Cole's Comics

Lipstick Traces: Plastic Man in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

2012-02-23T17:12:00.002-08:00

Published in 1973, Thomas Pynchon's massive novel is widely regarded to be one of the greatest works of 20th century literature. Time Magazine included it in its list of "All-Time Greatest Novels." The book is considered to be a landmark work of what is known as "postmodernist" fiction. It plays with the literary novel form itself, much like Jack Cole's comics played with the form of comics. So, it's no surprise to discover that Cole's Plastic Man pops up here and there in Gravity's Rainbow.

In the edition I have, the Plastic Man references show up in four places, on pages 207, 214, 331, and 751. Here's the first reference, which shows that Pynchon has a fine appreciation of the spirit of Cole's character:

It's interesting, though, to note that Pynchon refers to the character as "Plasticman," condensing the true name of Jack Cole's character, "Plastic Man," into one word. Perhaps this was a strategy to avoid to a copyright lawsuit. The next reference is brief, but once again very much captures the spirit and trappings of Cole's work:

Indeed, Plastic Man, where are you when we need you? A few pages later, Pynchon refers to a "Plasticman sound," which also shows an intuitive grasp of Cole's use of sound effects.

In the last reference, Plastic Man is joined by other golden age superheroes, plus Philip Marlowe, the Lone Ranger and... well... see for yourself:

In late 1971, DC published DC Special #15, a terrific reprint of Jack Cole Plastic man stories. This was my first introduction to Cole's work, and may have been an influence on Pynchon during the writing of Gravity's Rainbow, which was first published in 1973.

The Evolution of the Cole Female: Jack Cole's Early Magazine Cartoons 1938-45

2012-02-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

Jack Cole fans know the story about how he left Plastic Man and comic books in 1954 adroitly stretching into a successful new career as Playboy magazine's first signature cartoonist.

Despite appearances, Jack Cole's mastery of magazine cartoons - a vastly different form than the multi-page comic book story that Cole spent 16 years developing -- did not happen overnight. In fact Cole started out as a magazine cartoonist and continued to sell cartoons to various publications from 1938-45, while he was also developing a career in comic books.

Here's a look at a few of those early magazine cartoons, the result of hours of digging. Many thanks to Ger Apeldoorn, who found four of these rare items and first published them on his Fabulous Fifties blog.

In a 1956 Freelancer article (the first page of which is shown above), Jack Cole wrote about his early efforts as a magazine cartoonist:

"Here a buck -- there a buck --- I tried style after style until I finally sold one cartoon to Gurney Williams, then at Collier's Magazine."

The Freelancer article reprints that cartoon, but without the tagline. After much digging, I've finally located Jack Cole's first sale to Collier's Weekly! Here's the page it appeared on:

Collier's Magazine - August 27, 1938
Jack Cole's first cartoon sale to Collier's

And here's the cartoon:

Collier's Magazine - August 27, 1938
Jack Cole's first cartoon sale to Collier's

It's important to note that, while this was a big event for Jack, it was not his first sale. By this time, he had already sold over a dozen cartoons to Boy's Life magazine. See my article on Jack Cole's Boy's Life cartoons for nearly 2 dozen delightful early works by the master!

During the 1940s, Gurney Williams -- the cartoon editor that Cole mentioned in his Freelancer article -- was the cartoon editor for Collier's, American Magazine and Woman's Home Companion, paying $40 to $150 for each cartoon. From a staggering stack of some 2000 submissions each week, Williams made a weekly selection of 30 to 50 cartoons, lamenting

"The other day I found myself staring at the millionth cartoon submitted to me since I became humor editor here. I wish it could have been fresh and original. Instead, it showed several ostriches with their heads buried in the sand. Two others stood nearby. Said one to the other: 'Where is everybody?' " (Time Magazine, August 12, 1946)

A sale to Collier's in 1938 was an auspicious start for any new cartoonist, including Jack Cole. At the time, Gurney Williams was publishing cartoons by such greats as Otto Soglow:

Collier's - Jan 8, 1938 - Otto Soglow

William Steig:

Collier's - Feb 4, 1939 - William Steig

And Charles Addams:

Colliers - June 10, 1939 - Charles Addams

Cole's first sale to Collier's is drawn in a completely different style than his Plastic Man and Playboy work.

It's a loose, fragmented, agitated brush style. The eyeballs of the characters are black raisins. His first Collier's cartoon has an air of freshness about it that went beyond the visual style itself. The joke is genuinely funny and character-driven. We feel that we know this sweet, old-fashioned dowager personally and find it amusing that she thinks an airmail letter is an adventure.

It's interesting to note that the man who would become the creator of some of the sexiest cartoons for men's magazines ever drawn started out with a charmingly innocent cartoon featuring an elderly spinster.

It's also worthwhile to note the details Cole has stuffed into this small, narrow cartoon: the silhouette portraits on the wall that bespeak of a graceful time of the past, the antique grandfather clock, and especially the adorable cat blending into the rug at bottom left -- very similar to one Plastic Man's first tricks:

Police Comics #1, August 1941

Another golden age comic artist, Hal Sherman (known for his early 40s work at DC on Dr. Fate), also had a sale to Collier's around the same time, indicating that the twin trajectories of Jack Cole's careers in magazine cartoons and comic books was not totally unique:

Collier's - March 11, 1939 - Hal Sherman

I've scoured the pages of Collier's Weekly from 1938-1940, and turned up just one more Jack Cole cartoon - one that has been "lost," until now:

Collier's - May 20, 1939 - Jack Cole

Note this cartoon is in the exact same modernistic bush style as Cole's first Collier's sale. Here we have a man, a woman, and a toaster. The woman resembles nothing of the sexy "estrogen souffles" that Cole would become famous creating for Playboy and Humorama (as "Jake"). There is nothing sexy about this woman at all, but it may not be for lack of trying. The decorative hat and veil suggest feminine energy, and foreshadow the filigree touches Cole would use in his Jake and Playboy cartoons. In fact, she seems to be wearing the same old-fashioned clothes as the spinster in the earlier cartoon!

Evidently - and rightfully so -- Cole thought toasters were funny. he created another toaster joke in 1955:

Mirth, 1955 - Jack Cole

Jumping back in time a little, here's another cartoon sale Jack made in 1938, this time to Judge -- another one of those "buck here, buck there" events:

Note the different signature, which is closer to Cole's Boy's Life cartoons of the period. The art style is a less aggressive version of the loose brushwork. The gag is solid, and... what's this? A nurse? yes, a nurse that once again is nothing close to the sexy nurses and women Jack Cole would later turn out like a man possessed, such as in this 1944 comic book story:

Military Comics 30 - July, 1944 - Jack Cole

Jack Cole was considerably more innocent in his younger years and earlier cartoons. His drawing abilities were evolving rapidly, with uneven results. He leaned toward a goofy, screwball sense of humor in his work, such as in this unidentified delightful Rube-Goldberg-style lunch counter scene:

Or in this pair of cartoons from a 1942 issue of the over-sized Gags magazine, which appear to be chopped up to make room for blocks of copy:

Gags Magazine, 1942 - Jack Cole

Even as late as 1945, while he was a master in comic books, Cole was still struggling to master the gag cartoon -- especially the sexually loaded cartoon, as in this example from Judge, which -- oddly -- has the same left-leaning pose as the dental cartoon above!

Judge - December, 1945 - Jack Cole

This may have been Cole's first published wash cartoon. By now, some 7 years after the non-sexy Collier's and Judge cartoons of 1938, Cole has developed a desire to depict sexy women in his work. Yet, he hasn't quite got it. This drawing is too labored over and wooden to be appealing. It contains only hints of the greatness to come. Compare the 1945 Judge cartoon above with this masterful wash composition from sometime in the early 1950's:

Jack Cole 'Jake" cartoon reprinted in 1962 Humorama publication

It's interesting to me, though, to note that Cole hasn't thrown away his desire to draw little swirly filigree abstract designs to suggest sexual excitement and feminine energy, in the same spirit as the woman's veil in his 1939 Collier's cartoon:

It's the same idea we find in the mouth-watering Humorama cartoon above, just done about a thousand times better.

++++

Jack Cole In The News:

Silver Streak 6 on the Auction Block

A key Jack Cole comic is at auction on Ebay. Currently, the bid is $1,000.00. The auction ends Feb 12, 201211:15:10 PST.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Silver-Streak-6-Classic-Jack-Cole-cover-Origin-Daredevil-Claw-returns-/160730014101

UPDATE: The book sold for $1,447 sheckles!

SCREWBALL! A New Tumey Blog!

2012-02-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

Announcing: The Masters of SCREWBALL Comics - a new blog by Paul Tumey!

My study of Jack Cole's work and exploration of what I like about it has led me to a parallel exploration of the sub-genre of old comics known as "screwball comics." Cole started out zealously creating wacky SCREWBALL comics and it informed much of his work in the years to follow, including his Plastic Man stories.

My interest in SCREWBALL comics has become so keen that I've decided to start a new blog. Just as with Cole's Comics, I hope that maybe this new blog will help me develop some genuine scholarship and critical structures that will lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of this fascinating form of comics.

But mainly I hope it leads to getting some publisher to pay me money to make them a book! Gawrsh!

Here's a taste of what you'll find there:

The Squirrel Cage by Gene(eeyus) Ahern, 1945

Anyway, I thought the readers of Cole's Comics might like to know about this new blog of mine. You can visit it at www.screwballcomics.blogspot.com. Thanks in advance for visiting, and please let me know what you think!

- Paul Tumey

Jack Cole Playboy Cartoon Rejects Appear in Hefner's College Humor Mag

2012-01-28T12:50:00.000-08:00

From 1946 to 1949, Jack Cole's friend and publisher, Hugh Hefner attended the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana.

Incredibly, Hef earned his Bachelor's degree in just two- and-a-half years by doubling up on his classes.

Somehow, he also found the time to start a new magazine, rather boldly named Shaft, which became the U of Illinois' humor magazine. An ambitious cartoonist at the time, Hefner published many of his own cartoons in Shaft. Here's a cover he drew for the January, 1948 issue (courtesy of the University of Illinois archives):

Here's a Hugh Hefner cartoon not from Shaft, but from the college newspaper, the Daily Illini. This example, with its comment on the modern woman, is a primitive form of the sexual cartoon Hefner would develop into its own art form with Jack Cole and others:

During the time he edited Shaft, Hefner introduced a (clothed) Co-Ed of the Month feature, the first version of the famous Playmate of the Month centerfold that would become a staple (or, more accurately, embrace the staples) of Hefner's Playboy magazine.

Hefner graduated in 1949 and went on to create Playboy in 1953 where he quickly attracted Jack Cole's cartoon submissions. As we've recently discovered, in 1954-55, Jack Cole created a number of magazine cartoons and comic strips that have been mostly forgotten and overlooked. He was in transition from a 16-year career in comic books towards being a star magazine cartoonist and then syndicated comic strip creator. 1954-55 was a period of renewal, and rebirth for Jack Cole.

Sam Henderson wrote a while back that he had a Jack Cole cartoon from the April 1954 issue of Shaft. Here then, is yet another "lost" Jack Cole cartoon, thanks to Sam Henderson:

In his Magic Whistle blog, which has several covers and cartoons from 1954 issues of Shaft, Henderson speculates that the Jack Cole cartoon may have been a Playboy reject that Hefner passed on to his alma mater. That seems a reasonable assumption. The cartoon, which is funny enough, doesn't seem in the same league as Cole's Playboy work... and of course, it has nothing to do with women or sex. Maybe someday I'll get up the gumption to attempt to contact Mr. Hefner and find out for sure.

Our friend and fellow comics historian, Ger Apeldoorn recently purchased some issues of Charley Jones' Laugh Book Magazine, a bottom-of-the-barrel cartoon/humor magazine. Ger was delighted to discover, nestled among various minor work by unknown and forgotten cartoonists in the July 1955 issue, a terrific full-page Jack Cole cartoon! Many thanks to Ger for kindly sharing this new discovery with this blog. Be sure to check out his amazing blog, The Fabuleous Fifties which is a treasure-trove of comics and information.

Note the tagline at the bottom right of the page, "Jack Cole in Shaft":

This seems to indicate that this cartoon is a reprint from an issue of Shaft, where it originally appeared. At this time, I have no access to the 1954-55 run of Shaft, so I cannot identify the issue in which this cartoon appeared.

Again, the theory that this cartoon is actually a Playboy reject makes sense. Hefner may have purchased it from Cole and then donated it to the University of Illinois, helping both his alma mater and Jack Cole (who had just lost his house and most of his possessions in a flood). It could even have been a tax write-off! Here's the cartoon, cleaned up:

It's sexual humor, and sophisticated enough for Playboy. But there is a different approach. This is the period that Cole was experimenting and fine-tuning what would become a successful new formula. The cartoon here is very much in the same vein as the dozen Jack Cole cartoons recently discovered in a 1955 issue of Mirth (see my post here).

Perhaps it's simply that the thin, pinched, unhappy woman in this cartoon is much plainer than the typical Jack Cole Playboy women, who Art Spiegelman called "estrogen souuffles who mesmerized the ineffectual saps who lusted after them."

Spiegelman's observation is a terrific summary of the Jack Cole Playboy cartoon formula: bombshell women wielding extreme sexual power over impotent men. However, in this Shaft cartoon, the man has the power. The sexually frustrated woman has been waiting three days to have sex. The man in this cartoon is not ineffectual, he's just uninterested. The cartoon has a sadness about it. Here's the cartoon re-organized in a vertical scrolling format:

Thanks again to Sam Henderson and to Ger Apeldoorn for more "lost" Jack Cole cartoons from the mid-fifties!

