe it was just something that was out of his control…maybe he was just as surprised at the size of the signed bookplates but it was too late to do anything about it. Who knows.

To reiterate: the book itself, with that minor one page caveat, looks wonderful and I can’t wait to dig into it. The other issues may be a little disappointing, but the book itself is the important bit and that looks like they got it about 99% correct. Can’t wait to see who was able to lose their minds enough to match Fletcher Hanks’ illustrated insanity.