[positronic1]

Fantomah is really something else. She's got the physique of a female bodybuilder, and while her normal face is pretty, when she transforms herself into that blue-skinned, skull-faced appearance, together with her massive muscles, she's truly scary. The incongruity of that brawny body surmounted by a skeletal visage, while maintaining her signature cascading waterfall of curly blonde locks (the Farrah Fawcett look by way of 1940) is truly the most bizarre image ever given to any heroine, anywhere, in any medium. It is really not difficult to imagine the imagery in Fantomah stories (especially that of Fantomah herself) inducing nightmares among the younger children who might have read the stories, just as might have been the case with Basil Wolverton's wrinkled extraterrestrial beasties, or the later horrors depicted in EC's comics.

I don't even think she belongs in the genre of "jungle comics", because FANTOMAH fuses so many elements from different genres. She's obviously a powerful sorceress, queen of a lost civilization, but also a grim supernatural avenger of justice, like The Spectre -- whose powers seem almost as unlimited and ill-defined... and the plots are rife with copious science fiction elements. But that is the magic of the wild and unrestrained imagination of Fletcher Hanks... ANYTHING can happen!!

Link to the book: Fantomah Archive Part 1