If someone tries to tell you Fletcher Hanks was a genius, don’t believe them. If someone tries to tell you Fletcher Hanks was an important figure in the development of superhero comics, don’t believe them. But if someone tries to tell you Fletcher Hanks was one strange, f-ed up bastard who created some of the weirdest, creepiest, and (entirely by accident) most revealing comics of the Golden Era, that you can take to the bank.

As Ed Wood was to the Hollywood of the 1950s, Hanks was to the comic book industry of the late ’30s and early ’40s. Actually, that comparison’s a bit of an insult to Wood, who managed to have a hand in an array of horrible-yet-beloved cheapies over the course of a decade. Hanks’s career as a comic book writer/artist barely lasted two years. During that time, he cranked out crude, repetitive, simplistic filler for also-ran publishers. Then he disappeared. Doesn’t exactly sound like the stuff of coffee table reprint collections, does it?

Yet in 2007, Fantagraphics Books published I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!, a collection of Hanks features compiled by cartoonist Paul Karasik. Read any one of the book’s 15 full-color stories, and you’ll know immediately why Hanks has been rescued from obscurity. The mo-fo was just too damn twisted to go quietly into the dustbin of history.

Every story follows the same formula. Grotesque, grimacing bad guys perpetrate sadistic misdeeds on a grand scale, sometimes in the jungle (if the protagonist is Hanks’s Sheena-meets-Kali heroine Fantomah), sometimes in New York (if the protagonist is huge-muscled, tiny-headed “super wizard” Stardust). When Fantomah/Stardust learns what the villains are up to, she/he warns them to stop. “Attend to your business!” the heavies scoff. Or perhaps “Confound that meddler!” Whatever the case, the evildoers keep on doing evil. And that’s when the real fun begins — or at least the real fun as Hanks seems to have seen it, for his tales invariably end with two or three pages of elaborate, baroquely demented comeuppance meted out to the deserving by the artist’s god-like good guys.

An example: A mobster named Destructo decides to take over America by, well, killing a bunch of people. When Stardust learns of the plot (he’s watching Earth through a telescope on “his private star”), he does what any self-respecting superhero would do. He “transfixes” Destructo “with a superiority beam,” shrinks the crime boss’ body so that he’s nothing but a huge head, flies through space until he finds a headless giant, hurls the Destructo-head at it, then watches in satisfaction as the villain is absorbed into the giant’s body while screaming for mercy the whole time.

Wait. Did I say that’s what any self-respecting superhero would do? My bad. Obviously, it’s what any self-respecting superhero would do provided they were created by an embittered, paranoid son of a bitch with a persecution complex and an obsession with revenge.

And indeed, that’s what Hanks seems to have been. I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! includes a haunting postscript: an illustrated story by Karasik that explores his obsession with Hanks as well as his encounter with the artist’s son. Fletcher Hanks, we learn, wasn’t just the odd duck one would expect. He was a brutally violent alcoholic who terrorized his family before finally abandoning them. He died broke and alone in New York City, freezing to death on a park bench in the winter of 1976.

And one could say, “So what?” For decades, Hanks was entirely forgotten, and it would be easy to make the case that he should have been. His art is vibrant and bold, but rudimentary and stiff, too. His plots are so basic and unvarying they can barely be called plots at all. And characters? There are no characters, only victims and two flavors of victimizer: villain and hero. Aside from the fact that the stories are bizarre and unsettling, they’re really not worth remembering…or are they?

Sorry, yes, that was a cheap rhetorical question unworthy of Leonard Nimoy hosting an In Search of… about “ancient astronauts.” What I really meant to say was yes. These stories are worth remembering — or at least reflecting on. Because when boiled down to their essence, the stories of Stardust and Fantomah aren’t really as singular and peculiar as we might like to think.

When she’s punishing the wicked, you see, Fantomah looks more than a little like a B-cup Lady Death. And Stardust’s intricate, arcane tortures aren’t really all that different from the punishments the Spectre and Dr. Fate used to hand out, back in the day. These are Old Testament superheroes — judgmental and all-powerful and blithely cruel. And that’s the foundation for all the spandex-sporting do-gooders we know and love today.

“Beware of those in whom the urge to punish is strong,” Nietzsche once wrote. Or maybe it was Goethe. It depends on who you want to believe when you plug it into Google. Tell you what — why don’t we pretend it was someone else entirely? Let’s say it was Fletcher Hanks’s psychiatrist.

“Be careful,” we can imagine him telling Hanks’s son…or Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent or Peter Parker or Frank Castle. “That urge is in your DNA.”