All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey

Insane Comics: 3 Rare Jack Cole Stories From 1938

2012-01-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

Presenting 7 pages of rare Jack Cole comics from late 1938!

Funny Pages Volume 2, issue 11 (November, 1938) featured a panoply of Jack Cole's screwball stories. At the time, Cole was working for the Harry "A" Chelser studio in New York. Sometime in 1936, Jack borrowed some money from various merchants in his home town of New Castle, PA and moved to New York to start a career as a cartoonist. After a year of near starvation, Cole connected with the Chesler studio, which was packaging original comic book content to meet the growing demand for comics.

Cole's work of this time is very much influenced by the "screwball" school of newspaper comics, most famously represented by Bill Holman (Smokey Stover), Dr. Seuss, and Gene Ahern (Nut Brothers, Squirrel Cage). Here's a typical example of Ahern's Nut Brothers (written and drawn by someone other than Ahern who had left the NEA syndicate about three years earlier). This strip shows the screwball school in fine form around the time Jack Cole entered comics (note the Napoleon hat in panel 3) :

Jack Cole's determined screwball approach is certainly evident in his Nutty Fagin one-pager in Funny Pages Vol. 2, issue 11 (November, 1938):

Note that Jack Cole signs this page "Sassafrass." As far as I know, this is the single occurrence of this particular pen name. Other pen names Jack Cole used were: Richard Bruce, Ralph Johns, and Jake.

One thing that strikes me about this page is the bold pattern of the crepe paper bunting that adorns the speaker's podium, and the pattern of polka dots on Fagin's boxer shorts. Over the course of his 16-year career creating hundreds of comic book stories, Jack Cole would expertly use patterns to add visual appeal to his work over and over.

Another screwball artist that I suspect was a huge influence on Cole was Milt Gross. The energy and zaniness, as well as the sheer love of distorting the human figure that is so evident in Gross' comics must have inspired Jack Cole. Here's a couple of Milt Gross Sunday comics from 1931, when Jack Cole was 16 years old and starting to learn to cartoon.

Next we find a rare example of Jack Cole drawing the extremely non-PC "Cheerio Minstrels" two-pager series that seems to have been quite popular at the time, judging by how many Centaur comics have it. I think the "cheerio" concept was probably a core idea for Chesler. Here's the cover to one of his earliest publications, a newspaper Sunday magazine insert called Cheerio from January, 1936:

Note that, among the listed comics inside, we have "Cheerio Hotel" (and also "King Kole's Kourt," appearing before Jack Cole joined the studio -- which confirms that Cole's later episodes of the strip were a happy coincidence, and that he was not the originator of the comic). The Cheerio Minstrels format was always a trio of African Americans singing a song in a sort of comic book version of a vaudeville minstrel routine. Cole's treatment is a shifting filmstrip of insanity:

Observe, if you will, how, in the bottom of page one, Cole pneumatically propels the characters around the panel. This exaggerated movement is another element Cole would develop, particularly in his Plastic Man stories. In fact, Cole recycled the fourth panel on page 2, with the arm amputation with a saw, in his first Woozy Winks story (Police Comics 13):

Last, but far from least, is a zany 4-page story by Jack Cole, Smart Alec, in which the main character is resplendently adorned with reverse polka dot trousers. I particularly love the wonderful 2-panel spread at the bottom of page 3. I don't have a lot to say about this material, but just wanted to share it! Enjoy!

A big thank you to Digital Comics Museum and scanner "dsdaboss" for these marvelous scans!

Karswell Posts Key Cole Story - The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1954)

2012-01-12T16:02:00.000-08:00

Read the complete story here!

The master of all things comic book and horrorific, Steve Karswell, has posted "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" from Web of Evil #10 (January, 1954) at his always-fun blog, The Horrors Of It All.

This is a key Jack Cole story. It was one of his very last comic book stories, and was published as his second-to-last story (for his final published comic book story, see my post on "I Was The Monster They Couldn't Kill" here).

You can read "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" at Karswell's blog by clicking here.

Firstly, there may be a question in some readers' minds as to whether this story actually is by Jack Cole. The Grand Comics Database currently lists the story as being by John Forte (they credit another story in Web of Evil #10 to Cole, "Death's Highway," which is not his work. Karswell has published that story on extensive blog as well, and you can read it by clicking here.)

I feel certain this story was written and penciled by Jack Cole. It is very much "of a piece" with the rest of his Web of Evil work. The title alone is similar to Cole's story from Web of Evil #1, "The Corpse That Wouldn't Die."

There are a number of "Cole-isms" in this story that indicate Cole's work, as well. These include Cole's characteristic sound effects lettering, as we see in this panel from the story (which, by the way, could also serve as a panel from any of his lurid True Crime stories):

Then there's the pervasive scenes of dread and anxiety. I think Cole was channeling Cold War nuclear fear. He went very, very dark at the end of his career. Even in Plastic Man. See my post on "Dark Plas" by clicking here.

Lastly, there is the sense of movement in several of the panels. Check out this psycho-sexual portrait of speed and obsession:

The writing is by whoever else wrote the bulk of the Web of Evil stories Cole drew -- whether it's him or someone else. This story has the same dynamic between the twisted, broken individual who is at odds with society as several of the others, such as "Monster of the Mist," and "Killer From Saturn."

The 16 Web of Evil stories that Jack Cole drew fall into two types: Unexplained Supernatural Events and Psychological Breakdowns. It seems to me that Jack Cole may have written wrote the stories that fall into the latter category, if not all of them.

In the Unexplained Supernatural Events, characters come against bizarre circumstances, such as severed hands that still seem alive, or magic spells that somehow reanimate the dead . The characters inevitably fall victim to these terrifying phenomena, but no explanation is ever provided for the existence of these mysterious situations. They simply happen. These scripts are sloppy and tedious, and often even Cole’s extraordinary drawings cannot make them more than barely entertaining.

The second category of stories, which I think Cole wrote, and which I call Psychological Breakdowns are better written and have more clever and surprising plot twists.

These stories include:

The Killer From Saturn (Web of Evil #3)
The Man Who Died Twice (Web of Evil #5)
Orgy of Death (Web of Evil #6)
The Spectre’s Face (Web of Evil #6)
Death Prowls the Streets (Web of Evil #8)
A Pact With The Devil (Web of Evil #9)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Web of Evil #10)
I Was The Monster They Couldn’t Kill (Web of Evil #11)

In these stories the resulting horrific events are always shown to be result of a character’s mental breakdown. For example, in “The Killer From Saturn,” (which Art Spiegleman asserts is purely Cole’s work), it appears that a wildly frightening alien from outer space has landed in an American city and is murdering its inhabitants without cause or discernable reason. In the end, we learn the monster is actually a slight, timid man who has gone mad, dressing up in a monster costume and killing in a twisted form of revenge and ego gone wild.

In the case of this new find, "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," we learn at the end that Dr. Renard and "the brain" are communicating via thought-waves... maybe. The story puts the reader on a barbed-wire fence. On one side we have the possibility that Dr. Renard's invention is real, and on the other the possibility that he is mad.

Cole gives us clues to this twist with visual foreshadowing. Look at how he visually combines Dr. Renard and the brain in this panel from page 4:

What gives "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" depth beyond the standard comic book horror story is the way Cole's imagery encourages us to consider the story as a metaphor for the self. It raises Phil Dickian questions about reality and what it means to be human. Is a brain in a jar a human being?

Jack Cole’s Web of Evil stories pulled the title out of a standard horror realm, and stretched the series into crime and science fiction as well. Instead of a horror story, Cole would write a crime story as if it were a horror story, playing with reader expectations.

These stories of people cracking under stress poignantly foreshadow the final outcome of Jack Cole’s life. After completing these stories, Cole not only left a dying industry for good, but also referred to his brilliant and accomplished career in demeaning terms. It seems likely there were hard feelings for Cole under the surface. In one story, which may or no be true, Cole is said to have taken his portfolio to DC (National) and was rejected.

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die" as most readers will know, is the title of a very similar movie released in 1962. One wonders if Cole's horrific brain-in-a-jar imagery in this story inspired them.

Another interesting aspect to this story is that it is about a crazy inventor. From his 1939 "Dickie Dean" stories onward, Jack Cole populated his comic book work with brilliant, and often cracked, inventors. It's an archetype that Cole -- an inventor himself -- identified with, I think.

It's also worth noting that the inventor character in "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," Dr. Renard, is a Cold War version of Cole's longest-running inventor character, Doc Wackey, from his 40 or so Midnight stories published in Smash Comics. Physically, they are dead-ringers for each other:

The story ends perfectly, with the wildly protesting "talking" brain casually dropped into an incinerator to be destroyed. Is this how Jack Cole, after beating his brains out for 16 years in comic books felt?

The surname of the main character in "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," Renard, is a French-German name that means "strong decision." Perhaps Cole's choice of the name, "Renard," was, consciously or not, an indication that he was making his own strong decision to leave comic books, Plastic Man, and Woozy behind.

By the time this story was published, Cole had left Quality Comics. After that, the only work in comics he found was touching up stories for post-code publication as an assistant to Marc Swayze at Charlton Comics in Derby Connecticut. That's a little like hiring Ernest Hemmingway to write supermarket signs. No wonder Cole left after three weeks, never to work in the comic book industry again.

I am totally psyched to see this story appear here. Thanks, Karswell!

Note: The Grand Comics Database, which I love, has a few errors around Cole's work, which is understandable since a clear understanding of the different phases of his work is only just now coming into focus. I am working as an indexer/error tracker at that site to correct the errors, but it is a slow process. I'll add this correction to my list!

All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey

Jack Cole's King Kola Ads 1941-42

2012-01-09T15:18:00.000-08:00

For all his talent and ambition, it's strange that Jack Cole didn't create more advertising art. Here's two rare 1941 ads with Jack Cole art -- perhaps the only examples of advertising art in his entire career.The ads are from late 1941 and early 1942 books published by Harry "A" Chesler, Cole's first employer in comic books. The ads are for a product called "King Kola."

King Kola was supposedly made by the King Cole Beverage Company. A little research on the Web turns up this tidbit, from a collection of 1941 copyright notices:

Thus, King Cola equals Harry Chesler, the comic book publisher!

A similar cola caper is much more well-known. In 1941, the grandiose comic book publisher Victor Fox began to promote a cola of his own, called "Kooba Cola." Here's the back cover of an unidentified Fox comic, circa 1941:

Fox pitched the cola hard, with interior ads and schemes:

What is brilliant and delightfully screwed up about all this is that the product was never manufactured! Fox, who owned the brand, was using his publications to create demand for a product that didn't exist. He planned to license the brand to a manufacturer, thinking the pre-loaded demand would make the licensing deal attractive. As far as we know, no manufacturer took him up on the deal.

In late 1941, Harry "A" Chesler made the move from packaging comics to publishing his own. He launched four titles: Yankee, Dynamic, Punch, and Scoop. He must have seen what Fox was doing, and thought it a great idea. Chesler seems filled with ambition in 1941. he named his cola after the hoary nursery rhyme figure, Old King Cole. For years, a 2-4 page comic series had come out of his shop called "King Kole's Kourt." This series was sometimes drawn by Jack Cole, bit he didn't create it -- despite the obvious connection with his name, and other artists worked on it seemingly randomly. Here's a couple of examples of Cole's work on the series. You can see the similarity between the cartooning style in these pages and the King Kola ads.

By Jack Cole. Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (MLJ/Archie, Nov 1939)

By Jack Cole. CoCoMalt Big Book of Comics (1938)

As far as I can tell, there were only two house ads created for "King Kola." Here's the first, appearing on the inside front cover of Yankee Comics #2:

The art, though unsigned, is unmistakably by Jack Cole. It has Cole's exaggerated perspectives and frantic energy. The comic over-reaction of the doctor and the skinny patient wearing saggy socks held up by garters is pure Jack Cole. It's the humor of impotence he would soon wield in Plastic Man. The name on bag, 'Doc Smith," may be a tribute to science fiction writer E.E. "Doc" Smith, who had published his highly popular "Lensman" series in 1941-42 pulps (and we know Cole read and enjoyed the pulps).

I don't think the lettering in the speech balloon is by Jack Cole. We do often see a jagged edged balloon in his work, but the lettering isn't his style. It's my guess he left it blank so Chesler could fill in whatever slogan he decided upon.

This advertising art is more polished than Cole's usual comic book art, and he may have lavished time on it. Perhaps he was paid well for the art, and that was a motivation. Here it is looking even better in color, from the back cover of Dynamic Comics #2 (circa 1942):

One wonders if Jack Cole himself colored this ad. It's got a certain something to it. Here's the second King Kola ad, this one from the back cover of Yankee Comics #3 (1942), also with nice coloring:

Again, the ad is unsigned, but there's no doubt in my mind this is art by Jack Cole. The gasoline splash drops, the cartoony figures, the lettering, and the overall tight composition. The concept of a gag cartoon approach is also very much Jack Cole, who jam-packed his work with creative ideas. In this case, the very idea of drawing a service station team swarming over a customer and car is so very much like Cole.

The ads appeared long after Jack Cole had left Harry Chesler's studio and was working at Quality Comics. In fact, it's entirely possible that Jack Cole drew the art for these ads close to the same time he created the first Plastic Man story (which was published in August 1941). However, maybe Chesler lined up the ads earlier than this, perhaps even when Cole worked for him. We know from the copyright notice that he filed the paperwork on October 1, 1940, about a year before he rolled the ads out.

