I stated in my review of THE CITY OF SHIFTING SAND that I wasn't especially enamored of the sort of Golden Age comics-story where "anything can happen." This may explain why I've been less fascinated with the cult of Fletcher Hanks. To the best of my knowledge, this Golden Age artist was almost completely forgotten by organized comics-fandom. In the past ten or so years, some of Hanks's work saw print in Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine, and since then there have been three collections of the work he did for assorted Golden Age publishers.
Without attempting to analyze in depth Hanks's appeal for later afficianados of comics, I think it boils down to what I called "freewheeling silliness." Hanks's heroes, such as the superhero Stardust and the jungle-magician Fantomah, encounter grotesque beings that pop out of nowhere and start killing innocents. After a lot of killing, Hanks's heroes decide to exercise their powers-- which often seem limited only by whatever the artist happened to think up-- and the heroes destroy the villains, usually in equally grotesque, sometimes monotonous ways.
One can find other Golden Age stories that offer as little rationalization for their heroes and their boogiemen, but Hanks does have a singular artistic approach to his material, in that even characters who are supposedly good looking come off as subtly distorted. Hanks's flights of fancy are not mythic in themselves, but I did find one story that suggests the complexities of myth, even without rationalizations.
So on the first page, Fantomah-- a protector of some African jungle, whose origin and powers are never explained-- learns that the local tribes are being invaded by strange women riding on the backs of tigers. Fantomah instantly knows that they are "vahines" (a Polynesian word meaning "woman" or "wife"), and that they come from a place known as Wildmoon Mountain.
The image of wild huntresses may owe less to anything from Polynesian sources than from the Greek stories of the hunting-goddess Artemis and her forest-dwelling acolytes. At the very least, even in 1941 most pop-fiction raconteurs knew something of the Greek Amazons, as seen by the creation of Wonder Woman and her "isle of women" in the same year. But the vahines have a destructive purpose like nothing I've seen in other Amazon-tales. The tiger-women decide that they want to kill all of the other women in the world, so that "men will be at our feet." It's not just the ruthlessness that impresses me, but the sheer chutzpah of thinking that a handful of women could monopolize all the men in the world in order to rule them. (Are the vahines perhaps thinking of having lots and lots of daughters over time?)
Fantomah starts summoning jungle-animals to fight the vahines, and while she's doing that, the evil females wipe out all the women in a village.
To their credit, the vahines apparently anticipate Fantomah's tactics, for they bring along a "glow-worm oil" that makes them shine like phantoms. Whether the animals believe that the invaders are actual ghosts, or because they think they're on fire, they won't attack the vahines with that glow. Fantomah signals her displeasure by transforming into her skull-headed "wrathful goddess" aspect.
Fantomah exerts her "powerful will"-- which for some reason she couldn't manage before another tribe's women gets wiped out-- and she nullifies the ghost-glow. Then Fantomah's minions destroy the tigers and send the vahines leaping for the trees.
At last the heroine's pet vultures use their talons to grab the vahines by their long hair, after which the birds transport their prisoners back to their point of origin, Wildmoon Mountain. Up to this point the name sounded like nothing but an idle poeticism, possibly with a slight connection between moon-worship and the worship of Artemis/Diana. But Fantomah's powers bring a shining, "super-sized moonstone" from inside the mountain, and according to one of the vahines, this is an object of their veneration, without which the women cannot survive.
Fantomah then decides to let the tiger women get hoist on their own petard. By the jungle-heroine's will, the giant moonstone suddenly has something like a magnetic attraction, and when the vultures drop the vahines, they all get attached to their god-stone, and then get pulled into the orb's interior, as if it was a giant womb. Then Fantomah cancels earthly gravity under the giant globe, and it rockets away from the earth and into space. Perhaps appropriately, the moonstone collides with Mars, the nearest planet named for a male god. The vahines are utterly destroyed and Fantomah takes pleasure in the return of jungle peace.
As contrived as Hanks's story is, the base idea of a band of women trying to get rid of all worldly competition has few if any precedents. It reminds less of any literary ancestors than of the observations of ethologists speaking of the sometimes vicious ways that female creatures, particularly apes, retaliate when they have competition for the males of the tribe. Yet no men actually appear in the story, not even to come to the defense of their women. This doesn't exactly satisfy the provisions of the "Bechdel Test," insofar as the vahines talk about men with the plan of dominating them. But it might be the first comic-book story in which the entire conflict revolves entirely around a battle of powerful women.
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