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I picked up the first entry from The Next Issue Project, the latest in several attempts seen in the past few years at reviving long-forgotten public domain super-heroes.
The last issue of Fantastic Comics came out in 1941, which makes this one of the latest comics ever shipped. Not that I mind...this is a fun book. While not a pastiche, it deliberately tries to capture the flavor of the era when the rules of the super-hero genre were still being written. Anything can and does happen in such stories. There's all sorts of crazy, dumb fun to be had. The better stories include Erik Larsen's simultaneously poking fun at and celebrating the notion of a kid sidekick, Joe Casey's account of two time travelers engaging in a fight that takes them all the way back to Eden, a humor strip by legendary cartoonist Fred Hembeck...and my favorite story of the issue: Stardust the Super Wizard.
Joe Keatinge and Mike Allred revive the most famous and bizarre creation of the late Fletcher Hanks. The story manages to make someone who seemed more like an arrogant, over-powered jerk in the original comics seem like a confident, optimistic icon of wonder and joy. They do this without contradicting anything in the quite frankly insane old Hanks stories. No small feat, that. Plus, any excuse to see Allred depict a bunch of the cooler public domain super-hero designs is a good excuse.
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