As far as I can tell, King Kola was never manufactured. After these two ads, it seems that Chesler dropped the scheme. Still, we can't be certain. Here's a collector's photo in which the middle bottle of King Kola is dated from 1939.

The bottles look very different from the one in the ad, and I doubt that this is Chesler's product.

In fact, one wonders if Chelser really intended to sell the licensing at all, since his ad so clearly defined the look of the bottle. It seems odd that he would pick such a distinctive-looking bottle instead of letting a manufacturer/distributor design the packaging.Could it be that Harry Chesler planned to make the cola himself? Or, perhaps he was merely running fictituous ads in his magazine to perhaps attract other advertisers. One wonders if he was onto Fox's scheme, or if he saw soft drink ads suddenly appearing on Fox's comics and thought, "Hey, if he can get an advertiser to go for a full page color ad, so can I!"

In any case, whatever the true story of King Cola may be...

These are rare examples of Jack Cole advertising art and delightful to peruse. Perhaps, if he had lived longer, Jack might have been lured into the lucrative world of advertising, as many of his peers were in the late 1950s, early 1960s. The mind reels...

Cole in Your Stocking - 12 New Cartoon Discoveries!

2011-12-22T18:09:00.000-08:00

The Jack Cole Christmas Cartoon Roundup: A Sprinkle of Playboy and a Dollop of Mirth!

A post made just 2 days prior to December 25th is the ideal place to share a Jack Cole Christmas story. After all, in his hundreds of comic book stories created in a 16-year career, there must be at least a handful of Christmas stories.

Right? I mean, the man was born in December (December 14th).

At least one Xmas story. Santa's gotta be in here, somewhere, right?

Nope.

To my knowledge, Jack Cole did not create a single Christmas-themed comic book story. Yet, he worked in an industry that delighted in exploiting the holiday for all it was worth, with numerous Christmas-themed stories and covers. What in the world does this say, if anything, about our friend and hero, Jack? Was he a bit of a humbug? Or, as a Methodist, was he reluctant to do much with the holiday out of respect? Perhaps Jack Cole was simply too much of an original to follow the pack and instead developed his own themes and subject matter.

Whatever the reason, Cole and Christmas just don't seem to mix. Take a look at this 1939 one-page Christmas cartoons, the one piece of Christmas-themed comic book work by Jack Cole that I have found:

Funny Pages Volume 3, Issue 10 (Dec 1939)

It's not very warm and fuzzy, is it? This is from a black and white photocopy, by the way. Even so, you can see that Jack Cole's take on Christmas humor was not that inspired. This page seems to want to go into his penchant for funny crime situations, instead of Santa, North Pole, and well, all the tropes of the holiday.

As far as I can tell (somebody prove me wrong, please!), Cole doesn't touch on Christmas in his work again until 16 years later, after he's completely left comic books. In the December, 1955 issue of Playboy magazine, we find a Christmas card of sorts, by Jack:

It's one of five, and no doubt, Cole drew it as an assignment. Note that his card is accompanied by four others, all done by different Playboy artists.

Aside from the sprig of mistletoe at the top right corner of his card, and the understated hues of red and green (the colors of Christmas), there doesn't seem to be anything Christmas-y at all in the visual aspect of Cole's piece. This is even less enthusiastic about the holiday than his early 1939 page above. Nonetheless, his art leaps out of the pile of rather wooden art examples, and his concept is extremely clever and sexy. Here's the original art for this piece, a thing of beauty that celebrates the feminine, rather than the holiday:

Art Spiegelman, perhaps the most insightful critic of Cole's we have, has said somewhere that the key to understanding Jack Cole's work is to see that his main theme is impotence. My studies of Cole's work bears this out, and we'll see some examples of that later on in this posting.

However, it's worth noting that the above Playboy Magazine cartoon by Jack Cole is a rare portrait of masculine empowerment, rather than impotence. For this reason, it's always been a personal favorite of mine. A rare moment when Jack Cole stood up for his gifts and his own considerable power as an artist and generative human being.

In the image, the artist paints a slightly Christmas-y tie on the topless beauty. However, the image also looks a bit like the artist has created the stunning model of feminine sexuality with his brush and paints. And, of course, this is exactly what Jack Cole has done. In fact, in the original art scan, you can see his raw brushstrokes and paint daubs on the bottom edge of the board. Nice stuff. Thus, the image (especially the image of the original art) becomes a meta statement about the redemption Cole found in creativity, and perhaps in creating these ultimate images of the Feminine.

I also have in my files a lovely image of original art by Cole that looks as if it was created for a New Year's piece. I don't know if it was ever published. It's a lovely piece, a dazzling light and luscious vision.

In their terrific book, Forms Stretched to Their Limits: Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd publish a very rare, delightful Christmas card drawn by Jack Cole in the mid 1940s for his New Castle, PA family (note the name on the mailbox of the home the singing letter is being delivered to):

Again, there's a fascinating dearth of traditional Xmas art. I'm not sure if this type of approach to a "Christmash" greeting is typical of the time. Perhaps, in the ensuing generations since the 1940s, us Americans have built up the Christmas tropes - Santa, reindeer, a manger, 3 wise men, Frosty the Snowman, and so on. I'm not sure. But even so, there seems to be something a little off about Cole's black-drenched celebration of the season of light.

That's about all the Christmas-themed Jack Cole stuff there seems to be. However, let's not end this post on a note of lack and darkness. In fact, I say let's let Jack Cole do what he did best, and cheer us up with some great cartoons.

I just yesterday discovered on scanner superstar Bchat's blog, M.O.D.M a curious little humor digest from March, 1955 called Mirth.

As you may recall, in the last few months, I've developed a theory that there are a lot of Jack Cole cartoons in 1954-55 publications that we have yet to discover. This was the period where Cole left a 16-year career in comic books and focused on magazine cartoons, which was a sort of parallel lesser career of his up until the mid-50's. Sure enough, this humor digest, scanned and shared by bchat (thanks!) has some Jack Cole in it.

In fact....

It's got TWELVE (!) Jack Cole cartoons in it! I could scarcely believe my eyes when I first paged through the book. This was a lovely gift from the Universe and I thought it would be nice to share these cartoons with everyone, as a sort of holiday offering.

In the inside front cover, we find this delightful captionless cartoon:

This is a super-clever use of negative space, and obviously the editor agreed, giving it the place of honor on the magazine, and choosing it out of the batch of 12 Cole gems he had in front of him. How in the world 12 Jack Cole cartoons were published in one emphemeral, vernacular bon bon is a mystery that will likely never be solved. My guess is that these cartoons of Cole's are mostly rejects from higher markets, and that Cole shoved an accumulation of these rejects into an envelope and mailed it to an editor with a smaller budget who knew a good thing when he saw it and snapped up the dozen gems.

Speaking of cartoons that -- um -- don't speak, here's another captionless cartoon by Jack Cole that I love:

Cole has wandered into the same territory as more gentle, observational cartoonists, such as Charles Schulz (Peanuts), and offers us a fascinating glimpse of what a mature Jack Cole could have done with cartoons, had he not gone the Playboy route.

Note the cartoons are all signed by Jack, in the same style signature he used for his Playboy cartoons. During this time, we find a number of "Jake" cartoons in the same sorts of magazines ("Jake" being Cole's pen name). Such as this beauty, also from bchat's website:

A-Laugh-A-Minnit #8(Toby Press/Minoan, circa 1955, exact date unknown)

Note that this art looks similar to Cole's virtually unknown Millie and Terry comic strip, but it's also looser and more "arty."

Another interesting aspect to the Jack Cole Mirth cartoons is that they are not "Jake" cartoons. They reach out to other topics and situations, with grounded, more domestic humor instead of a frothy chiffon of sex. Consider this sitcom of a cartoon from the Mirth series:

This is truly inventive, clever, engaging stuff. It is very similar to Cole's Saturday Evening Post cartoon published about a year earlier:

Both cartoons are sequential multiple images, and both are about domestic squabbles involving lights at night. For more analysis of this particular cartoon, see my post here. Jack Cole liked drawing splashes of light and shadow, and we see this in a comic book work a lot:

Here's another cartoon from Cole's Mirth series that seems delightfully different from his men's magazine work; almost a George Price New Yorker style cartoon.

Here are the remaining delightful half-dozen Jack Cole cartoons from Mirth #36 (March, 1955). Thanks, Jack. Enjoy!

Cole's Comics wishes you all a happy holiday and a great 2012! Here's a silly card I drew for the kids and humbly offer.

An Interview with Mike Kooiman, Quality Comics Scholar and Author

2011-12-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

Mike Kooiman has created, with Jim Amash, The Quality Companion, a terrific book that has just been published by TwoMorrows. It's on sale at the TwoMorrows website, where you can get a paper or a digital edition (I got both!) -- click here to preview and buy!

I got my paper and my digital copy three days ago and WOW, is this a fun book for a golden age comic book geek like myself! Of course, there's a lot about Jack Cole in this book. I'll have more to say in the coming weeks as I digest this massive tome of information, but overall I just want to say that I am really impressed with the job Mike Kooiman and Jim Amash did in researching all things Quality, compiling the various pieces of information we have about Quality Comics into a smooth narrative, and then assembling it into a beautifully laid out book filled with fascinating photos and art.

Mike and I have been emailing the last few weeks. As soon as he heard about Cole's Comics, he offered me the special fonts he designed for The Quality Companion, which he based on Jack Cole's hand lettering (used in the new masthead, above - thanks, Mike!). Mike graciously consented to a little interview that reveals some fascinating behind-the-scenes information on the creation of The Quality Companion.

The Quality Companion reprints in high resolution
nine extremely obscure and fascinating stories
from Quality in a special full-color section that includes
the amazing Jack Cole Midnight story from
Smash Comics #32 (March, 1942)

The Quality Companion is stuffed with fascinating stuff
about Jack Cole, including some insight into
Cole's last "Dark Plas" work for Quality

What inspired you to make The Quality Companion?

My site, Cosmic Teams (Paul's note: be sure to visit this cool site here), has been active for over a decade, and my love of the Justice Society led me to even more interest in DC's Golden Age properties. In particular, I like Quality because these characters had been so largely overlooked. Sure you can say the same for Fawcett, but I felt that the Marvel Family had such a fan base, and Quality's was much more forgotten. When I realized that I could download all the comics for free, I began to write all of the character profiles, hoping to assemble the definitive set and site on the matter. I quickly realized this was a huge project and approached Roy Thomas about doing a book. Roy and Jim Amash had already discussed such a thing, and a year later they officially asked me to write it.

The Quality Companion is chock-full of smart stuff,
such as a Quality Comics family tree, a map of
key locations of Quality offices and artists' homes
(including Jack Cole's NE homes), archival photos,
and tons more.

How long did you work on the book, and can you share a little bit about the research you did?

The book took a year to write, and I wish I'd had another three months (not necessarily to write more, but to read through and edit one more time). My research began with a reading of the Quality archive, and in familiarizing myself with Jim Amash's interviews (something which had already piqued my interest). This led to any kind of research I could muster. The next logical research steps included reading major volumes most related to my subject, namely Steranko's History of Comics, A Spirited Life and Spiegelman's Jack Cole book. When I began knitting these things into a linear history, that's when I began Googling and digging and searching for missing bits of information, wherever it was needed. The book has a full Bibliography that lists every resource I consulted.

Mike's book has lots of helpful information, including
in-depth studies of the Quality characters and titles.

The book is co-authored by Jim Amash, who has made a huge contribution to the study of golden age comics by personally interviewing many of the artists, writers, and publishers. What was Jim's involvement in The Quality Companion?

Jim was Quality control! After I fashioned his interviews into a different form, he read my work, spotted inaccuracies, and filled in gaps occasionally where it helped the story. Jim even roped in Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. to put his keen eyes on the Artists section. Our discussions were detailed on certain subjects and I they greatly aided the fairness of the text. There are even a couple of tidbits that were too late to make the book that Jim learned from having re-contacted the likes of Dick Arnold. I very much hope that I did Jim justice and encourage everyone to see out those original issues of Alter Ego (available for preview and purchase here) , because my narrative only cherry-picks from those.

Mike Kooiman's exhaustively researched and annotated
golden age comics website, Cosmic Teams

Earlier, you mentioned your website, Cosmic Teams. Can you share a little bit more about that, and the Quality Comics blog you've started?

Cosmic Teams was a simple extension of my fandom for JLA and Legion, really. When I found myself making lists of members and stuff, I thought "why not put it online?" This was in the mid-90s when HTML was all-new. Then I simply began adding everything that struck me as a fan, things that other fans might like to read. I've always written Cosmic Teams as a reference volume, and accuracy was important. It was there that my citation style was invented (when you see an issue number in parentheses) (something I highly applaud - Paul). I did that because I was tired of everyone claiming crazy things and not being able to point anyone to the correct issue. I debunked a lot of errors while doing my own reading and research, and I'm pleased to see that even Wikipedia comics entries are now heavily footnoted. Long after me, natch. Yep, I'm gonna claim that.

The Quality Companion Companion has a singular focus: to supplement the book and target readers interested in that publisher. Longer articles like the Blackhawk profiles are "teased" on the blog and then linked to Cosmic Teams, where the permanent article resides.

Mike Kooiman created two fonts based on Jack Cole's
hand-lettering especially for The Quality Companion

I know you created two special fonts for the book, based on Jack Cole's hand lettering. Did you also do the layout and production work on the book yourself?

