(Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)
The Super Fiend (aka the Super Fiend of the Lost Planet) is, if not the archetypal Fletcher Hanks villain then certainly representative of one of the major Hanks villain types, the civilization hater. He's got no stated motivation but the Super Fiend hates civilization so much that he's out to destroy it on a planetary scale, starting with Mars and moving on to Earth as an encore.
The Super Fiend's Thermal Ray Spore does the job on Mars, rendering the question of whether non-Hanks Stardust stories actually canonically occurred a bit moot - if Dr Martinious and the Brain Men did actually exist then they're just so many charred bones now.
Though Mars is toast and Earth is in the crosshairs, unfortunately for the Super Fiend Stardust the Super Wizard only allows one genocide per story, and with a cry of "You're going bye-by!" he whisks his foe off to face justice.
Like Wolf-Eye before him, the Super Fiend is made big and strong for the final righteous beatdown - presumably this keeps happening because Fletcher Hanks recognized that even the righteous Stardust looks like a bit of a bully beating up people 1/3 his size.
The Super Fiend is left behind on Mars to contemplate his actions among the bones of his victims for the rest of his life - a classic Stardust punishment and in fact the same one meted out to Moloka in the non-Fletcher Hanks story in the previous issue. This raises the schoolday spectre of the compare-and-contrast vis-a-vis Moloka and the Super Fiend. On paper, they are very similar villains, but Moloka never felt quite right as a Stardust foe while the Super Fiend did. Why? Simple clarity of purpose, perhaps? Molka's goals remain undefined throughout while the Super Fiend was lightning focused on destroying civilization, one planet at a time.
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