Foreshadowing Playboy: Jack Cole’s Boy’s Life Cartoons (1936-40)

 

From 1936 to 1940, Boy’s Life magazine regularly published one-panel gag cartoons by Jack Cole. These previously unknown cartoons trace his development from a rank beginner to a distinctive stylist. In these cartoons, Cole develops the layered ink/watercolor/wash visual style he would return to 14 years later as Playboy magazine’s signature cartoonist. I have spent days searching through back issues of Boy’s Life to cull out two dozen wonderful Jack Cole cartoons that, as far as I know, have never seen the light of day since their original publications, nearly 75 years ago! Reading these cartoons in chronological order reveals Jack Cole’s amazing growth as an artist and humorist in his early years. You saw it here, first folks!

It is believed that Jack Cole began his cartooning career with a 1935 sale to Boy’s Life magazine. In a wonderful, but somewhat slanted autobiographical piece that Cole published in a 1956 issue of the Freelancer magazine (Issue #2), he recounted this momentous event:

“…I had taken a job with the American Can Company and was well on my way to the normal life when one of my idle-hour etchings made a sale to “Boy’s Life” magazine in 1935.”

Here’s the whole wonderful article (thanks to  Harry Green, who recently published the page  (courtesy of David Miller, who provided the scans) on his wonderful comic blog, Hairy Green Eyeball 2, and to loyal reader and supporter of this blog, Daniel McKiernan, who made me aware of the post.

  

Just a few thoughts about this new find. Notice how Cole glosses over the major effort of his life, his 16-year career in comic books. Also, the “minor class magazines” that Cole mentions are the Humorama line (Joker, etc.). A nice collection of these cartoons were collected in The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, by Alex Chun. A few of these cartoons can be viewed at this link.

In Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s top-notch book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, they reprint the first page of an article that Cole wrote and illustrated about his epic 1932 cross-country solo bike ride (which I transcribed and commented on, in this earlier post). The caption for the page reads:

“Cole’s first professional sale, to Boy’s Life in 1935, recounts his 1932 adventure bicycling all across America and back.” (p. 10)

I am a huge fan of Art Spiegelman’s work, but recent scholarship on my part suggests this is incorrect; very likely a mistaken assumption. The first sale to Boy’s Life was not this article, but very likely a one-panel gag cartoon.

Spiegelman was recently kind enough share with me that he got the reproduction of the article’s first page from Cole’s brother, Dick Cole, who had no date information. I think it was a reasonable assumption to make that this article was Jack Cole’s first professional sale. Boy’s Life published articles of this ilk, and in the early 1950’s, I even found a very similar (if much less well written) article in which a teenager tells the story of his west-to-east journey across America by bike, even hitting some of the same out-of-the-way towns as Cole!

However, after searching through Boy’s Life magazine back issues for 1935, I can find no trace of anything by Jack Cole. Not the bike trip article, nor a cartoon or illustration. Nothing. I looked through every page of every issue five times.

In fact, I looked through every page of every issue of Boy’s Life from 1933 to 1941, and I did not find Cole’s “A Boy and His Bike” article. So where was this article published, and when? It’s a mystery, as of this date. My friend and fellow comics curator, Frank Young (see Stanley Stories, his superb and groundbreaking blog on John Stanley) suggests that perhaps the article appeared in his hometown newspaper, the New Castle News (which, unfortunately has no archive for these years). Frank says that the article looks to him like the typical layout of Sunday newspaper rotogravure magazines of the time. Indeed, the layout of this page doesn’t look anything like the layouts Boy’s Life used, although the fonts are similar.

In any case, although Jim Steranko, Ron Goulart, and Art Speigelman, as well as Jack Cole himself all state that Cole’s first professional sale was to Boy’s Life in 1935, I can find no trace of a cartoon in those pages. The first Jack Cole cartoon I have located appears in 1936, not 1935. Could it be that Cole simply mis-remembered? Heaven knows that if you asked me the date of my first fiction sale (“Toy Chest River,” in a hardcover anthology called Christmas Forever), I would very likely get the date a year or two off – and that was a major event for me.

