For a moment I forgot the title of this Fletcher Hanks book, and was convinced it was actually All your base are belong to us. That’s not right, of course — the real title of the book is I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets! But the slip up isn’t exactly an accident either. He’s a lot like a mangled, mistranslated Internet catch-phrase; a lot of his appeal is the outsider-art one of being naive/incompetent in a surprising way.
The fetishization of outsider art is always a little uneasy. Outsider artists are, by definition, distant from centers of cultural power, and their kooky stories (insane, marginal, loopy) are often as important to their mystique as the art itself. So you end up with a lot of cultural elites patting themselves on the back because they get the genius of this artist and understand him in a way that normal people don’t. It’s a way for bourgeois hipsters (a redundancy, of course) to pretend that they’re actually more prole than the proles. It’s icky — and it’s certainly in full effect here. The book includes a final section by editor Paul Karasik which is, rather presumptiously, in comics form. Anyway, Karasik repeatedly points out that he recognizes the genius that is Hanks even though most people (Karasik’s mother, Hanks’ own son) do not. We also get the scanty biographical details which place Hanks firmly as an outsider — he was a mean drunk, a wife-beater, and a child-abuser, who died penniless. No quite Henry Darger, but it’ll do.
The thing is, you know, I’m a bourgeois hipster myself, and I do think Darger is brilliant. Hanks too, for that matter. His use of color alone is stunning: lots of solid contrasting areas of, bright, almost lurid tones; Lichtenstein or Warhol would eat their hearts out. Fantagraphics reproduces each shade lovingly, and the result is marvelous. The drawing is also distinctive and energetic; stiff stylized poses, weirdly bland faces for the heroes, exaggeratedly twisted features for the villains. Hanks is also amazingly imaginative, in that way that outsider art can be — making connections that are weird and lovely, in an aphasiac kind of way. In a typical story, a crime syndicate distributes an oxygen destroying ray so that it is beside every single important person in America. They set off the ray by remote control and everyone starts to suffocate. But Stardust the super-wizard sees they’re evil plotand appears in a flash. He destorys the radio outlet, finds the gang leader resonsible, and shoots a ray at him which makes his head grow large and his body shrink. Then he takes the bodiless headand take sit to the “space pocket of living death, where the headless headhunter dwells! He’s the hugest giant in the known universe!” Stardust throws the head into the space pocket, where it lands on the headhunter’s headless shoulders, and then sinks into its body. Stardust returns to earth, attracts all the remaining gangmembers to a central place, and uses his rays to turn them all into a single person. then he sends them off into space. The end.
This is the basic Hanks plot (more or less). The stories generally involve a hideous and unlikely plot (creating an enomrous tidal wave, or making earth and venus run into each other, or stopping the earth’s rotation so everyone will fly into space and the bad guys can have the planet to themselves (the bad guys hold themselves to the earth with chains, you see, so they won’t be affected.)) The omnipotent super-hero waits until some fairly large number of people have been killed, then swoops down and enacts a bizarre and gruesome multi-stage revenge.
Obviously this is all totally tripped out, and there are a bunch of testimonials from aging hippies — R. Crumb calling Hanks a “twisted dude,” Gary Panter referring to the strips as “magic jellybeans,” Kurt Vonnegut enthusastically praising it as a “major work of art.” Again, I don’t necessarily disagree, but there is a certain dissonance. I mean, not to state the obvious or anything, but these strips are really, really, really fascist. The super-hero genre in general — with its simple-minded emphasis on good vs. evil and revenge narratives — tends to be fairly pro-police-state, but Hanks goes above and beyond. The stories are all about the joys of imaginatively torturing bad guys to death. The balance of power is completely one-sided; the super-heroes can do anything. It’s a lot like the God-as-Superman-as-Asshole comics independently invented by Chris Ware and Johnny Ryan — except there isn’t any irony here, unless you bring your own. Authority here is all-seeing, and good is defined almost completely in terms of revenge and the exercise of power. It’s just a little weird to see a bunch of lefty, free-speech types falling over themselves to embrace a work of art which seems pretty clearly to be in favor of forced, inventive extermination of the riff raff. And maybe I’m making a leap here, but I’d bet that for Hanks that riff raff would include a certain number of high-brow lefty weirdos like Crumb, Panter, Vonnegut, et al.
