Jack Cole's Higrass Twins 1940: Money Madness!

It's been far too long since I've posted anything new here at Cole's Comics. Most of my comics scholarship and writing energy has been directed towards books and magazines. As some of you may know, I am now a regular columnist and reviewer for The Comics Journal. I also recently co-edited and wrote essays for The Art of Rube Goldberg (Abrams ComicArts, 2013). Just recently, I completed an introduction to the upcoming book, The Bungle Family 1930 (IDW Library of American Comics Essentials). Doing this work gets me a broad readership -- but mostly it pays money, hoo hah!

Speaking of money, here's a great example of Jack Cole's screwball comics that revolves around the theme of money. As a near-starving artist in New York City at the time he created this story, Cole no doubt had his money on his mind, and his mind on his money, as the song goes.

These scans are generously provided to us by the gifted artist and Jack Cole fan Ryan Heshka, who scanned them from his own very rare copy of Target Comics #3. Be sure to check out Ryan's super cool art at his website (and I'm not just saying that because Ryan was nice enuff to supply scans -- I really DO love his art).

Cole did four of the curiously named Higrass Twins stories. He drew these while he was working at the Harry "A" Chesler shop, and they were sold to Novelty Press, who published them in issues one through four of their new title, Target Comics. For the other three Higrass Twins stories, see this earlier post.

Here, now, are three pages of insane comics from the early years of comics master  Jack Cole, originally published in Target Comics #3 (Novelty Press - April, 1940).

That is All,

Screwball Paul

An Unpublished 1940 Sub-Zero Cover by Jack Cole

Here's a super-cool rare piece of previously unpublished early superhero art by Jack Cole that provides a small revelation about his early career. It's a cover rough featuring Sub-Zero Man, a character that Jack Cole is not known to have ever drawn.

"What's a cover rough?" You may be asking.

In the cartoon and comics biz, a "rough" is simply a preliminary version of a finished piece of art. It's done to give the publisher an idea of where the artist is headed with the piece, and allows for adjustments to be made. This is a common practice, even today. It saves the artist time, and it makes sure the publisher gets what they want.

The files and archives of old comics publishers are probably filled with unpublished cover roughs. At some point in the past, the comics historian and writer Ron Goulart appears to have gotten access to the files for a 1940s  comics packager called Funnies, Inc., and he photocopied from these files a rare, previously unknown cover rough by Jack Cole.  As you may know, Ron wrote Focus on Jack Cole (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1986)

Decades later, Ron Goulart put the photocopy (which was never published) up for sale on ebay, and I bought it to share with the world's Jack Cole fans. Feel free to thank me. :) Here's the art:

Jack Cole's unpublished cover rough for Sub-Zero Man. January 1940
(From the collection of Paul Tumey)

Ah, that beautiful pointed exclamation mark!

Information on the art identifies it as a cover rough and tells us it was drawn by Jack Cole for Novelty Press. The art has a date stamp of  January 15, 1940. We know that Jack Cole wrote and drew a few comic book stories for Novelty Press that were published in the early 1940s. These stories appeared in Target Comics Volume 1, Number 1 through Volume 1, Number 4 (the January, 1940 through May, 1940 issues). The stories were "bigfoot" style humor features called The Higrass Twins.

The splash page of Jack Cole's HiGrass Twins story from Target Comics Volume 1, Number 1 (January, 1940)

It's interesting to know that Cole was also developing a superhero feature for packager Funnies, Inc. (who sold to Novelty Press -- confusing, isn't it?).  Also in early 1940, he created a superhero for MLJ called The Comet. Note how similar the pose is in this splash panel below to the Sub-Zero Man's pose above.

Jack Cole's second Comet story, from Pep Comics #2, MLJ - February, 1940)

Clearly, around this time, Cole was developing his own approach to an exciting visual depiction of a superhero in flight. His early solutions are almost pornographic, with his characters wearing skin-tight suits that reveal every curve and muscle of their taut buttocks. Despite his name, Jack Cole's Sub-Zero Man is well, kinda hot.

It's also interesting to compare the Sub-Zero art with the black and white ink wash cartoons Cole published in Boy's Life magazine in early 1940:

In 1939 and 1940, Cole had developed a commercially viable black and white ink wash technique, that included using white paint on top of the black ink to indicate sound and motion. Both his superhero and his humor cartoon work of this period vividly depict bodies flying through the air. His work of this period was an important stepping stone to his creation of Plastic Man, his masterpiece.

However, the newly surfaced 1940 Sub-Zero cover art raises as many unanswered questions as it answers. The biggest question is: did Jack Cole create the character of Sub-Zero Man? Did he also create a Sub-Zero story to accompany this cover?

