Fantastic Comics #24 is nothing if not high-concept.  Despite the title, it's actually the first issue from Erik Larsen's "Next Issue Project."  The idea is to revisit old, long-cancelled Golden Age comics, and to produce a "next issue" for them, using characters and concepts from the original series.  This is all perfectly legal, because the Golden Age was so long ago that most of the characters are now public domain.

The original Fantastic Comics was an anthology title from Fox Syndicate Features.  Issue #23 came out in 1941.  Larsen isn't sticking too strictly to continuing the stories in progress, because as he rightly observes, most of the Golden Age titles got downright desperate by the end of their run.  Instead, this is meant to be more of a representative issue of Fantastic Comics.  Kind of.  Sort of.

It's a bit confused about what it wants to be.  On the one hand, it's presented as a kitsch pseudo-Golden Age comic.  It's 64 pages, with nine stories (plus a text piece).  There are period adverts.  Some of the colouring is deliberately wonky to match the printing standards of the time - other stories are coloured straight, depending on style.

On the other hand, the level of faithfulness to the source material varies wildly.  Almost none of the contributors are really trying to replicate the original stories.  Thomas Yeats' "Golden Knight" strip is probably the closest to a straight pastiche; Larsen's own take on the generic strongman superhero Samson is a more or less straight take on the character, but done in his own style.

Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, the creators of Street Angel, are probably the most successful contributors in that vein.  Their take on "Captain Kidd" as a womanising adventurer is tongue in cheek without being too knowing, and almost feels like it could sustain a longer story without relying on the gimmick.

But other creators take a completely different approach, either revamping an old concept in their own style, or paying lip service to the concept while doing something pretty much unrelated.  Joe Casey and Bill Sienkiewicz dust off time-travel story "Flip Falcon in the Fourth Dimension" as a weird angel-vs-devil affair that looks like the sort of thing Sienkiewicz was doing for Marvel in the early 1980s.  It's actually pretty good on its own terms, but it couldn't be less Golden Age, and I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the original story beyond the very basic concept of "He's got a time machine."

Ashley Wood's strip is... well, it claims to be something to do with war hero Sub Saunders, but it's basically six pages of obscure panels and German dialogue, with a payoff that depends entirely on you recognising a version of his own character Automatic Kafka, and isn't especially interesting even if you do.  A lot of people think Ashley Wood is very good.  Occasionally I see his stuff and agree with them.  Other times, I decide that it's a major case of the emperor's new clothes.  This one is decisively in the latter category - it's wilfully obscure, self-indulgent nonsense which reminds me of why I never used to like the guy.

Joe Keatinge and Mike Allred have the strangest task, dealing with the Fletcher Hanks character Stardust.  A collection of Hanks' Golden Age work was published a couple of years ago.  By any standards, he was one of the more distinctive creators of the period - although he specialised in one-dimensional heroes pummelling bad guys, his stories feature so much utter weirdness and disregard for logic that they stand out a mile.  Depending on your point of view, Hanks was either a bizarre anomaly, or a mad genius liberated from the shackles of "making sense" which would smother later creators, and pouring (violent) dreamlike craziness onto the page. 

Keatinge and Allred are clearly pro-Hanks, and this story is basically a tribute rather than a revival.  Stardust has been gone for years, and in his absence superheroes have been replaced by bland protector robots.  In some hard-to-specify manner, everything is depressing and gray.  And then, of course, Stardust comes back to make everything great again.

I'm not sure this quite achieves everything it set out to do.  Presumably it's trying to argue that things were much more exciting in the good old days when there wasn't the burden of being taken seriously, and people like Hanks were free to go nuts.  But unless you already know who Stardust is - and while he's the best known character in the book, that really isn't saying much - you're unlikely to appreciate just how weird Hanks' stories actually were.  He comes across as just another generic hero from the Superman-archetype production line, and the story seems like all-purpose nostalgia.  It works on that level, but I suspect the creators were aiming a little higher.

It's a strange book, this.  I can't imagine wanting to read a whole series of them; very few of these stories make any sort of case for the characters being lost classics.  Golden Age comics haven't aged very well, and the characters were largely too generic to be given a modern revamp in any meaningful way.  But there's still a curious charm to this comic, if only to see creators playing with decidedly ropey old ideas.  It's a gimmick, and really, the book relies heavily on novelty value.  But in small doses, that can still be entertaining.

Rating: B

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