DICKIE DEAN BOY INVENTOR - Episode 3 - Cole's First Speedboat Story

Story presented in this post:
Dickie Dean (story, pencils, inks, and lettering by Jack Cole)
Silver Streak Comics #5 (June 1940, Lev Gleason)

We've looked at some memorable early stories Jack Cole created in which the action centered around speedboats. There's Cole's single Quicksilver story, his landmark fourth Midnight story, and in our previous post, we saw a mind-blowing Midnight story involving a speedboat that traveled on land. Having established Cole's fondness for speedboat stories, here now is, as far as I can tell , his very first speedboat story: the third episode of his highly entertaining DICKIE DEAN series.

I'm not sure why Cole was so fond of drawing speedboats and water. Perhaps there was a flood in his hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania when he was a child, or perhaps his Dad had a speedboat. In any case, there is a strong sense of place in this story, which makes it even more vivid than ever. This story reminds me of the more recent, but equally entertaining story, Won't Be Licked; The Great '37 Flood of Louisville, by one of my favorite modern cartoonists, Dan Zettwoch (the story appeared in The Best American Comics 2007, Chris Ware, editor).

Perhaps Jack Cole's interest in speeboat stories was purely graphical. If you study these stories, you can see that he used the boats as pointers on the page layout, directing the eye effortlessly to the next panel. The result is a sense of movement that is often exhilarating.

This story stands alone in the DICKIE DEAN series. It's the only one of the eight that Cole did in which Dickie's friend/sidekick doesn't appear. Instead, there is a genial, faintly Dad-like newspaper reporter named HAP who joins Dickie on his adventures. I like the chemistry (if you'll pardon the pun) between these two characters and I wish Jack Cole had explored this duo more. Alas, this is the only story in which HAP appears.

Like many of Jack Cole's comic book stories of 1940-42, there is a way cool information drawing, explaining the main invention, a boat that can make water disappear by running through it:


There are also several other fun inventions in this story, including an automatic apple dispenser, an accordion hat retriever, and an acid-spewing fountain pen. Cole also speaks directly to his boy readership at the start and end of this story, proving no small amount of enthusiastic encouragement to invent. Cole's words are so compelling, that I felt myself growing keenly interested in inventing something as I read the story!

Another hallmark of Cole's work is an interest in using decorative patterns to provide visual richness (such as Woozy Winks' polka-dotted blouse). In this story, he uses the diffusion of the water molecules as an excuse to populate several panels with wonderful arrays of floating spheres of water. The effect is magical, like something out of LITTLE NEMO:

In addition to the Dickie Dean story in this issue, Jack Cole also delivered the lead feature, a ripping Silver Streak adventure (which I'll share at a future posting). Cole was the editor of this title, and in addition to his two stories in this book, he also turned in a wonderful cover:

Note Dickie Dean in the lower right-hand corner, the only time Cole drew his full figure on a cover.

By the way, have you checked out my pal, Frank Young's superlative articles and reprints of some great Jimmy Thompson ROBOTMAN stories at Cartoon Snap? If not, be sure to hop over there once you've finished reading this amazing DICKIE DEAN story... you'll be glad you did. Thompson is the most under-appreciated artist of the Golden Age, and Sherm's Cartoon Snap blog is one of the best out there!

Just an aside: if you happen to be enjoying a scan blog and see some links to ads posted, clicking on a few is an easy way to help support that blog, since the blogger will get a little dinero for each click. Just a suggestion. We're not supposed to solicit clicks for ourselves. I just wanted to raise general awareness of this issue. For example, out of 15,000 page impressions on this blog there have been only 8 clicks on the advertising links! I always make it point to click a few times to help the blogs I like... it's the polite and helpful thing to do!

Here then, is the third Dickie Dean episode, another lost gem, excavated for your reading pleasure from the Cole-mine!