The first issue of Boy’s Life in which Cole’s work appears in is the October issue of 1936. Cole had two cartoons in that issue. It’s possible these represent his first professional sales (I am not sure where the “circa 1934” cartoon shown caption-less in the above Freelancer article comes from. That could be the first sale, or it may even be a rejected cartoon Cole dug out for this piece.)

Boy’s Life (October, 1936)

From the start, Cole is displaying technical prowess with wash and watercolor. 14 years later, his Humorama and Playboy cartoons would in part be so successful because of Cole’s mastery of watercolor.

If I haven’t missed anything in my search, Cole did not place another cartoon in Boy’s Life for 11 months. During this time, he borrowed 500 dollars from his hometown merchants and moved to New York City with his wife Dorothy. By the time his next Boy’s Life cartoon appeared, Cole had begun his comic book career, finding a salaried job at the Harry “A” Chesler studio, the first packager of original comic book material. Talk about being in the right place at the right time -- Cole got in at the ground floor of the development of a whole new art form and branch of publishing!

Boy’s Life (September, 1937)

A typically wacky Jack Cole invention. Cole’s work is filled with surreal inventions such as this one. Compare to the story of the invisible “Flit” spray in Plastic Man #1

Cole had a second cartoon in this issue, as well…

Cole was particularly creative in his next cartoon, creating an irregularly-shaped cartoon cleverly designed to slot into the magazine’s 3-column layout:

Boy’s Life (October, 1937)

Cole’s inspired design supports the subject of the gag very well…

 

Boy’s Life (November, 1937) 

More surrealism. The sort of play with reality that we see a lot of  in Cole’s Burp the Twerp one-pagers….

Boy’s Life (December, 1937)

Here we see similar motion and energy that Cole invested in his Plastic Man stories.

Boy’s Life (January, 1938)

Cole’s first published hillbilly cartoon (and a funny one, at that). Hillbilly humor and rural settings are a staple of Cole’s work. See The Highgrass Twins (1940) for starters

Cole had a second cartoon in the Jan 1938 issue… delightfully  surreal and again with the invention theme…

Boy’s Life (February, 1938)

Note the use of pure wash effects with no defining border lines… a characteristic of Cole’s stunning 1950’s Playboy cartoons.

Boy’s Life (May, 1938)

Funny drawings…

Note in the above cartoon that Cole’s signature has begun to evolve from the ornate, labored anchor-shaped icon/logo he designed in the earliest cartoons to a more simpler and assured signature. A study of the development of Cole’s signature in his 1936-40 Boy’s Life gag cartoons reveals a march toward simplicity and grace.

The last signatures in this progression are very close to the signature Cole used for his famous Playboy cartoons, some 14 years later.

Boy’s Life (July, 1938)

Impotence was a theme Cole explored in both is comic book, gag cartoons, and in his syndicated comic strip, Betsy and Me.

Boy’s Life (August, 1938)

 

Boy’s Life (September, 1938)

Only Cole could think of an impossible gag like this… and make it work.

Boy’s Life (January, 1939)

Cole’s visual style is evolving from the “puppet” figure shapes to more organic and flowing forms. You can feel the fluidity of Plastic Man in this image…

Interestingly, a cartoon by Fred Schwab appears in this issue, as well. Schwab worked with Cole at the Chesler studio, and I get the sense they were chums. When asked about the Cole-Schwab connection, Art Spiegelman kindly shared the following information: “Cole really got along well with Fred Schwab since they shared an affinity for screwball Smokey Stover cartooning. I interviewed him for the book (he worked in production at the NYT, but turned out to be an affable man with almost no specific memories.” I suspect that Cole probably helped Schwab get this sale to Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (January, 1939)

 

Boy’s Life (February, 1939)

Ah, an “Eat at Joe’s” cartoon by Jack Cole. That’s like finding a “Kilroy was here” cartoon by Harvey Kurtzman. Notice how effectively Cole has begun to use patterns to create a more richer visual experience. His comic book stories are filled with patterns, such as Woozy Wink’s polka-dotted blouse.