My day job is that of Art Director/graphic designer, so I did indeed do all those things. Initially, TwoMorrows was going to use their go-to guy, Eric Nolen-Weathington, but he was forced to withdraw. Creating fonts is something I enjoy when the opportunity arises. I noticed immediately the potential for fonts based on Jack Cole's lettering.

A typical mixture of controlled weirdness by
Fred Guardineer, also a favorite of mine,
from Crack Comics #20

What's your favorite Quality series and artist? Favorite series?

That one's hard because the features were all distributed across seven anthology titles. The ones that had the most super-hero bang for the buck were Feature, Smash, Crack, National and Police. Indeed, maybe Police was my favorite because you got classic Plastic Man, along with Phantom Lady, Human Bomb (drawn by another favorite of mine, Paul Gustavson), and loads of other heroes.

Personally--and I'm going to go out on a brittle limb here--Lou Fine is not one of my favorites. (not one of mine, either - sez Paul) I appreciate his work, but at the end of the day I find myself seeing Will Eisner's (sour-grapey) point of view: Fine wasn't a cartoonist or a storyteller, and those things show pretty heavily in his comics work.

My favorite artist is one who gets little press: Fred Guardineer. Something about his unique style really thrilled me. There are some panels in his art (he drew many many features) that would just stop me in my tracks and I'd pore over and over them with wonder. Wait! I was supposed to say "Jack Cole" here, wasn't I? :; Naturally, I appreciate all the other greats, but I could go on at length about who and why forever!

The Mouthpiece was, like Jack Cole's Midnight,
a clone of Will Eisner's Spirit. Publisher Arnold tasked
his best artists to create Spirit-like characters to
capitalize on the character's popularity, and to provide
a little insurance in case Eisner defected Quality,
or didn't return from his wartime service. Like Jack Cole,
Fred Guardineer was too much of an original to
create an out-and-out copy, and invested his
Mouthpiece stories with his own brand of
wooden weirdness, as shown in this
splash page from Police Comics #13.

Any special thoughts on Jack Cole you'd like to share? Any insight into the relationship Busy Arnold had with Cole and his other artists? Did Arnold regard Cole as his top artist?

It's clear to me that Arnold regarded Cole highly. The Quality publishing record clearly demonstrates Arnold's choices about what and whom to promote. Those artists who became popular rose very quickly, and I know in my soul it was because they were noticed by Busy Arnold, either personally or in response to reader feedback. In regards to Cole, it was another case of the "fast track to exclusivity." Once Arnold wanted you, he kept you so busy that you didn't work for anyone else. Busy played the "pal" and let his editors be the task masters. It says something of their relationship that so many key artists and staff moved to be near the publisher's Stamford, Conn. office in 1939.

Jack Cole's funny depiction of Quality Comics publisher Busy Arnold from
the Plastic Man story that appeared in Police Comics #20

I didn't unearth any anecdotes not already found in Jim Amash's discussions with them, but I was amused by Cole's portrayal of Arnold in Police Comics #20. I think Cole's depiction of Arnold was equal parts good fun and subtle dig at him for being a slave driver. There seems to be more mention of artists than Cole, by Arnold. Perhaps Arnold got along personally a bit better with Fine and Crandall.

The Quality Companion is filled with information and rare photos,
such as these little seen photos from Jack Cole's life

Did Jack Cole's brother, Dick Cole, lend you the rare, seldom-seen family photos used in the book, or did those come from another source?

Jim Amash spoke directly with Dick Cole and told me that all those images were from him, yes. Lucky guy!

Augmenting The Quality Companion is Mike's new blog.
Visit it at www.qualitycomics.blogspot.com

In your book, you have an interesting side article about the recent phenomenon of digital comics and their influence on studying comics history. I think the sudden availability of this rare, previously impossible to see material has led to a much deeper understanding and appreciation of American comic books in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, resulting in terrific books like The Quality Companion. Any thoughts on that?

I can only speak for myself, but heavens yes I hope so! I think people are only starting to realize that this resource is available. Now, I'm not talking about the legions of extant Golden Age fans. I've found that my blog article about "reading The Spirit for free" was quite popular and I have a hunch that spelling this out to new readers was enlightening for some. I look at G.A. fandom and hope that a younger generation will unearth all these gems. Tablet computers are going to expand this audience. I definitely had my own impressions --which sometimes differed GREATLY from what gets repeated over and over, like my appreciation of Guardineer, who is never mentioned anywhere.

Thanks, Mike, for the interview! You did a marvellous job and I hope the book sells well. The Quality Companion: Preview and purchase here!

Sexy Nurses, Jive Genies, and Innocent Racism in Jack Cole's 1944 Private Dogtag Screwball Adventure

2011-12-06T09:59:00.001-08:00

(Special note: Comics for Sale! Get digitally restored and annotated comic book madness by Jack Cole for only $2.99 here.)

Story in this post:

"Private Dogtag: Aladdin's Lamp" (story and art by Jack Cole)

Military Comics #30 (July, 1944 - Quality)

In 1944, the United States was all about fighting the war against Germany and Japan. Please keep this in mind when you read the extremely insane story in this post.

American comic book sales boomed during World War Two as cratefuls were shipped to American G.I.'s overseas. Comic book publishers like Quality altered their content to appeal less to the kiddies and more to the soldiers. PRIVATE DOGTAG was one of a fleet of comics about inept soldiers. From SAD SACK (begun in 1942) to BEETLE BAILEY (begun in 1950 and still running today), the concept was -- and has been -- enormously popular among U.S. military and civilians alike.

Jack Cole was one of the few healthy top comic book artists in America who wasn't called up to serve in the military effort (although his brother, Bob, served in the Coast Guard).

As such, Cole had all the work he could take on. And take it he did, perhaps building up a cash reserve in case he was drafted. This was the year PLASTIC MAN got his own book, with Cole penning virtually every page of the first three issues. If you take a look at my year-by-year page count of Jack Cole's work (read the whole post, wit6h additional charts and interesting stats on Cole's career, here), it becomes clear that 1944 was a peak production year for the prolific Jack Cole.

In Military Comics #30 alone, Jack Cole not only contributed a wonderful 4-page Death Patrol story (which you can read on this blog here), but he also tossed in a terrific nine-page Private Dogtag adventure that features sexy nurses, a Zoot-suited jive talking genie, a plethora of Japanese stereotypes, and our hero impersonating a female!

I've restored the art to this story, for your reading pleasure. It begins with a great, bizarre splash panel that gives us a healthy dose of sexy army nurses...

From Military Comics #30

(July, 1944 - Quality Comics)

Note the story is signed by Bart Tumey. PRIVATE DOGTAG was primarily drawn by Quality staffer BART TUMEY, who had a pleasant cartoony style. Tumey worked in comics longer than Cole did, starting out in the mid-1930s and lasting until the late 1950s. He also penciled and inked several Plastic Man stories.

As some readers of this blog may know, my name is Paul Tumey. As far as I know, there is no direct relation between me and Mr. Bart Tumey. I wish there was, but we will have to simply be connected through an interest in comics and Jack Cole.

There is no doubt that this Private Dogtag story is written, penciled, inked, and even lettered by Jack Cole. When you compare how Jack Cole and Bart Tumey drew Private Dogtag, there are several marked differences:

Tumey tends to draw Dogtag's huge, comical cowlick wider and fuller than Cole. Jack Cole's character design seems more organic and graceful, even though he is basically replicating a design someone else created. Tumey also structures Dogtag's head with a larger cranium (although the brain inside is probably fairly small!). In fact, the "bighead" style of cartooning was embraced by Tumey in some very odd and strange images:

Aside from the obvious differences in cartooning styles, we can identify the Private Dogtag story in Military #30 as being by Jack Cole (even though it is signed by Bart Tumey) from several "tells." First off, there's the Cole women. Jack Cole's mid-1940's women had a very distinctive face:

Also, the character of Sheik Bey Rum in the Private Dogtag story reminds me a lot of a character from the Woozy Winks origin story:

Comparing the two images above, it's clear that they were both penciled and inked by Jack Cole (as he did the vast majority of his work), which means we can probably eliminate the possibility that Tumey penciled and Cole inked this Private Dogtag story, or vice versa.

The mystery remains: why is this story, which is so clearly by Jack Cole, signed by Bart Tumey? Was this simply an editorial screw-up? Perhaps it's simply because the Death Patrol story in this same issue is signed by Jack Cole:

For some strange reason, it seemed to be an editorial policy at Quality that each story in a comic book of theirs needed to appear to be created by a different person. We also know that Cole was fond of using pen names, such as Ralph Johns, Jake, and Robert Bruce -- so perhaps it was Cole himself who drew Bart Tumey's signature to his wacky gem, lost for 60 years in the "cole mine."

Jack Cole's Playboy Style Cartoon Composition: A Guest Post by Timothy O'Neil

2011-11-19T12:59:00.001-08:00

In 2007, blogger Timothy O'Neil published an astute visual analysis of one of Jack Cole's sexy "Jake" cartoons from the early 1950's. In another posting, I'll go more into the history of Cole's career as "Jake." For now, with Timothy's permission, I'd like to share his analysis with you (Thanks, Tim!). Timothy shared with me that this analysis of Jack Cole's composition took a lot of work, and it remains one of his favorite postings.

I've done a few of these visual analysis pieces myself, and I can attest to the fact that they are indeed, a lot of work and require a lot of looking and thinking. Tim's work here is well done and reveals the high level of craft and artistry that Jack Cole brought to his gag cartoon work. Tim concludes his visual essay with a terrific point, that immediate accessibility is the major goal of most commercial artists. This is an overlooked, but important aspect to Jack Cole's art. His stories and gag cartoons are among the most immediately accessible work done in these mediums. A large part of that has to do with his mastery of composition.

Please be sure to visit Tim's blogs:

The Hurting
Rejected Breakfast Cereal Mascots

I'm happy to share with you this "guest post" on Jack Cole. If anyone else out there would like to write a guest post, please feel free to contact me.

LET'S TALK ABOUT COMPOSTION

This is a pin-up by Jack Cole ("Jake"), one of many produced for the Humorama line of mens' magazines in the years between his early comic book work on Plastic Man and The Spirit, and the Playboy work that defined the last period of his life. (This piece is excerpted from Fantagraphics' wonderful monograph, The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, edited by Alex Chun and released in 2004. It doesn't actually contain any of his Playboy material, unfortunately. Fantagraphics and Playboy recently collaborated on an excellent overview of Eldon Dedini's pin-up art, so the idea of the two publishers one day producing such a volume isn't that far-fetched.)

First, let's look at the general shape of Cole's picture. I've used red to delineate the piece's main focus - a central oblong focal point roughly corresponding to the curves of the secretary's body and the faces of the men crowding the opposite end of the office. Notice how most of the straight lines in the composition are tangential to the area of negative space at the heart of the picture, defining the negative space without violating it.

Something which surprised me was how the picture's sight-lines also framed the focal space. Look at how the direction of each figure's gaze also manages to do a great job of pointing the viewer towards where the artist wants the viewer to look. I've colored each character's plane of vision with a different colored triangle - you can see, roughly, that they all overlap at the center of the picture, in a pentagonal figure roughly corresponding to the composition I outlined above.

Here, I have colored the picture's three main elements: the figure of the secretary in the center, the furniture in the middleground and the office spectators in the background. Notice how every shape in the picture defines the secretary's figure. The secretary really pops out of the foreground when set against the staid, perpendicular lines of the furniture and her co-workers.

By flipping the colors we see something else entirely: a band of light across the lower half of the picture, roughly corresponding to the ostensible focus point, i.e. the secretary's breasts, torso, hips and legs. In the real piece, obviously, this band of yellow is dark, which also helps to pull the eye down towards the desired focal point. The darkest point of a picture pulls the eye towards it - contrast is one of the illustrator's most potent tools. (This is why flat compositions can present difficulty in terms of immediate accessibility to the viewer. In the case of pin-ups, as well as posters, comic-book covers and album jackets, immediate accessibility is a major goal - if not the major goal - of the artist.)

Jack Cole's Mystery Chicken Comics

2011-11-14T13:32:00.001-08:00

Here's a tasty tidbit for all you fellow cooped-up comic book people who, like me are - unh - scratching around to uncover more Jack Cole comics.

But first, I'll fatten up this lean posting with a chicken story!

I grew up in a semi-rurual setting, outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had some pretty rural kinfolks that we stayed with from time to time. One morning, I woke up in an old farmhouse in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. I went out onto the big wooden front porch and peed into the yard. I said good morning to the fat old alligator in his fenced-in pond a few feet away. Yes, it was THAT rural -- maybe one reason I love Cole's hillbilly comics. Anyway, as I peed, the yard chickens came running up and hungrily pecked at the yellow droplets of urine as if they were corn! I'm not making this up!

That's when I realized that chickens, for all their great value in the food chain, have rather flawed perception systems.

Jack Cole, however, had a pretty great sense of humor, and a huge love of comics, even when he - uh - winged it. Here's a one-pager from a feather-less (that is, cover-less) comic book that was probably packaged by Harry "A" Chesler, and most likely published by him, too. As usual for Cole, it's jam-packed with 5 one-panel gags and a 4-panel strip.The jokes are all pretty - unh - corny.