Even though no Cole-drawn Sub-Zero stories exist, the character was indeed published in Novelty Press comics, a few months after the date of this art. The first appearance was in Blue Bolt Volume 1, Number 1 (June, 1940), which featured work by Joe Simon (of Simon and Kirby). Here's the first Sub-Zero story, signed by a "Larry Antonette." Even though the finished art is not by Cole, it does have the feel of his early superhero work, with manic energy, huge natural disasters, vindictive heroes, and bizarre fates for wrong-doers. See what you think:

I'm sure that Mr. Mason Moray, the eminent panelologist, could shed some light on aritst Antonette's life and career -- he seems to know reams of information about the obscure creative talents that worked in 1940s American comics. But, the really interesting artist to work on Sub-Zero is Golden Age great Bill Everett. 

Bill Everett's first Sub-Zero story from Blue Bolt Vol. 1, Number 5 (October, 1940)

Did you catch the similarity between the names of Sub-Zero and Everett's most famous creation: The Sub-mariner (first published in October, 1939 -- eight months prior to Sub-Zero's first appearance). And how about this: another feature in Blue Bolt was called Dick Cole -- and Jack Cole's brother was named Dick. Is any of this connected? Was it an in-joke? Did Cole write some early superhero material for Funnies, Inc. that was later developed by others? 

We know Jack Cole was prolific, ambitious, and hard-working -- so could there be yet more unpublished early Jack Cole art out there, somewhere?

At this point, these questions must go unanswered.

But, we can certainly appreciate the raw, primal ZOOM power of Cole's lost Golden Age superhero comic book cover!

'Till Next Time,

Paul Tumey

Go see this

So where did Jack Cole get his screwball sensibility from? Be sure to check out my other blog, The Masters of Screwball Comics, where you can read the very Cole-like Dinky Dinkerton comic strip by the forgotten Art Huhta!

All text copyright 2013 Paul Tumey

Jack Cole Gets A Cloo: Racism, Morbidity, and Great Screwball Comics

Jack Cole wrote and drew about 700 one-pages for Quality comics, mostly from about 1940 to 1945. Some of these I've shared in this blog: Burp the Twerp, Dan Tootin, Windy Breeze, and Slap Happy Pappy. It's time we rolled out the last of Jack Cole's great one-pager series, Wun Cloo, The Defective Detective. Cole did not create the character -- that dubious honor goes to Gill Fox, who also created Windy Breeze. When Fox moved up through the ranks to become an editor at Quality, Cole took over many of his one pagers.

The premise of the Wun Cloo one-pagers is to present a screwball (and unknowingly racist!) send-up of detective stories. It was likely inspired by the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto books and movies featuring Asian detectives. I have put off posting anything about Wun Cloo because, by today's standards, the comic is painfully disrespectful to people of Asian descent. Fox and Cole don't even have the excuse that we were at war with Japan, since the character was created before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

In their feeble defense, such stereotyped portrayals were pretty common place and their comic was just one of many. Here's a comic from the same period, Ching Chow:

Ching Chow by Stanley Link offered daily pearls of wisdom

Amazingly, Ching Chow, which started in 1927, lasted until 1980! 

Nevertheless, some of the Wun Cloo pages are still of interest of to Cole fans -- if you can peel away the racism, there's some mighty fine screwball cartooning. This is something that modern fans of American Golden (and earlier) comics and pop culture have become expert at -- looking past the outrageous racism in the works. Plastic Man was also a humorous version of crime and detective stories, so Wun Cloo could be seen as a testing ground for what Cole later used in his Plas stories.

In fact, months before he created Plastic Man, Cole used the concept in a landmark morbid Wun Cloo 2-pager:

from Smash 17 (December, 1940)

As he did with many of his one-pagers, Cole played with his drawings and had fun. I've read that he would start his work session knocking off one of the one-pagers as a warm-up. Whew! This was a hard-working guy! In our next example, you can see Cole indulging his love of visual patterns...

Smash Comics #20 (March, 1941)

Despite his appearance, Wun Cloo often came out on top:

Smash #24 (July, 1941)

 For some reason, Cole seems to have populated Wun Cloo with a great deal of his darkly comic imagery, as in this next page:

Smash #29 (Dec, 1941)

 This next Wun Cloo one-pager features both a rare Jack Cole caricature of Adolf Hitler, and an example of his patented face-changing trick, which Plastic Man used on numerous occasions. The page is also looney as hell...

Smash #32 (March, 1942)

That's all for now! More Wun Cloos to come at a later date!

Thanks for reading and be sure to visit my NEW BLOG all about cool screwball comics, featuring original paper scans from my collection of Milt Gross, Rube Goldberg, The Squirrel Cage, Smokey Stover and more! This is the stuff that inspired Jack Cole. You can only find this stuff at The Masters of Screwball Comics!

Stretchily Yours,

Paul TwoClueMe

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