Something Strange Is Going On!: New Tales from the Fletcher Hanks Universe Paperback – Import, 8 August 2015

MIND BLOWN. That's how you'll feel reading the bombastic goofiness of Fletcher Hanks, Golden Age comic book artist. He's got a cult following and you can witness his craziness for yourself in the collection "I Will Destroy All the Civilized Planets."A gaggle of writers whipped up stories of his characters in novel form. All the writers somehow harnessed the Hanksian cosmic power and put their brains in his realm. The results are incredible. To get what they're doing, you'll want to check out Hanks' work. But this book is crazy, pulpy sci-fi that you'll want to check that out anyway. (Joe Crowe, [...]

Based on the intriguing world of Golden Age writer/artist Fletcher Hanks, SOMETHING STRANGE IS GOING ON is an eclectic, enjoyable anthology of tales. Never descending into camp, never feeling tongue-in-check, this is one of the more unique reads available.Purchase it. Read it. You won't regret it.

I was hoping this book would have some fun new stories written in the style of the great comics by Fletcher Hanks. Given that Hanks' tales were fairly simple and sometimes formulaic, I had hope that others could replicate them without too much trouble. And though no new art is disappointing, I see this as a small measure of respect for Hanks, whose style would be virtually impossible to reproduce.I find it interesting that much of this book is devoted to characters Hanks wrote only 1 or 2 stories about. I think it's a bit presumptious to think the writers understood a character like Tiger Hart well enough to write a faithful story when they've only read one tale featuring him.Hanks' Big Three which comprised most of his comic output were Stardust, Fantomah, and Big Red McLane, so I'll focus on reviewing those stories.Fantomah gets "Evil Thoughts". One of Fantomah's most unique features was that once an evildoer started wreaking havoc, she almost always gave them a verbal warning, an opportunity to stop before interfering. The only exceptions were a couple cases were she stepped in only after the evildoer had already caused unimaginable devastation. In this tale, however, she acts nothing like her comic book self. She tells the male "villain" to leave and never return, tormenting him by turning his equipment into a mass of snakes and ruining his laboratory, even though at this point he has done nothing wrong. Hanks would never have stood for this, as evidenced by the countless stories where Fantomah senses evil is afoot but waits for the villain to act before stepping in. The rest of the tale is unreadably bad, as the "villain" (who again has done nothing wrong) suddenly starts fleeing around the world for no real reason before returning to Fantomah who wipes him out (although he has *still* done nothing wrong). The author also gives Fantomah extra shape-shifting abilities while he's at it. A truly poor tale, and one that I wish I could erase from my memory due to the way it sullies Hanks' vision for Fantomah.The story starring Big Red McLane (misspelled as McClane in the Kindle version) is just as bad, if not worse. There's no mention whatsoever of Red's partner, sidekick and best friend Tom Farr. Instead, the author gives Red a dog, Bruno, for no apparent reason. The trademarks of all Big Red McLane stories, and what set them apart from Hanks' other tales, are a gritty realism and lots of fist fighting, typically in the forest. However, in this tale McLane throws exactly one punch, never sets foot the forest, and the central villain of this tale is some sort of magic phenomenon that is never really explained. Again, the writer here seems to have totally missed what the Big Red stories are all about.Last, the Stardust story. Although slightly better than the previous two, this still manages to miss the mark big time. The point of Hanks's Stardust stories was that Stardust was the most powerful force in the universe, there was nothing which could hope to stand in his way. Having a "dark" duplicate battle the hero is an old, tired sci-fi trope, and one that makes no sense for Stardust. Apparently the author of this tale didn't think a regular Stardust story was interesting enough, so he instead opted to ruin the image of an unstoppable hero in order to make him have a traditional long, drawn-out battle.Lastly, the flowing, flowery language in this book sounds nothing like Hanks. There are a few words he loved to use over and over and over again, among them: "remarkable", "meddle/meddler", and "civilized/civilization(singular)". Yet other than "remarkable" being mentioned exactly once, none of these words appear in this volume. This is just a way to quantify how very different this book sounds from anything Hanks would ever write.To me it seems like the authors of these tales thought that because Hanks was a lesser-known artist, and by several accounts, a unlikeable person, they didn't need to show much respect for his original vision. Instead, they decided to take only the very basics of each character and then do whatever they wanted with them. What a disappointment.