Stardust the Super Wizard

Stardust the Super Wizard is one of the strangest heroes the Golden Age produced — a nearly omnipotent cosmic avenger with a barrel chest, blank stare, and powers limited only by his creator's imagination. He appeared in Fox's Fantastic Comics beginning in 1939, written and drawn by Fletcher Hanks, a singular outsider artist whose work looks like nothing else of the period. Hanks's Stardust does not so much fight criminals as pass sentence on them, meting out grotesque, wildly disproportionate cosmic punishments to gangsters and spies. The art is crude by any conventional standard — stiff figures, awkward anatomy — yet it carries a visionary, dreamlike intensity that has fascinated later readers. Long forgotten, Hanks and his creations were rediscovered decades later and republished in acclaimed collections that reintroduced Stardust to a modern audience. As a public-domain character, Stardust is free to be reprinted and reimagined. He endures as a monument to the unpoliced creativity of the era's fringe — proof that at the industry's margins, one eccentric talent could build an entire cosmos on his own terms.