I stumbled across something fascinating in the library yesterday. It was an action story that shows a team of villains in an “ultramodern” secret lair gathered around aerial photographs of Fort Knox . They were planning to assault the gold depository and steal the 20 Billion Dollars in Gold it contained. Their plan was to incapacitate the soldiers guarding the fort with gas delivered by a squadron of private planes, then drive in and blow up the fence and then blast their way into the fort, then carry away the gold bars in their airplanes before anyone could stop them.
Only this wasn’t the James Bond movie Goldfinger in 1964 or Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel that the film was based on. It was one of Fletcher Hanks’ comic book stories about Stardust, the Super Wizard, and it had first appeared in Fantastic Comics number 16, cover dated March 1941. The leader of the gang was “Slant Eyes”, who definitely had them (although there’s no suggestion that he is of Asian ancestry – his eyes just look like they’re slanted).
I first discovered Star Dust and Hanks’ other main feature, Fantomah the Jungle Queen (who predated Wonder Woman and even the Canadian Nelvana to be the first female superhero in comics) because they were included in Jon Morris’ 2015 book The League of Regrettable Superheroes Both of them benefitted from Hanks’ unique visual style and storytelling. (Hanks wrote and drew almost all the features in Fantastic comics).
Hanks’ style is interesting. It’s that of a not-quite-competent amateur who hasn’t quite mastered anatomy and perspective, and who stubbornly refuses to put shadows in his artwork.
https://bzpb.shoutwiki.com/wiki/File:Stardust_the_Super_Wizard.jpg
His villains are drawn to be almost sub-human, often with some distinguishing feature after which they are named, a la the Bad Guys in Dick TRacy. Stardust himself is disgustingly handsome and well-built, and is maybe 8 feet tall. Both Stardust and Fantomah (who looks like a gorgeous blonde until you piss her off, at which point her face goes all skull-like) have virtually god-like powers and like sentencing the villains to increasingly poetic and grotesque fates – being frozen in immobility but retaining the ability to think, being turned into a rat with a human head, being turned into a neanderthal and put at the mercy of beasts he’s collected, a la Actaeon.
In the Fort Knox story, the soldiers recover from the gas (Almost as in the movie, where they weren’t really gassed) and seize all the villains, but Stardust takes personal charge of Slant Eyes and appropriately drops him into the waiting arms of a Golden Octopus.
I’m surprised that no one has commented on the similarities before, but none of the sites devoted to StarDust mention it. (He’s in the public domain now, and has been revived as a comic book hero by a lot of folks). Nor do I see any mention of it on Ian Fleming sites. I don’t know exactly how he got hold of a copy of Fantastic Comics, but I feel certain that he did. One of the things that struck people about the novel and the film was the audacity of someone actually planning to break into Fort Knox and steal the US Gold Supply. I only know of one other early example of someone breaking into Fort Knox (a 1950s Bowery Boys film, in which the break-in is accidental), but the sophisticated HQ and planning and the use of airplanes in the plot seem to tage the Stardust story as the origin. I always called the James Bond movies “comic book”, but I didn’t realize how accurate that was.
Actually, there are differences – in Fleming’s novel the US soldiers are incapacitated with poison in the water supply, and Pussy Galore and her team aren’t pilots, but impersonate nurses. In the novel Goldfinger really does plan to steal the gold, although for the movie they changed this to detonating a “dirty” nuclear bomb and rendering the gold radioactive.