We don't have a title or date for this one. My guess is it's around 1940. But really, at this point, we have no hen-ts to go on. At least, we can appreciate the sublime silliness of an entire page of chicken gags! It shows that Cole had a rather egg-zacting sense of humor:

The bottom strip is Jack Cole's own square egg comic book story, a concept that Carl Barks fully hatched years later in his classic "Plain Awful" square egg story ("Lost In The Andes, April 1949). And, lest you think I'm cracked in identifying this unsigned page of fowl humor to be by Jack Cole... one of the many tells is the patterned title lettering. This elaborate, distinctively-shaped lettering is similar to the title art from the last story in Plastic Man #2 ("Coroner's Corners", circa 1944). Here's that unforgettable splash page, for comparison:

I guess that's why we love the man's work: it's pretty -- clucked up -- in a beautiful way.

ANNOUNCEMENT! My two Midnight ebook collections, Volumes 1 and 2 are on sale for only $2.99! See the right-hand sidebar (or click "web view" if you are browsing on a mobile phone). Buy today for -- cough, cough -- chickenfeed!

_____________________

Note: see http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?ACT=addcomment&dlid=16231 for the complete unknown Chelser comic

Jack Cole Battles Hitler!

2011-11-07T11:02:00.000-08:00

Like many Golden Age comic book men, Jack Cole battled Hitler with an assault of four-color firearms. This blog entry looks at some of Cole's anti-Hitler work, including a previously unknown discovery of cartoons from one of Lev Gleason's non-comics "slick" magazines, Picture Scoop!

In March, 1941 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had the great idea of drawing Captain America punching out Hitler for the cover of Captain America #1. Suddenly, American comic books were relevant.

What they lacked in sophistication, they more than made up for in sheer graphic oomph and patriotic fervor.

Knowing that Hitler and the wartime effort were huge circulation builders, America's comic book publishers rarely missed a chance to direct their super (and non-super) heroes into the fray. From 1941 to 1945, deliberately vicious, almost non-human caricatures of Germans and Japanese people populated hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of American comic books. The altered collage-style comic book cover by Bob Wood (signed) that opens this posting is from Lev Gleason's Daredevil #1 (not by Cole, although it appears that some figures from his stories might have been pasted onto or copied into the cover), one the classic iconic anti-Hitler comics.

Because of their connections to Europe, many of the comic book makers of 1941 were a little ahead of the curve as far as American involvement in stopping Hitler. That first spectacular Hitler punch-out cover of Captain America #1 came out nine months before America entered the War.

Even though he had no European connections, Jack Cole, a Methodist from Pennsylvania, was among the many American cartoonists who created anti-Hitler comics months before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Caught in the wake of World War two, even a non-political person would have been galvanized into opinions and action.

Cole was one of the few healthy American cartoonists to escape the draft. One of his brothers, Bob Cole, was in the Coast Guard during WWII, though, as this newspaper clipping shows:

It seems reasonable to assume that Cole may have wanted to do his bit by integrating his own brand of anti- Hitler/Japan propaganda into his work as he remained safe -- if overworked -- on the American homesoil.

In an interview in Alter Ego #12, Quality editor and Cole's friend and neighbor, Gill Fox states that Cole was not political. Although he may not have discussed politics with his colleagues, Cole clearly had political opinions and social awareness. In a 1940 Mantoka story, Cole writes:

"Our American Indians, during the early days of the United States were robbed of land, possessions and homes by white man's treachery."

The villain of this story is an exploitative mine owner. Keep in mind that Cole was born and raised in a mining town.

Cole's political views were simplistic but heartfelt, based more on a humanistic view of life than a political view. Any reader familiar with his stories knows that he was an idealist. He was not afraid to paint the worst -- and best -- of people.

Cole was a man who raised himself up through the American system by his own talent and toil, and so he knew first-hand the meaning and promise of human potential. He clearly believed in the American system. Where New York born cartoonists like Simon and Kirby, and Will Eisner depicted slums and urban decay, Cole's cities looked like nice places to live, even if they were populated by bizarre criminals.

Despite his humanistic streak, and sympathetic views of the downtrodden, Cole's portrayals of Nazis and Japanese people are virulently racist. No more so than anybody else's of the time, however. In fact, his first treatments of Hitler and the Nazis are fairly light. We can look at Cole's treatments of Hitler, including some rare and previously unknown material for Lev Gleason's slick magazines, and see an evolution in his treatment of Hitler from harmless to heinous.

The first appearance of Hitler in Cole's work was in Silver Streak #2 (July, 1941), in "The Claw Double Crosses Hitler." In this story, Hitler has a two-panel appearance and is almost an object of sympathy, as absolutely evil Claw forces him into a pact:

In this story, Hitler is drawn almost heroically. More than likely, Cole's intent was not to exonerate a dictator, but rather to just make The Claw seem as evil as possible. No doubt Cole, like most of the world, had no idea he was playing with fire. Even the great Charlie Chaplin said later that he would not have made "The Great Dictator," if he had known the depths of the Hitler and Nazi Germany's horrible madness.

About 6 months later, Cole write and draws a story called "War Over Iceland!," in which a comically nutty Nazi commander uses Doc Wackey's crazy invention, the "atom-reversing machine," to turn people into candy. He then licks the frozen, candied humans and delights in their taste. Cole plays it more for laughs than horror, but his story shows he beginning to sense the evil horror in the world. The Nazi's invasion of Iceland, of course, echos the real life invasion into Poland.

Another six months pass, and in June 1942 (Police Comics #9), Cole portrays Hitler and the Nazis as being behind the crazy villain, "Hairy Arms." As Eel O'Brian, Plastic Man leads a gang of criminals into resistance against the Nazis, echoing the 1941 Warner Brothers vehicle starring Humphrey Bogart, "All Through the Night." In one of Cole's typically witty moments during this period, he has a crook yell out, "Nobody can take away our right to free speech and free cash!"

The gloves begin to come off in the next issue of Police Comics. Here's How Cole draws Hitler:

This drooling, despising, demonic portrayal from Police Comics #10 (July, 1942) is part of a spectacular Plastic Man splash page that functions as stand-alone editorial cartoon about the power-crazed Axis machine:

The interior story is only marginally connected to this nightmarish image. This is unusual for Cole, who was an early master -- like Eisner and Jimmy Thompson--at using the splash page to set up the story that follows. It may be a sign of the increasing sense of urgency Cole and much of the country felt at this time. In fact, the diagonal shading strokes in the above splash suggest almost a curtain of darkness descending on the world.

However, this sort of drawing was not unusual in American comic book at the time. Consider this splash page from Quality's Smash #43:

Just three months after the Police #10 splash,, three strongly anti-Hitler cartoons by Jack Cole appeared in Picture Scoop Volume 1, Number 1 (Oct, 1942).

The magazine was one of several mainstream "slick" style publications published by Lev Gleason, the publisher of Charles' Biro's comic book Crime Does Not Pay. Gleason also hired Jack Cole in late 1939 to edit his comic book, Silver Streak (named after his new car), where Cole created The Claw, Sliver Streak, Daredevil, The Pirate Prince, and Dickie Dean - Boy Inventor.

By the time of Picture Scoop's publication, Jack Cole had left Lev Gleason, worked briefly for MLJ (Archie) and then moved over to Quality Comics. It's an interesting revelation in itself to see evidence that Cole still dabbled in freelance work during his years in the comic book industry.

Many thanks to the sharp-eyed Darwination at Digital Comics Museum (and be sure to visit his Darwination Scans blog ) who discovered these amazing cartoons, one of which is signed by Cole:

In these lively cartoons, Jack Cole has returned to using wash techniques, as he did with his Boy's Life cartoons, although his technique (and drawing) has improved greatly. About 10 years later, he would publish numerous artful wash cartoons for the Abe Goodman Humorama magazines, among others.

Comics historian and publisher Greg Theakston has meticulously restored hundreds of Jack Cole drawings, and he made the observation, "the guy loved patterns." As has been previously pointed out many times in this blog, Cole used patterns as an art element time and again. Here, in these cartoons, we have the Swastika-patterned wallpaper. Just as the polka dots on Woozy Winks' green blouse catch and direct the eye, so do the patterns in these cartoons. These were illustrations for an article on how comedians were deflating Hitler. Here's the article:

I don't know about you, but for my money, Cole's cartoons are much more entertaining than the comedian's jokes, even the great Danny Kaye's!

Also in October, 1942, Cole's hero Midnight, goes to Hell and rallies the "inmates" there to go back to Earth and conquer the Nazis. Very similar to the Plastic Man story from Police Comics #9. It is clear now that Cole, like most of America, has accepted the necessity of fighting Germany and Japan.

Here's a Jack Cole one-pager from about a year later, in August of 1943, from Police Comics #21. Here, the emphasis is on the people who will lead us OUT of this mess, instead of the evil madman who created it.

There are numerous Jack Cole stories during the early 40's where his characters fight the Germans and Japanese, particularly his Death Patrol and Private Dogtag stories.

In 1944, another Lev Gleason magazine appears, interestingly called True Drime Detective, foreshadowing Cole's 1947 True Crime Comics. As an aside, one wonders: could Jack Cole have designed that logo? Comics scholar Frank Young points out the top part of the logo is well done, but the bottom "Detective" part is sloppy and looks as if another -- lesser skilled -- artist added it on. Perhaps the magazine was going to be called "True Crime," but they added 'Detective" at the last minute, for some reason. In any case, the top part of the logo looks a little Cole-like to me, but we may never know for sure.

You can pick up a scan of the complete True Crime Detective Vol1#1 at the Darwination Scans blog (which has many other terrific items of interest). The back cover of this issue has a terrific lurid ad featuring Hitler that looks as if it could possibly be illustrated by Jack Cole.

The sensibility, the staging and lighting, and the drawing suggest Cole to me. Look at the hand holding the dagger dripping blood, embellished with a human skull carving. The drawing is unsigned, and I haven't yet found any reference to it in any of the Cole literature. It's possible too, that other issues of True Crime Detective, as well as other Lev Gleason magazines may contain work by Jack Cole.

I'd love to hear from readers and fellow Jack Cole fans as to whether this ad appears to them to be drawn by Jack Cole.

These are just some of the instances of Jack Cole battling Hitler. Cole was by means a standout patriot in his anti-Hitler/Nazi/Japan propaganda, but he didn't remain silent, either. His comic book stories are filled with moral outage, so it's no surprise that Cole -- a generally non-political person -- would be moved to speak out against the madness that infected the world at the time.

After the war, Cole's work is less obviously topical, but it still kept in pace with the times. As America slid into the repressed, nightmarish, anxiety-ridden age of the Cold War and The Bomb, Cole's work -- like many comics and other vernacular artforms -- was a dark reflection of these changes.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!
My colleague, Frank Young (see his great blog on John Stanley here) and I have an article in Alter Ego #105, which has just been published. It's an examination of a bizarre Nazi horror story that was published before the Comics Code, and then re-published after the Code, with some absurd changes made to it. Many thanks to editor Roy Thomas and his team for doing such a great presentation and for using much of our original copy, untouched, which first appeared on our Comic Book Attic blog. The issue is a fascinating look at the effect of the Comics Code, and includes some eye-opening examples from Plastic Man, among others. The digital version is only $2.95, and you can download it instantly. Click on the image below to order!

All text copyright 2011 Paul Tumey

A New Unknown Jack Cole Cartoon Before Playboy

2011-11-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

The "Unknown Jack Cole" goodies continue to come to light! Yes, your intrepid 'Cole miner,' has emerged from the dark, musty caverns of history into the sunlight with another sparking gem -- a wonderfully clever, forgotten Jack Cole cartoon published in a major mainstream American magazine.

With the discovery of Cole's previously unknown Millie and Terry comic strips, I theorized a few weeks ago that there could be several previously undiscovered Jack Cole cartoons published in 1954-55. This was the time that Cole was in transition from comic books to magazines, and it is now coming to light that he reached out to several markets in this transition, before settling in at Playboy, to become the magazine's first signature cartoonist.

We know about the "Jake" cartoons published in Martin Goodman's Humorama digests, and recently, comics historian and blogger Ger Apeldoorn (see his always fun and enlightening blog here) discovered a previously unknown Jack Cole cartoon in a 1955 issue of Look, a major US magazine at the time. I'm happy to announce and share yet another Cole discovery, this time from a 1954 issue of The Saturday Evening Post!

On February 12th 1954, this small, hastily written item appeared on the front page of the New Castle News, Jack Cole's hometown newspaper:

Many thanks to Alter Ego Magazine (recommended for anyone interested in comics history) for reprinting the article a few years ago ( I think it was provided to them by Jack's brother, Dick Cole). The article reads as follows:

"In the January 23 issue of the Saturday Evening Post you probably noticed an unusual cartoon of a house in which the picture told the story of someone going from floor to floor an turning on the lights.

"The artist's signature in the lower left hand corner was 'Jack Cole.'

"Jack Cole is a New Castle product, son of Mr. and Mrs. DeLace Cole, of 411 Euclid avenue (sic). His home is now in Milford, Conn., but presently he is here in New Castle, called here by the serious illness of his mother.

"Seventeen years ago Jack went to New York City with little more than a few sheets of paper and a burning ambition. His original ideas caught on fast and shortly he was drawing not one but two comic books monthly. (my note: this probably refers to Cole's Plastic Man and Midnight stories, which were the lead features in two comic books, but not the whole comic book, a distinction that was probably lost on the Pennsylvania newspaper writer). Between times, he turned out cartoons good enough for 'Judge' and Colliers. (sic) His first 'Satevepost' was Jan. 23.

He has abandoned the comic book field for free lance (sic) work and more and more his art will undoubtedly be seen in national magazines."