Boy’s Life (May, 1939)

Fred Schwab placed two more cartoons in this issue. These are the last of the Schwab cartoons in Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (April, 1939)

To borrow Jeet Heer’s great phrase, the comedy of locomotion…

Boy’s Life (June, 1939)

Cole is becoming more confident and accomplished visually. It is interesting to compare this evolving painterly technique to his still-crude pen-and-ink line work in his 1939-40 comic book stories…

Boy’s Life (September, 1939)

Wow.. look at the motion and the sense of a moment captured in time. Cole has found the underlying mechanism of the visual expression of time and space, and has invented a way to stuff a captured moment with the implied events that occur just before and after the moment, adding enormous depth and profundity to his work. Compare this to the similar waterfall gag of October, 1937 and you will see how much Cole has grown in a very short time. The legendary bluesman Robert Johnson is rumored to have made a deal with the devil to suddenly transform into a master of the guitar. Did Cole make a similar deal in 1939 to acquire the ability to manipulate time and motion in comic book images like no other artist before or since? His growth in this period is uncanny and unexplainable. By the way, this was the largest cartoon I saw in 10 years of Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (November, 1939)

 

Boy’s Life (December, 1939)

Another impressive motion-on-paper moment, and a funny gag, too… almost iconic… just when you think you’re bad off…. there’s a cactus that’s waiting to break your fall….

 

Boy’s Life (January, 1940)

This gag reminds me of Death Patrol… look at those gorgeous speed lines… Cole has clearly become fascinated with showing motion on paper…

 

 

Boy’s Life (June, 1939)

Motion, motion, motion – funny, funny, funny. Cole is now by far the most distinctive stylist of the cartoonists in this run of Boy’s Life. His cartoons leap off the page.

 

 

Boy’s Life (October, 1940)

And then, it ends… sadly, here is the last of Cole’s marvelous cartoons for Boy’s Life. In New York City, Cole had taken on the job of editor for Lev Gleason, and devoted himself wholly to comic books for the next 14 years. Look at how this lovely cartoon leaps off the page…

 

Tuba or not tuba, that is the question…This is the only cartoon in the Boy’s Life panoply that has no caption. Cole has graduated to a “pure” form of gag cartooning with this last entry.

Overall, Cole’s heretofore unseen and unknown Boy’s Life cartoons are a revelation. We can see, more clearly than in his comic book work of the same period, his meteoric growth as a cartoonist.

Somewhere out there, a 4-CD bootleg of Bob Dylan’s unreleased 1962 songs exists, Dylan 1962. Listening to this CD, one can hear in a few tracks the “wild, thin mercury sound” of Dylan’s famous albums of a few years later. The tracks totally undermine the story of Dylan’s artistic development as an acoustic folksinger into an artist who suddenly picked up an electric guitar in 1965. He had the electric sound in 1962, and brought out this new style when it best suited his career.

Similarly, Cole had developed his wash/watercolor gag, compressed-time gag cartoon approach some 15 years prior to his landmark work for Playboy magazine, starting in 1954.

All text is copyright 2011 Paul Tumey

Midnight Episode 6 (second run) – The Comedy of Locomotion

Story this post:

“Bull Market” (my title)
Story and art by Jack Cole

Smash Comics #73
(Quality Comics Group
Oct, 1947)

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

In his great 2003 essay on Jack Cole (Comics Journal #255), Jeet Heer observes that Cole’s stories in his 1946-47 period are more light-hearted than his earlier stories which feature grisly violence. Heer writes about Cole’s PLASTIC MAN stories, but his insight works just as well for Cole’s Midnight stories:

“The plots for the stories in this (period)… are very simple.  They usually involve simply throwing Plastic Man and Woozy Winks into an odd environment (an old-folks home, the artic, a futuristic city) where they have to fight a gang of crooks, who often seem reassuringly incompetent.”