Part of appreciating outsider art is, of course, being able to enjoy the crackpottery from a safe distance. You can enjoy a powerful belief system by appreciating it rather than actually, you know, believing in it — or even engaging with it. I’d certainly agree that Hanks is a great artist. Like many other great artists (Ezra Pound, Yeats, Kipling, Lawrence…) he’s also kind of a moral abomination. I think it’s maybe more respectful to point that out than it is to enthuse about his formal qualities and imagination (as Karasik does) without responding to the actual content of his work.
This is all true, but the morality of Hanks’ work is so absurd that it’s impossible to take seriously. And the sincerity of it is part of the interest. He reminds me of Harold Gray in that way. If Hanks was a better human being his work wouldn’t have been as interesting.
I don’t know, Eric. The happenings in his work are absurd; the morality is evil, but pretty familiar. It’s true that it’s hard to separate an artist’s morality from his or her work — it doesn’t make sense to say that Kipling’s work was great despite the imperialism, for example, since the imperialism is so integral to it. On the other hand, that’s a little different from saying we should celebrate his work for its imperialism, or claiming that the imperialism doesn’t matter because liberal, right-thinking folks like you and me don’t agree with it.
I think Hanks is an interesting artist, and partially because of the way his politics interacts with his trippiness — I think there’s a fascist, puritanical aspect to hippidom that he kind of plugs into for example….
Anyway, thanks for stopping by! It’s always nice to know somebody’s reading a post even before Dirk plugs it….
Your Kipling example is thought provoking. I agree that you can’t say the “work was great despite” the sticky political leanings, nor can you say we should “celebrate his work because of” those political leanings. And I agree we can’t simply set them aside, as they are integral to the work.
What, then, should we do with them? I’m not necessarily asking you this question directly, but any thoughts, obviously, would be welcome.
The answer – to me, at least – CANNOT be to simply dismiss someone like Kipling. His art is too good. Yet you must in some way deal with the politics. Same goes for Hanks.
I will say that with any great work of art – take a Fletcher Hanks page as an example, or a Kipling poem, or a Wagner movement, or fill in your own – there is a necessary balancing act between one’s intellectual interaction with the work and a separate, simultaneous non-intellectual interaction with it. The feeling you get when your breath is taken away by a phenomenal shot in Triumph of the Will, say.
That there is a balancing act is, I guess, obvious. The exact nature of it is not – and I certainly can’t pinpoint it. Thanks for stirring up the issue in my mind, though, Noah.
I actually really enjoy Kipling’s short story collection Plain Tales from the Hills precisely because it undercuts his pro-empire stance: both the colonized and the colonizers are victims of the process, and in even the funny stories, the characters suffer.
The character, Paul Karasik, from my story, “Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks” is a myopic fanboy. He waxes on gleefully about the refined qualities of the Hanks aesthetic while getting a boner contemplating the potential treasures he hopes to score at the house of the son of his idol.
The point was that he was blind to the actual content of the work.
I purposefully left it up to the reader to make the connection between Karasik’s delusions (and limited appreciation of Hanks) and the true nature of Hanks’ fascistic tendencies as the revelations about Hanks’ character are revealed.
The entire idea of the Afterword was that these revelations would resonate with an intelligent reader (who had just finished reading 15 of Hanks’ stories) in such a way that they would come to their own, clear and hopefully disturbing response to the “actual content of his work”
To think that most readers, including Crumb, Panter, and most of all, Vonnegut (who, by the way, if you check the quote, was referring to the unearthing of these treasures) do not appreciate the barely hidden misanthropy bubbling under the surface of these stories is to sell these guys short.