This tiny piece has some interesting information in it. It tells us that at the time that Cole's 16-year career in comic books was collapsing, his mother was probably dying. It must have been a time of great stress for Jack Cole. The article also fails to mention Plastic Man, the primary creation that, over fifty years later, Jack Cole is famous for having created. In all, the article is a nice snapshot of Jack Cole as he transitioned from comic books to magazines.

Of course, the article also tell us very specifically where to find a Jack Cole cartoon in the pages of one of the top magazines of the day! Here then, is the delightful Jack Cole cartoon that appeared in the January 23, 1954 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, on page 125:

I love that the cartoon has a green outline to set it off in the dense page. This clever cartoon appeared amid spectacular lushly colored advertisements for modernistic new cars, plastic products, and articles about the cold war. The cartoon firmly places Cole's work in the context of 1950's "atomic age" America. The issue also had numerous cartoons, including several by Ted Key (of "Hazel" fame. The cartoon on the page opposite from Cole is by Cavalli, one of the ubiquitous career-cartoonists of the latter half of the 20th century. Amid all this professionalism, we find a little gem that gives us a glimpse into Jack Cole's life at the time.

The 1954 newspaper article above gives us the address of Cole's parents, "411 Euclid Ave." The actual address was 411 East Euclid Avenue. In Jim Steranko's History of Comics Volume 2, he states that Cole's boyhood home was on Euclid Avenue. Therefore, unless the Coles relocated to another house on the same street, here's a satellite image of the house where Jack Cole grew up, as it stands today:

And here is a satellite photograph of the neighborhood where Jack Cole grew up, with the Cole home on Euclid Ave, circled:

Cole lived on the edge of town, almost to the end of the street, and was within walking distance of the large Oak Park Cemetery. One wonders if he explored the city graveyard and if that perhaps fueled his later comic book horror stories. Perhaps he pulled a prank or two there.

When Jack Cole lived in New Castle, it had a population of about 35,000 people. Today, the town has a smaller population, around 25,000. In Cole's day, New Castle hit the peak of its prosperity. In 1954, Cole may have seen a few changes upon his return to his hometown. Here's a photo of Castle Motors in the mid-fifties, a New Castle car dealership that stuffed their vehicles with appealing female radio and TV performers and drove them around town to attract attention:

Interestingly, New Castle is often referred to as a "little New York City," because of its diverse ethnicity. The town is famous in part for its chili dogs, which were developed by Greek immigrant restaurant-owners who lived there. Perhaps, in some ways, when Cole moved from New Castle to New York in 1936, he was already familiar with a city that has a diverse population.

It's difficult to tell for sure from the steep angle of the photo of the Cole home above, but the house appears to be very similar to the one in Cole's Saturday Evening Post cartoon. The Cole family, with six kids, would have needed a large house. Here is an image from a modern promotional film on New Castle real estate that shows the typical style of the town's residential architecture:

Again, very similar to Cole's cartoon:

Perhaps the comical incident Cole depicts in the cartoon actually occurred in his house. Perhaps he looked out from his bedroom window and saw lights going on and off in a house across the street.

Years earlier, Cole put New Castle and some personal details into his comic book work. The first stories of his early 1939-40 comic book series, Dickie Dean (read the stories here), are set in New Castle. The character's name, no doubt, refers to Jack's brother, Dick Cole. Jack also used the pen name "Richard Bruce" for his 1940 comic book story, "Mantoka" (read it here). In the second Dickie Dean story, Cole writes,"Living in the small city of New Castle, PA is one who can truly be called "genius."

In his introduction to the 2007 collection of Cole's "Betsy and Me" comic strips, historian and author R.C. Harvey mentions that the "nimbus of genius" surrounds Cole's work. There's a bit of brilliance in the Saturday Evening Post cartoon. By no means the first -- or last -- to do so, Cole nonetheless combined sequential cartooning with gag cartooning. In effect, his Post cartoon is a one-page, 8-panel comic strip.

However, while Cole's comic book one-pagers (and he created hundreds of these!) were stuffed with extra comic details, this cartoon is sparse. Knowing the cartoon would be published at a much smaller size than a comic book page, Cole simplified the image, stripping it of anything but the most essential details so that the repeated house images would read clearly at a postage stamp size. The high light and dark contrast of the house with lighted windows works perfectly for the format. The cartoon is a series of 8 almost identical images, and the key is to discover not only the differences between the images, but the pattern of increasing and then decreasing lights, as they are turned on and then off.

We don't need to see the people inside to get the joke. In fact, it's considerably funnier if we don't see the people. This is very similar to how the comedy of Laurel and Hardy works. We see a shot of Stan with a ladder. We see a shot of Oliver bending over. We see a shot of Stan turning around with the ladder. We hear "Ohhh!" We see Ollie on the floor covered in paint.

Speaking of film comedy, when I first saw Jack Cole's Saturday Evening Post cartoon, I was reminded of a similar sequence in the amazing Jacques Tati film, "Mon Oncle," in which lighted windows in a silhouetted house react to noises.

Tati's film came out four years after Cole's Post cartoon. Did Tati see the cartoon? Did Jack Cole influence Jacques Tati? Probably this is merely an instance of two comic geniuses arriving at a similar gag.

An essential part of the genius of Jack Cole's cartoons is how well form follows function, while still allowing for Cole's unique and personal voice. His drawings here are perfect for the medium and totally get the gag/story across.

I can picture the mature husband and wife in their pajamas in the upstairs bedroom. I can see the scornful look on the wife's face as she tells the husband who has just searched the house to see the source of the noise that he was just imagining things. I can see the slightly sheepish look on the husband's face. Not to make too much of it, but it seems to me this is ultimately is yet another Jack Cole cartoon about impotence. Heartbreaking, when you consider how magnificently gifted Cole was, and the courage and competence of his mid-fifties career change. Where many men might have found an safer but less artistic income source, Cole went for it -- and scored. It's admirable.

Here is the cartoon reorganized into a vertical strip, just for fun:

Announcement! I've just finished the second Midnight eBook and it's on sale right now for $2.99! Look for it in the right-hand sidebar at the top!

Dark Plas: Special Halloween Post!

2011-10-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year where we don colorful costumes and share spooky stories. To mark the occasion, and since our hero, Jack Cole, was an early master of the comic book horror story, here's a special Halloween / Day of the Dead posting.

Of course, us comic book, convention-going people don't limit ourselves to just one day a year to dress in colorful costumes. The impressive images below happily show that Jack Cole's beloved creation, Plastic Man is still alive and well! I hope this guy won the costume contest at that convention... he certainly deserves it!

Along the same lines, here's a Plas costume kit for the general populace:

So that's the costume part of our Halloween post. And now, as far as scary stories go, there are fewer more disturbingly dark comics that I know of than Jack Cole's last comic book stories from 1953. Check out these images:

These are from Cole's 1952-54 Plastic Man stories, not -- as you might first guess -- from his horror genre Web of Evil stories. As we see from the Comic Con photos above, Plastic Man is generally regarded to be a cheerful, happy-go-lucky fellow. Not just funny, but fun. So, how do we explain the images of the worried, despairing Plas we see above? Plastic Man started out funny and carefree, laughing at crime. As time went on, he became covered in shadows, and lines of stress and worry ravaged the face that bullets could not alter:

Around 1952-53, the world of Jack Cole's Plastic Man stories became considerably darker and creepier. And deeper. Like the Plastic Man convention-goer above, most people remember Plas in his light-hearted incarnation. But there's also a fascinating, darker version of the character. At first, I didn't even think the later Plas stories were done by Cole. They are so different in tone and appearance. In fact, years ago, I rather turned my nose up and thought to myself, "Idiots! They ruined a great character!"

Today, after having drenched myself in Jack Cole's work for the last two years towards, hopefully, someday creating a book with some new insight into his work, it's not only clear that the later "dark" Plastic Man stories are all Jack Cole's work, but also that there is much of interest to be found in them (if you can stomach the darkness). Suffering is often a prelude to spiritual growth, and there are many moments in these dark stories where Cole's drawings suggest a spiritual awakening. These images, for example, from the story you are about to read have a certain power:

Amid the shadow-drenched tableaux of despairing heroes and victims, Cole sprinkles moments of illumination, such as this. Interestingly, even the women of these stories have a considerably less sexual, more spiritual aspect than we would normally expect to see in the work of Playboy's first signature cartoonist. In contrast to the the cheesecake, beauty poses Cole is known for, his females in these 1952-4 dark stories are shown in relationships to men. You can look at these images and sense a connection beyond sexual between the women and the men. Was Cole portraying the maturing marriage of himself and his wife, Dot?

It's dangerous, of course, to read too much into a commercial artist's work done for hire. However, there certainly seems to be a strong connection between Jack Cole's extremely dark last comic book stories and his own life. Just as Cole's early 40s work reflected the strength of the war effort, his early 50s work reflects America's decent into cold war atomic age madness.

In a strange sort of way, the darkness invigorated Cole's work. Once you breach the shock of the darkness, these stories are as amazing as anything Cole created. It was a new phase of inspired creation that has largely gone unnoticed and unexplored.

Here then, are two remarkable, anxiety-drenched deliciously black stories from Police Comics 39, published in January, 1953. Happy Halloween! Brrrrrrr........

New Midnight Collection - Just Released!

2011-10-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

As part of my ongoing Jack Cole Research and Restoration project, I've just released...

The Complete Jack Cole Midnight, Volume 2
ONLY $3.99!

I'm very excited to share this collection, as it contains some amazing stories and art by the great Jack Cole. In this book, Midnight encounters insane Nazis in Iceland, a lost tribe in the Florida Everglades, real-life Hollywood starlets, human-made freaks, and even the Devil himself!

This 115 page eBook in .CBR format provides all the Midnight stories of 1942, along with all the covers of Smash Comics from 1942, including two great covers by Jack Cole himself! In addition, the book includes two of Jack Cole's extremely rare Dickie Dean-Boy Inventor stories from 1941, which show Cole's rapid development in 1942.

The book includes a 5-page introduction and 14 pages of detailed story notes by me. I've taken some time to create attractive layouts and organize my analysis so that it's informative and enjoyable to read (hopefully!).

In 1942, Jack Cole came into his own as a master of the medium of sequential graphic storytelling. No longer jumping from publisher to publisher, Cole had found a stable berth at Quality Comics, and even moved to Stamford Connecticut, where the Quality offices were located (my intro includes a rare photo of the building that housed the Quality offices). Within this framework of stability and rising success, Cole developed confidence and deepened his skills.

However, even as Jack Cole and American comic books gained a solid footing in 1942, the world was facing the de-stabilizing spectre of Nazi Germany and Hitler. Even though Jack Cole was not political, the menace of the Nazis pervades his work of 1942. In one story, Midnight goes to Hell and rouses the "inmates" there to overthrow a Nazi invasion of the United States.

This book also includes 3 extremely rare anti-Hitler cartoons from Picture Scoop, October 1942. This was a leftist magazine published by Cole's former employer, Lev Gleason (Silver Streak, Daredevil, Crime Does Not Pay).

I've spent weeks restoring these pages to make them as clear and readable as possible. My goal has been to remove the obstacles of age and deterioration so that these amazing stories can be easily enjoyed by all.

I have some great new Cole finds to share soon. Stay tuned!

Jack Cole's Roots: A Rare Wild Early Comic Story and a Documentary!

2011-10-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

Jack Cole's work had -- and continues to have -- appeal in part because his work is a heady combination of screwball comedy and the darker side of human nature. It's a mix that shouldn't work, but somehow this one great cartoonist pulled it together.

The Landon School of Cartooning was a prime influence on Jack Cole's development as a screwball, "bigfoot" cartoonist, as we've previously noted.

Below, you'll find an informative and insightful 2009 10-minute documentary well worth watching about the Landon School and it's influence. The documentary, produced by Enchanted Images, Inc., notes that Jack Cole, among many other notable American cartoonists, took the 28 lessons of Landon School of Cartooning's correspondence.

The documentary, created by artist and writer John Garvin at Enchanted Images (check out his new book, After Carl Barks), points out that the Landon course presented a practical approach to newspaper cartooning, so that "a young kid, working from home, could become a famous cartoonist with nothing more than Landon's lessons, some pen and ink, paper, sweat, and a little talent."

According to Jim Steranko's History of Comics Volume 2, Jack Cole did just that. Seeing an ad for the course, Cole asked his father, who was a hard-working father of 6, to pay for the course. When his Dad refused, the endlessly inventive Cole found a way. He began to sneak down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and quietly make a sandwich to take to school the next day. Cole smuggled the sandwiches to school in a hollowed-out textbook. In this way, Cole was able to save up his lunch money and eventually pay for the course, which, according to Cole's colleague and editor at Quality, Gill Fox, cost around $8 -- or $20 if you wanted to send your work in and get Landon's notes on it.

Garvin's documentary explains how Landon's method of cartooning differed from previous approaches and textbooks on cartooning. Instead of basing the figure drawings on a careful study of human anatomy, Landon developed a way to create humorous pen-and-ink drawings of people with stick figures and basic shapes. It seems to me that learning to cartoon using the Landon method may have freed Cole (and others) from focusing on representational images, allowing him to stretch and distort his figures, as he did so brilliantly, particularly in his Plastic Man stories.

In 1937, Cole created a rather brilliant one-sheet summation of the Landon approach to cartooning:

It's my theory that Cole may have created this one-sheet to self-publish and sell to make a few bucks. In 1937, he had moved from his home town in New Castle, PA to the big city -- New York -- with his new wife, to make a career. This instant cartooning course may have been an attempt by Cole to create an income. If so, it appears to be the only known time that Cole dallied with publishing, as the rest of his known career was as a freelancer and staff artist.