In the case of the story in this posting, the setting is the New Central Stock Exchange on Wall Street, a place Cole probably visited or walked by in the years he lived in Manhattan. This story can be seen as a partner of sorts to Cole’s previous MIDNIGHT story (read it here), which features a cow and a county fair. Cole changes the cow into a bull and moves the setting from rural America to the country’s most sophisticated city and the world of high finance. Jeet Heer goes on to write:

“What keeps this basic formula interesting is Cole's antic visual humor, which can be seen in the attention he paid to gait and body movement. The characters rarely walk from one spot to the next: they are always bouncing about, prancing, leaping or ricocheting. Because of his focus on the comedy of locomotion, Cole was always focused on getting his characters from one panel to the next, or moving from the top left to the bottom right of the page.”

I love Heer’s phrase: “the comedy of locomotion.” This story is a great example of Cole’s focus on depicting comic movement throughout his story. In virtually every panel, characters are captured in mid-movement. The drawings sometimes are as distorted and unlikely as the image you see when you press the pause button on your DVD player during a vintage Bob Clampett DAFFY DUCK cartoon.

 

Cole’s art in this period is quite spectacular. His splash page in this story makes creative use of stock market ticker tape in a composition that rivals the best of Will Eisner’s famous SPIRIT splashes.

Smash Comics #73 (Oct. 1947)

Sadly, these Midnight stories of Cole’s second run are woefully weak on plot. As wonderful as the art is in this story, it is awfully hard to follow. Cole is said to have created his stories by starting at the first panel and spinning the story out from there. Given this, it’s easy to see why he would lose track of the overall shape of his story, and become engrossed in the visual dynamics. Jeet Heer puts it very well:

“With his focus on panel and page design, Cole's characteristic unit of attention was much smaller than those cartoonists who labored to produce well-crafted and shapely stories (notably Will Eisner, Carl Barks and Harvey Kurtzman). Unlike these other pioneering comic book creators, Cole cared little for the pace and structure of his stories. Plastic Man's adventures tend to ramble haphazardly, starting with a strong momentum that usually dissipates with an abrupt ending.”

Everything about the storytelling in this episode is forced, and as result, the story is not much fun to read. As if sensing this, Cole would make a mid-career course correction in 1948 and enter into what could be called the baroque period of his work, with better-realized stories and a much greater profusion of background gags.

DEVILS OF THE DEEP – A Lost 1940 Jack Cole Story?

Jack Cole was an inventive writer as well as an innovative artist. In his wonderful book, The Steranko History of Comics Vol. 2, Jim Steranko quotes Quality Comics publisher (and Jack Cole’s employer for most of his comic book career) “Busy” Arnold:

“With the exception of Jack Cole, none of my freelance artists were much good on stories.” (page 92).

Given Cole’s recognized ability as a writer and story man, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he may have occasionally written a story that some other artist drew. Well, dear reader, I am pleased to report that I think I may have discovered an early example of this, and what a wild example it is! But first, we need to briefly look at the mystery of George Nagle.

In Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (Nov. 1939, MLJ) a two-page story by Cole is signed with the pen name “George Nagle.” Here’s the story:

 

How do we know the above is by Jack Cole? Jack Cole’s work is all over Blue Ribbon #1, with four separate stories. Two of them are signed by Cole, one is unsigned, and the fourth (above) is signed “George Nagle.” To me, the art is unmistakably Cole. Compare these two panels:

(Note: the upper panel from the illustration above from Blue Ribbon Comics #1 is excerpted from “Ima Slooth,” a wonderful 3-page story that can be read here) The device of positioning a character’s head in profile on the left or right side of the panel was a favorite layout of Cole’s, and he used it throughout his 16 years in comics. However, others used this device as well.

Further evidence lies in the fact that the heads in the two panels are very similar, with very large eyes, “pie slices” out of the retinas to indicate the direction the character is looking in (as device Carl Barks also used), and matching shapes of the heads and mouths. The lettering, the rounded-corner speech balloon, and line quality are also the same. Therefore, “George Nagle” is a pen name for Jack Cole.

Cole fond of pen names. His two 1940 MANTOKA stories were signed “Richard Bruce,” and his hundred of Quality one-pagers were often signed “Ralph Johns.”

In the 1938 Cocomalt Big Book of Comics, there is another “King Kole’s Court.” Note this one is also attributed to “George Nagle,” but is signed in the last panel by Jack Cole.

