Fletcher Hanks: The RPG

A brief post, inspired by a Facebook conversation.

GM:”You encounter a…”
Player: “I transform it into a two-headed frog, then take the frog to a space-snake, which swallows the frog and halfway digests it, but then I make the space-snake spit up the half-digested frog and I take what’s left and throw it into a black hole where it will be torn apart by gravitational forces for eternity while still being conscious.”
GM:”… jaywalker.”
Player: “I stand by my actions.”

And if you don’t know who Fletcher Hanks is… he is, or rather, was an alcoholic, violently abusive man who died alone and forgotten, frozen on a bench in Central Park in the 1970s.. and in the early 1940s created some of the most insane, bizarre, strange, and unforgettable comic book stories ever. Crudely drawn, poorly written, and bursting with the energy of unhinged madness and the desperate urge to churn out pages as fast as possible to meet the demands of an industry in its boom stage. Of his life between the last comic he published and his unheralded death — it would be decades until his lunatic genius was brought to a wider audience — almost nothing is known. But you can read everything he published, as well as the saga of tracking him down, here.