Here's a wonderful 4-page Jack Cole comic book story, appearing for the first time in this blog. It's taken from Ron Goulart's book, Focus on Jack Cole, hence the black and white printing. The influence of the Landon School of Cartooning is very evident in this early work by Jack Cole:

Star Ranger Funnies #1 (December, 1938 - Centaur)

Lest you think this is just too danged weird, a mainstream US television show watched by millions built an episode around a similar concept. "The Darling Baby" from The Andy Griffith Show has the 10-year old Opie Taylor (Ron Howard) narrowly escaping wedlock to a 3-month old baby. It's just them mountain folks' ways, I reckon! You can read a second HOME IN THE OZARKS story, in full color, by Cole from one year later, here.

Cole's cartoon work here is loose and fast, and delightful. The baby reminds me of Swee'Pea, from Segar's Popeye, another prime influence on Jack Cole.

Cole, by all accounts, was a funny guy. In an Alter Ego interview from a few years ago, Alex Kotzky, a terrific cartoonist who worked with Cole on Plastic Man and the True Crime comics, provides a fascinating insight into Cole's demeanor: "You know who Willard Scott is? Physically, Jack could have been his twin brother. And he was the type of jokester that Willard Scott is."

Enchanted Images, the creator of the informative documentary, has brought the Landon course back into print, and you can buy it from them for $24.95 at their website.

A Lost Jack Cole Cartoon from the Playboy Years!

2011-10-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

In my last blog entry, I posted a new "Millie and Terry" comic strip by Jack Cole and theorized that he may have placed several items in various publication in 1954/55, the years that he left his 16-year career in comic books and transitioned to becoming the first star cartoonist at Playboy magazine.

Fellow comics scholar, Jack Cole fan, and curator of the marvelous Fabuleous Fifties blog, Ger Appledoorn was inspired by my discovery to look around for other "lost" Jack Cole work from this period and made this wonderful discovery, from Look Magazine, the April 19, 1955 issue!

It's a wonderful example of how far Jack Cole developed his talent and style to fit a more sophisticated market. Could this strip have been a reject from Playboy, or did Cole create a sexy gag cartoon in a more mainstream, less sexual style for Look?

In any case, be sure to look at the great expressions on the character's faces in the background. It's very nice piece that shows off Cole sexy gag work in a slightly different light than Playboy. Thank you to Ger for kindly sharing this scan with me and giving his blessing to post it here first. Enjoy!

There was Playboy and also... The Army? Jack Cole's Unknown Comic Strip

2011-09-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

Playboy Magazine's great cartoonist of the 1950's, Jack Cole, wrote and drew a great, sexy, Playboy-like girlie comic strip called Millie and Terry... and almost no one knows this!

The comic was published in a Sunday funnies format for a package syndicated by W.B. Bradbury Co. called American Armed Forces Features. This was an 8-page color newspaper that was available at stores on US military bases. The comic section included Al Capp's Dick Tracy parody, Fearless Fosdick, and several Sad Sack type strips. Cole's cartoon - the best one in the lot -- was the only sexy, girlie, pin-up comic strip in the paper.

Jack Cole's first published PLAYBOY cartoon was in the April, 1954 issue. His last comic book story was dated two months earlier, in February 1954. This was a turbulent period in Cole's career, as he left comic books after a 16 year career. At the time, in the early 1950's, the American comic book industry was imploding due to changing public taste, and the widespread (and incorrect) perception that comics were corrupting children. Comic book artists who had paid off mortgages and raised families on their work were scrambling to make ends meet. In 1954, Cole had a very brief stint of 3 weeks at Charlton (I have yet to locate any published work of Cole's at Charlton). He probably contracted with Bradbury for the Millie and Terry strips, spent a week writing and drawing a batch of perhaps 5 or 10 episodes. As the Millie and Terry strips were published monthly, Cole moved on to other magazine markets. Very quickly, of course, he found steady work with Hugh Hefner as PLAYBOY took off.

It may very well be that there are several undiscovered Jack Cole cartoons (perhaps even comics!) from this 1954-55 scramble for work. In fact, here is the cover to Army Laughs #9 (Dec 1954/Jan 1955), another Army gag magazine that, according the eBay seller, has at least one Jack Cole cartoon in it:

Earlier, I posted a Millie and Terry comic at this posting. I am indebted to my pal and fellow comics historian, Frank Young (see his great comic blog, Stanley Stories), for discovering this unknown Jack Cole comic, which he found tossed out in someone's trash. A wonderfully kind soul posted a very informative comment about this strip that gave me information to locate another issue of this rare, virtually unknown comic section... and so, I proudly present to you a second installment of Jack Cole's great "lost" comic strip, Millie and Terry!

Millie and Terry - November, 1955 - American Armed Forces Features #9

Isn't this great stuff? I love the the opening drawing, of the two women curving together. This sensuous image can be appreciated separate from the narrative, and reminds me of the Females By Cole series that became a staple in Playboy Magazine. Cole truly had a gift for drawing the female form!

The gag in strip is genuinely funny, and the drawings manage to be both cartoony and graphically sophisticated at the same time. By this time, Cole had written and drawn about 600 similar one-page filler strips for Quality Comics, so he had the pacing and style of the "short form" of the comic strip very well worked out.
Now that we have two installments of this strip, which I believe had at least 10 episodes, we can see that it really is a sort of missing link between Cole's sexy Playboy work and his 1958 nationally syndicated comic strip, Betsy and Me (personally, I prefer Millie and Terry). The drawing style Cole uses in Millie and Terry is very similar to the style he would use in his comic strip about a comically overwhelmed new father. Here's a couple of examples, to compare:

Betsy and Me - July 13, 1958

Betsy and Me - August 10, 1958

Betsy and Me has more graphic invention, but we can see the similarity in character design. In the call-out below, a face from Millie and Terry (on the left) has a very similar rendering, facial expression, and head-tilt to a typical figure from Betsy and Me (right):

Cole is also using some of his tried-and-true techniques that he brilliantly employed in PLASTIC MAN and his other comic book work, including the artful use of fabric patterns. Terry's blouse has bold stripes, while Millie's dress has a tasteful polka dot pattern. Note that the dress is colored green, which makes it very similar to the blouse worn by Plastic Man's sidekick (and perhaps Jack Cole's most brilliant character), Woozy Winks:

This suggests that Cole may have colored this strip himself. One can also appreciate Cole's artistry and attention to details when you realize that his polka dots for Woozy's blouse are perfectly round and all the same size, suggesting a clown's costume. Millie's dress is less garish and comical, with more delicate dots of varying size and shape. Crass versus Class; both are funny. Cole put a great deal of thought into his seemingly simple cartoons, and this is just one example of that!

Jack Cole's work is filled with terrific women's outfits. In a Comics Journal interview with a fellow golden age comic book artist and colleague of Cole's, Craig Flessel relates: "(He was) very much in love with his wife. He bought all her clothes. He worshipped her. " Perhaps Cole's knowledge of women's outfits came from his clothes-buying trips for/with his wife. It's charming to imagine the shy, quiet, tall and lanky Jack Cole in a ladies' wear store secretly taking mental notes for his comic book stories!

As more examples of Millie and Terry surface, I will share them in this blog!

Text and scans copyright 2011 Paul Tumey

Jack Cole: Colorist - Rare Golden Age Original Art (1941)

2011-09-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

You just never know what you'll find when you troll the Web. This image has been up on Comic Art Fans for 5 years, but I just now discovered it! Sheesh! Many thanks to the site, and the art's owner for sharing this extremely rare piece! This is very likely the ONLY known page of 1940's superhero art by Jack Cole known to exist. It's the splash page from Silver Streak #10 (Lev Gleason, May 1941).

Note the "Good Luck" at the bottom. Could that be a note of encouragement to an aspiring comic book artist from Jack Cole himself? It's known that many comic book artists of the time gave pages of their original art to young visitors and fans as gifts.

Even more interesting is the fact that this page is hand-colored, presumably by Jack Cole himself. Did Cole, before sending this page in the mail to a fan, perhaps take an hour or two and apply some color? I have long suspected that Cole colored at least some of his stories. He liked to do everything on his stories, if possible, from writing, penciling, and inking... and probably in some cases, coloring. At any rate, this page -- if it was colored by Jack Cole -- provides a clue as to the sort of color palette Cole preferred (at least in 1941!).

A side-by-side comparison of Cole's coloring and the published version (above) reveals that Cole had a more interesting palette, and a very different vision of the visual impact of the art than what was published. The published page has a lot of red and yellow... more garish primary colors. It is also interesting to note that, while the published page's splash panel treats the US map background as merely a non-distinguished field of light orange, Cole gives it a lighter color, making it an art element in the composition. It must have been frustrating for Cole and other artists of the time to create layouts and have the impact of them reduced by slapdash coloring.

I've read that most of the stories at Quality Comics, Cole's main home for most of his career in comics, were colored by the color-blind publisher himself.

The Claw vs. Daredevil story is pretty cool, by the way. We've published it on this blog in black and white, but since we are looking at color... here it is -- in its amazing, bizarre entirety in full, glorious (if sloppy) color, from a recently surfaced nice paper scan. Enjoy!

New Jack Cole Quality One-Pagers

2011-09-06T13:05:00.001-07:00

Jack Cole created hundreds of genuinely funny one-page comics for Quality Publications in the 1940’s. In these one-pagers, Cole loved to play with double-meanings and the surreal images that resulted. In many ways, they are an extension of the gag humor style Cole based on the newspaper screwball strips, such as SMOKEY STOVER by Bill Holman (see my post on Holman’s influence on Cole here).

Part of Cole’s greatness was that he married the screwball “bigfoot” humor style and the 1940’s comic book superhero into stories that were both thrilling adventures and surreal, wacky comedy. In his Quality one-pagers of the 1940’s, you can see Jack Cole at his loosest, most fertile. He often warmed-up to his longer comic book stories by knocking off these one-page delights. Sometimes the gags are flat, sometimes the humor is too bizarre, and sometimes Cole’s pacing and art is just too sloppy to make much of an effect.

But sometimes, and more often than you’d reasonably expect for a guy carrying the creative workload Jack Cole had in the 1940’s, these tossed off one-page fillers that were buried in the back pages and which never really earned Cole much attention (or money) at all – are flashes of brilliance.

Here’s a few one pagers that are new to this blog, mined from new scans that have surfaced lately. Many thanks to the original scanners.

Hit Comics 22 (June, 1942)
A very typical Jack Cole comic of the early 1940’s, with humor wrapped a core of sadism. I really like the looseness of the art.Probably due to the fact that Cole had very little time to work on these pages. At this time, Cole’s PLASTIC MAN was taking off, and he still had his MIDNIGHT duties, as well as the several other one-pagers like this one he produced for Quality Publications every month.

Hit Comics 26 (Feb. 1943)
A great example of Cole playing with words and generating a bizarre, surreal image as a result.

Hit Comics 27 (April, 1943)
Cole’s style just gets looser and more assured. Look at the beautiful figure groupings. The three figures in panels 3 and 4 are grouped as one. Then, in panel 5, they separate as they compete with each other in bidding for Dan Tootin’s new, delightfully silly invention. In panel 7, they are once again grouped into a cohesive whole with Dan as they all take in the new, game-changing information at once. Beautiful pacing, great drawing. By 1943, Cole had mastered the semiotics of comic book storytelling.

Hit Comics 34 (Winter 1944)
Notice how Cole’s drawing style has changed from the 1943 page, above. The drawing is tighter, more angular. The content is also edgier, not as innocently silly. And, sadly, here is yet another reference to suicide. It’s worth noting that the image of the weeping man, with giant teardrops gets developed a year later in a Spirit story, and then eventually leads to one of Cole’s greatest stories, “Sadly-Sadly” (see my post here)

Crack Comics 49 (July, 1947)
Cole’s style, by the mid-to-late 1940’s had become quite baroque, and this one-pager is a great example of that. A more complex page-layout, the use of patterns, background detail, multiple characters, the list goes on. Cole is juggling a lot of balls by this time. This story has enough content for a 5-page comic. The drawings feel very much like the figures in Harvey Kurtzman’s HEY LOOK one-pagers (which were very likely inspired by Cole’s Quality one-pagers.) The story also feels a bit like Carl Barks’ UNCLE SCROOGE morality tales about money that would surface a couple of years later.

Candy 12 (October 1949)
The master at work, with a variation on Mark Twain’s classic story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County.” Once again, masterful figure grouping. This time, it's an accumulation of figures. As the page progresses, more and more figures are added to each panel, until we have a big clump in the last two panels. I suppose something could be said here about Jack Cole unconsciously exploring group dynamics, but it won't be... he created these things for a grin and a giggle, and that's exactly what I hope you'll get from this post!

Midnight Episode 7 (second run) – Jack Cole subverts the boxing story

2011-08-12T12:46:00.001-07:00

Story this post:

“Masked Mayhem” (my title)
Story and art by Jack Cole

Smash Comics #74
(Quality Comics Group
Dec, 1947)

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

For such a seemingly mild-mannered guy, Jack Cole was pretty subversive in his creative expression. He not only pushed the form of comics into new directions, he also pushed the content of comic books in the 1940’s.