Hey Kristy. I love Kipling myself, actually. Part of the reason is, as you suggest, that he can be read against himself at least to some degree. Not in the sense that he ever is really anti-imperialist, but rather in the sense that he’s actually very insightful about how imperialism works. For example, “The White Man’s Burden” doesn’t argue that we should invade lesser nations because they want us to; rather it explains very clearly that they will hate us for it. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Edward Said citing that poem favorably, in fact, precisely because the analysis Kipling offers is not that different than Said’s, even though their conclusions are very different.
Jason, I think that answers your question to some extent as well…what we do with an artist’s moral and political positions really depends on the artist. With someone like Kipling or (I think) D. H. Lawrence, one can be impressed with their take on a problem even if you disagree with their position. Other artists, like Winsor McCay, seem to take poisonous poisitions fairly casually — McCay’s definitely a racist, but I doubt he thought about it all that much; he’s really much more about pure formal qualities than about any particular content, so it’s possible to enjoy him and to some extent bracket the racism, since it isn’t really integral to his work. I haven’t thought about Hanks’ politics and aesthetics as much, so I don’t know that I can come up with as glib a rule-of-thumb suggestion for how to deal with it…it does function as something of an unconscious critique of the way super-hero comics and revenge narratives in general work. I think I need to think about it more, though.
Paul, I appreciate your editing of the comic, and your unearthing of Hanks, who really has done a bunch of wonderful stuff. But I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. In the first place, and as I suggested, placing your own work next to Hanks seems to me deeply presumptuous. I think the anthropological narrative you use, and your ambivalent effort to straddle the line between autobio and fiction, both end up rather desperately focusing attention on you, as the middle-class discoverer with whom the reader can identify. This is totally the way outsider art is generally packaged (or other authentic genres, like folk music — we end up focusing on Alan Lomax rather than Ruby Vass, which is kind of icky), and your effort to undermine it with irony and distance just seems like another tiresome hipster pose. You would have been much better to just write an essay about it; even if it were anthropological and ambivalent, it would have been less distracting, and generally allowed Hanks to be much more the focus, rather than you.
Also, I can well believe that R. Crumb, Vonnegut, and Panter may see Hanks as a misanthrope. Being a misanthrope is a perfectly acceptable lefty/hippie/artsy identity; it even carries a certain cache. The problem is, Hanks is not a misanthrope. He is a law-and-order fascist. There really is a difference, and your effort to blur the distinction is exactly the sort of thing that made me question your editorial position in the book.
I know that probably sounds really harsh. These issues (outsider art, political art) are ones that I think are really important (insofar as any art or burble on a blog is important, that is) and very difficult to steer around. I very much enjoyed the book, and again really appreciate your efforts in bringing it into print. And I’m touched that you bothered to reply here. I look forward to seeing more of your work. Take care.
Nice article on Hanks, Noah… your summary of the problems with so-called “outsider artists” is dead on.
A fascistic philosophy is indeed everywhere in superhero comics, but I suspect Hanks motivation for his fascistic revenge scenarios did not go much beyond producing something that entertained and amused him to write and draw. They ended up so over the top, that they come off like a satire of a fascistic revenge scenario.
Hanks doesn’t strike me as much of a political artist… probably not much of a philosopher either. He strikes me as someone having a hoot making comics. To attempt to derive Hanks’ personal philosophies out of his work seems to me to be reading way too much into it.
Beyond that, clearly artists frequently draw and write characters that in no way reflect their personal philosophies, so to call Hanks a “law-and-order fascist” seems way off-base. Stardust certainly is, though, god love him.
I thought Paul’s afterward was thoughtful and wonderful… it certainly gives you a very different understanding of Hanks that you don’t get from reading his comics. It doesn’t seem even remotely presumptuous to me… it greatly added to the value of the book.
Paul, thanks much for the wonderful read! I adore the book.
Steven Stwalley
http://stwallskull.com