 

The mystery continues, however, as one considers that George Nagle was listed as associate editor and managing editor for various comics assembled by the Harry Chelser studio. At this time, I can find no biographical information on Nagle, but I will keep digging. It would appear that Nagle probably wrote the “King Kole’s Court” stories and Jack Cole drew them. However, this is not a certainty.

In Blue Ribbon #3 (Jan 1940), a story appears that is signed by “E.M. Ashe,” with “Story by George Nagle.” The wildly imaginative and darkly bizarre subject matter of this story certainly seems to fit with Cole’s aesthetic.

The artist of this story, E.M.Ashe is Edmund Marion Ashe, also known as Edd Ashe. A key artist in the early MLJ/Archie books such as Pep, Top-Notch, and Blue Ribbon Comics, Ashe is best known for drawing Don Winslow of the Navy (Fawcett) for many years.

There were two “Devils of the Deep” stories. The first appeared in Blue Ribbon #2. It was a standard fist-fighting hero story of the time, bereft of anything interesting. It’s not clear who wrote or drew this first episode. Here’s the first page:

 

The second (and last) of the “Devils of the Deep” stories, however, is something a little special. The story has completely ignored the “three intrepid adventurers of the sea” from the first story and instead focuses on a criminal, a favorite subject of Cole’s at this time. Note the credit to George Nagle at the top of the first panel. The story begins with a bit of introductory narration, a device that Cole often used to open his stories.

Blue Ribbon #3 (Jan 1940, MLJ)

 

 

 

 

 

This is a wholly original, offbeat story concept. Even the clumsy delivery doesn’t obscure this story’s inventiveness and sheer jaw-dropping oddness.

Interestingly, in August of 1940, Theodore Sturgeon’s landmark monster story, “It!” appeared. In 1942, Airboy Comics would feature the morally ambiguous monster character THE HEAP, inspired by Sturgeon’s story.  The 1970’s brought us SWAMP THING and MAN THING (who appeared in the amusingly named book Giant Sized Man Thing). Before them all, though, came Cole’s “Devil of the Deep.”

The fact that the story is not a heroic tale at all, but instead focuses on the criminal is a dead giveaway that Cole made it up. When he would leave MLJ in a couple of months to work for Lev Gleason and edit Silver Streak Comics, Cole would create THE CLAW, again emphasizing the bizarrely interesting criminal over the hero. The “Devils of the Deep” story may be the first time Cole played with the idea of a fantastic story with a criminal as the lead character.

The fact that people die violently to slake a thirst for vengeance is another trait of Cole’s early stories.

The unusual three- panel fifth page action climax is similar in concept to the memorable four-panel page from a COMET story written and drawn by Jack Cole (to read the whole story, click here) of the same time period:

Pep #3 (April, 1940, MLJ)

I think it’s very likely that Cole wrote this story. Consider the writing in the amazing sequence from page 3:

“The claws of the killer lobster! The teeth of the tiger shark! The heart of the barracuda!”

The sequence is highly visual, and has a rhythm, indicating a writer who thinks visually. More importantly, it has that crazy vitality and feverish imagination that is a hallmark of Jack Cole’s work. It also has a dreamlike logic, characteristic of Cole’s best work. When you first read it, you totally buy in. It is only afterwards that you start to realize there are no killer lobsters, or wonder why the heart of a fish would be so fierce.

Despite the promise of a follow-up story in the last panel, this nightmarish narrative was the last appearance of this extremely short-lived series. It’s a shame there weren’t more “Devils of the Deep” stories.  It would be fascinating to read a series in which a criminal controls a killer lobster man.

In the last years of his comic book career, Cole would explore the man-transformed-into-monster story concept in some of his Web of Evil stories, including his very last story, “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill.”

So is this “Devils of the Deep” story written by Jack Cole or by the editor George Nagle? Probably the latter, but given the familiar themes and wild imaginings of this story, and the connection between Cole and Nagle in other work, one can’t help but wonder.

PLASTIC MAN begins life as a criminal who undergoes a physical transformation, and it’s here – in 1941 --  that Cole refined concepts such as the ones that lie at the heart of this tossed-off trifle, and struck story gold.