His greatest creation, PLASTIC MAN, was itself a parody of the super-hero genre that defied the story-forms conventions and moral standards. Plastic Man started out as a crook and, for his first dozen or so adventures, kept functioning as a crook – breaking the law with a jester’s playfulness while he also saved the day as Plastic Man. When you think about it, these stories turned the hero concept inside out, which may be part of the unique appeal of the series.

In his seventh MIDNIGHT story in his second run on the series, Cole subverts the classic boxing/fight story-form. The boxing movie has been a Hollywood staple for over 50 years, with films like Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, and most recently The Fighter. In 1947, the year Cole wrote and drew this story,one of the big hit movies was Body and Soul, starring John Garfield (pictured left). In the film, Garfield becomes involved with fight promoters who are crooked and corrupt. Ernest Hemmingway wrote about rigged fights in his great 1927 short story, “The Killers,” which has been adapted into a movie four different times (so far).

By 1947, the story-form of the rigged fight was predictable enough that Cole could parody it in his Midnight story. No doubt, Cole was inspired by the great work E.C. Segar did in Popeye with his numerous parodies of boxing matches and fights. He starts the story with a comic reversal, showing a man with a massive, rugged fighter’s body and the sensitivity of a child…

Cole ends the story on a subversive note, with our hero, Midnight, actually holding up the crooks at gunpoint!

It is also of passing interest to note that this story is also yet another in a long series of Jack Cole stories that play with the concept of shapeshifting…. in this story, Midnight is almost interchangeable for Plastic Man in his ability to change his appearance.

Sadly, like many of the later Midnight stories, there seems to be something lacking in the energy of the story. Still, the art is terrific and the storytelling is masterful. Check out this lovely panel from page six that features a classic Jack Cole city scene:

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The book includes Cole’s first 12 MIDNIGHT stories, pages of notes and analysis written by me – Paul Tumey, and additional bonus material, including his wonderful single Quicksilver story from 1941. I have carefully restored the pages and put it all into an attractive unified format with archival notation and quality. I think that this is probably the best digital representation of this classic work available at this time.

Please note: Orders filled within 24 hours. Because this file is large, it is necessary for me to email you the file myself in order to avoid costly storage and data transfer charges. This keeps the price very low for you, but please be patient as I will need to check email and fill orders manually. Thanks a million for supporting this blog!

This is a great way to support this blog and get some great reading for cheap!

A Million Years Before Jack Cole's Playboy Comics - Dickie Dean and the Time Camera (1941)

2011-08-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

Story presented in this post:
Dickie Dean (story, pencils, inks, and lettering by Jack Cole)
Silver Streak Comics #10 (May,1941 - Lev Gleason)

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Please note: Orders filled within 24 hours. Because this file is large, it is necessary for me to email you the file myself in order to avoid costly storage and data transfer charges. This keeps the price very low for you, but please be patient as I will need to check email and fill orders manually. Thanks a million for supporting this blog!

Long before he became Playboy’s first premiere cartoonist and comic artist, Jack Cole started out in the four-color world of comic books. Most famous for creating Plastic Man, Cole also created numerous comic book series that are all but forgotten today. One of my personal favorites is DICKIE DEAN, BOY INVENTOR, which appeared in Silver Streak Comics. DICKIE DEAN sprang from Jack Cole’s own boyhood, in which he invented various gadgets, including a way to listen in on his big sister’s romantic phone calls. As you can see in the first 3 Dickie Dean stories (published in this blog, with commentary here), Cole started the series out in his hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania.

Here, we present Jack Cole’s final Dickie Dean story, a wild, surreal crime story in which the past overshadows the present until Dickie’s time camera invention reveals the truth.

At it’s best, Jack Cole’s early work had a poetic, winsome quality, and was as bizarre as it gets. This was never more so than in his Dickie Dean stories, which were very likely fueled by melancholy memories of his childhood, contrasted with fantasies of what it could have been. Here, Dickie has a camera that looks into the past. In the first Dickie Dean story (you can read it here), he invents a similar device that reveals past crimes. The criminal's advantage? He removed his hair by electrolysis. Was any early comic book series ever more prosaic?

Cole gets a lot of mileage from Dickie’s sidekick comic relief character in this story, Zip, who at times prefigures the creation of his finest character, Woozy Winks, Plastic Man’s sidekick.
The art in this story is rushed, but still has moments of storytelling brilliance. Look at the bottom tier on the first page and see how Cole creates a sweeping cinematic camera movement from right to left and then into the sky.

One of the hallmarks of Cole’s imagery and storytelling is his gift for putting speed on paper. This story contains an early, iconic image of a car zooming into action in the climactic last page of the story.

On page one, Cole zoomed us into the air high above the characters, and on the last page, he shoots the speeding automobile from below. We see this image time and again in Cole’s early and mid-career comic book stories. Cole was an early master of dynamic “camera angles.”

The panel in this story also includes perhaps the first image of skyscrapers framed by a big yellow full moon. Cole was also quite fond using “celestial circles” as design elements in his early work. In fact, I’ve identified this as a “Cole-ism,” and one way to spot Jack Cole’s unsigned work. For more Cole-isms, see my article here.

Cole left his beloved creation behind when he joined Quality Comics and soon created Plastic Man, a series which owes much to Dickie Dean. Apparently, the publisher saw a lot of potential in the series. Lev Gleason published numerous Dickie Dean stories in Silver Streak 11-21, and Daredevil 1, 12-41. Some of the stories were drawn the Archie comics master, Bob Montana. Here's a delightful, patriotic 2-pager, "The Defense Bond Machine," by Bob Montana that first ran in Crime Does Not Pay #22 (July, 1942 - Dickie's only appearance in this title). I think it captures the spirit of Cole creation, showing that Montana was one of the very few people who could take a Cole creation and do it justice:

Did Frederic Wertham Drive Jack Cole Out of Comics?

2011-07-29T18:13:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you are one of the top people in your field. Imagine that you have worked hard for 15 years to not only master a demanding art form, but contributed significantly to the development of that art form. In so doing, you've proudly made a good living, supported yourself and your wife, risen out of your humble circumstances, and even managed to buy a large house in a nice neighborhood.

Then, imagine that suddenly the field you have devoted yourself to is declared to be harmful to children and to society. Imagine how confusing that could be. And then, imagine opening a popular magazine and discovering that your work is being held up as a prime example of how your field harms children.

That's exactly what happened to Jack Cole in November, 1953 when the Ladies Home Journal, a very well-read magazine of the time, published an anti-comics article and called attention to his work.

This double-page spread includes a panel from Jack Cole's classic story, "Murder, Morphine, and Me" (True Crime Comics Vol. 1 #2, May, 1947 ). The image is unforgettable, to be sure... and no editor worth their salt would pass up the chance to include this art in their publication as it would certainly draw interest. In the article, it is never mentioned that the scene the panel is taken from is actually a dream sequence, and the entire story is a cautionary tale. (The entire classic story is posted on my blog here). This iconic image simply sits, out of context, as one of the key images in the war against comic books that happened in the United States from 1948-55. (Many thanks to www.SeductionOfTheInnocent.org for the above scans)

Nonetheless, what decent human being would not read this article and ask themselves, "did I go too far?" The article was written by the infamous child psychologist Frederic Wertham. A few months after the Ladies Home Journal article, Wertham published a highly influential book, Seduction of the Innocent, in which he said that comics books harmed children and society. The book included a section of excerpted panels and covers printed on glossy paper in the middle, and the needle-to-the-eye panel from True Crime was one of the more vivid examples in that section.

The panel had also appeared in Wertham's first volley against comic books, about five years earlier, in an article he published in The Saturday Review of Literature in May, 1948:

In 1951, pages from "Murder, Morphine, and Me" appeared in an investigation conducted by the New York State government:

It all came to head when the United States Senate got involved.

In 1954, hearings were held in Congress, for goodness' sake! Some of these hearings were even televised! This time, not only Jack Cole's True Crime Comics story was singled out, but PLASTIC MAN - his baby, his masterpiece, was labeled by the United States Government as "Objectionable."

Comics were in trouble. At the conclusion of the Ladies Home Journal article from November, 1953, Wertham calls for their extinction: "Whenever you hear a public discussion of comic books, you will hear sooner or later an advocate of the industry say, 'Comic books are here to stay.' I do not believe it." In no time, millions of comics were gathered and destroyed... in scenes that resembled the book-burnings in Nazi Berlin.

Good grief! How terrible would anyone feel if the work they had poured their talent and sweat into was being rounded up and eradicated from existence!

As sales dropped, and publishers scrambled to adapt to the changing market, job opportunities for a comic book creator dwindled. Even for the greats, like Jack Cole. He left comics in 1954 and shortly after became the lead cartoonist for the brand new magazine, Playboy.

Could Jack Cole have looked at these articles and the TV broadcasts, and felt ashamed to even say he was a comic book artist? Could the rabid attack on comic books have shamed Jack Cole? Is this why he hardly ever mentioned his 16 years in the business? Is this why he barely gave himself any credit publicly for creating the Plastic Man stories, which now stand as one of the most appreciated and beloved groups of classic comics ever?

While we have no actual documentation or oral history to support the idea that Wertham's crusade drove Jack Cole out of comic books, it seems to be more than possible -- perhaps even very likely.

The anti-comics crusade affected this emerging art form in a number of ways. Check out the article I wrote with fellow comics historian Frank Young at Comic Book Attic here. I'm happy to report that Roy Thomas plans to publish that article in the next issue of his great magazine Alter Ego.

Personally, I have always found Cole's comics to be anything but a corrosive influence. I remember being very affected by the humanity and humor of the few Plastic Man stories that were reprinted in the 1970's. To me, the witch hunt against comics may have been well-intentioned, but I don't think it was connected much to reality, which in this case was that millions were entertained by the great work of Jack Cole and his colleagues. As proof of that, here's a photo from the late 1940's that shows how a sick kid found some enjoyment in comics. Can you spot the Cole comic on his bed?

And finally, here's yet another photo of a young fellow enjoying a stack of comic books, with True Crime Comics proudly displayed on top -- the title that contained the offending needle-to-the-eye panel (that perhaps Cole wished he'd never drawn). I don't know about you, but I identify MUCH more with this kid, than the politicians. Long live comics!

Eight New Insignificant Eructations: Burp the Twerp

2011-04-04T21:24:00.001-07:00

A huge shout out to the amazing scanners and folks at the Digital Comics Museum for making material like this available to the world. Bless you, men!

According to Kurt Vonnegut, a twerp is someone who shoves false teeth up his rear end and bites the buttons off of the back seats of taxi cabs. That’s not too far from the bizarre, funny Jack Cole version. Perhaps Vonnegut had Cole’s comic in mind.

As Cole was developing his brilliant Plastic Man stories in Police Comics, which were a parody of the superhero concept, he also delivered a wonderful wacky Burp the Twerp one-pager every month which represented an all-out surreal take on the then brand-new world of the costumed crusaders.

Cole’s Burp is a fat, round, polka-dotted butterballish senior citizen. While Cole was obviously heavily influenced by screwball cartoonist Bill Holman (Smokey Stover), in this this page, Cole pays homage to E.C. Segar’s POPEYE, another of his inspirations. Segar was fond of staging knock-down, drag-out epic prize fights between Popeye and oversized contenders. Popeye, sometimes regarded as the first superhero, displayed amazing strength and always won. If you haven’t read Segar’s Popeye,be sure to check it out. Fantagraphics is reprinting this all-time great in super cool, affordable volumes.

Police Comics #5 (December, 1941)

Note the name of the contender in the above page. It’s startling how often the word and act of suicide appears in Cole’s work.

Next, here’s another “fight” that Cole’s fiendishly clever sub-conscious derails into la-la land.

Police Comics #7 (Feb. 1942)

Some of Cole’s war-time work was pretty racist, such as this one-pager. I don’t know for sure, but my in-depth study of Cole’s work leads me to think that he was no more racist than the average American of the time. After the war, his work isn’t mean to any particular group of people, and in fact, his stories often satirized the very “mob mentality” that gives rise to racism.

Police Comics 13 (Nov. 1942)

Plastic Man himself makes a cameo appearance in our next Burp the Twerp one-pager. After a cavalcade of surreal gags to show how Burp is truly the most super of super men, Cole throws in his own superhero who causes Burp to faint! Years earlier, as editor at Lev Gleason’s Silver Streak Comics, Cole had pioneered the idea of having different characters cross-over… a device that became a money-making commonality in American comics from the 1960’s on. Notice that Burp’s form has changed in this next page, the 17th episode, which, along with the first 20 Burps, you can read here.

Police Comics 23 (October 1943)

During the war years, Americans had to make a lot of sacrifices. Coffee was hard to get… and so the following strip makes a joke out of that. A rare topical joke from Jack Cole, who mostly avoided humor that was tied to events of the day.

Police Comics #24 (Nov 1943)

To get the following joke, it is necessary to know that “jack” was slang at the time for money. There are nested jokes here, as Burp totally misses the fact that he has “won” a five dollar bet by giving away six thousand dollars. Cole was becoming an expert at packing in the jokes, something that would be done to great effect in Mad.

Police Comics #27 (Feb. 1944)

And speaking of nested jokes, this next page literally shows us a visualization of Cole’s approach, in the wonderful eighth panel. The whole strip reads like Alfred Jarry’s version of a Vaudeville comedy skit.

Police Comics 29 (April 1944)

Again, notice the eighth panel in the following page. Cole sets up a rhythm of action panels and then creates a perfect set-up for the punch line with a quiet note. So, we’ll end this posting, dear readers, on a quiet note.

Police Comics 32 (July 1944)