MIDNIGHT 4 (1941) - A Jack Cole Classic

Story presented in this post:
"Midnight - Gabby, The Talking Monkey" (Story and art by Jack Cole)
Smash Comics #21 (April 1944 - Quality Comics Publications)

In his fourth Midnight story, Jack Cole found a new mastery of the recently born graphic storytelling form, and created one of the best stories of his career.

The month that Smash Comics #21 came out, Silver Streak Comics #9 (Lev Gleason) also sold off the stands, with 18 pages by Cole. The 10th issue of Silver Streak would contain his last work on that title and for Lev Gleason. These were stories Cole had created months earlier. By April, 1941, he had moved on to greener pastures, having been recruited to Quality Comics a few months earlier.

Smash Comics #21 (April 1941) Not by Cole.

Cole must have been excited and uplifted by this step up. His first stories for Quality were a series of beautiful, tightly plotted and superbly realized 5-page MIDNIGHT adventures. Not only had Cole discovered a newfound confidence in his writing and art, but he also had begin to combine screwball comedy, crime stories, and superhero comics into a new, highly entertaining mixture.

In an earlier post, we looked at the first three MIDNIGHT episodes. With an analysis to follow, here is the landmark fourth adventure of Midnight, an early masterpiece by Jack Cole:





The closing sentence, with it's weird mix of sincerity and satire, in some ways, sums up what the magic of Jack Cole's pre-war stories were all about: "And with a talking monkey, Midnight brings a new weapon into action against the forces of evil."

There are several ways this story represents a stand-out in Cole's work. First, the artwork is particularly graceful and well-realized. Panels such as this Will Eisner-esque sewer scene are rich with detail, vibrating with dynamic poses, and move the story forward beautifully.


In fact, the entire page is a tour de force of design, elegantly moving the reader through the story in a dense, rich series of up and down curves that work left to right, in three tiers (click to study a larger version):

The red lines and arrows show how Cole used his character's poses, and props such as the waterfront dock pilings, to create design elements that resulted in an extremely clear communication of movement on the page. The speedboat, with it's triangular shape, serves as almost an arrow in itself, directing us first down into the bottom tier, and then onto the next page.



This page also contains a DICK TRACY moment, in which Cole stops the manic chase for a beat to give us an information diagram that introduces Midnight's new weapon. The suction cup gun is a crazy invention that would never work in real life, but as we have seen Cole -- an inventor himself -- was quite fond of putting fantastic devices into his stories.



Here's another beautiful panel, demonstrating how Cole's art often used patterns as a design device. I love how there are two sets of shadows in this composition, visually suggesting a connection between the two characters that would come to pass (Midnight will adopt the woman's pet/child when she dies). This is literal foreshadowing, and innovative graphic storytelling!



Another hallmark of Cole's graphic storytelling is the masterful use of sound effects as graphic devices. Look at how the sound effects in this panel point to the action like arrows. Also notice Cole has thrown a pair of white eyes in the blackness, Gabby's eyes. The panel is a great illustration of Cole's newfound combination of action-adventure and comedy, which he would employ to great effect in his PLASTIC MAN stories.



Towards the end of the story, Cole creates a lovely silhouette with a full moon backfrop, something he was quite fond of during this period. Also, very appropriate, as Midnight's early adventures take place in the, um, dead of night. Midnight's pose is also characteristic of Cole's early hero work. The sideview-running pose was something Cole created and used often, until he began to think in more three-dimensional terms in his PLASTIC MAN stories. For example, here is a comparison with Cole's splash page from Silver Streak #4 (May 1940 - Lev Gleason):




Jack Cole's stories also often included a woman. The women in his early hero stories were usually typical damsels in distress. The women in his later stories were sexy villains. The woman in this story, who shares the last name of another Cole creation, Angles O'Day, is rather unique, being a talented scientist who invents a way to give Gabby the monkey the power of human speech. Cole even draws her differently, with her hair chastely pulled back in a bun, and often with her face and body partially obscured. At the risk of being too psychoanalytical, one could say the inventor-female in this story is a shadow of Jack Cole himself.




This story would not rank as a Jack Cole classic unless somebody dies in a bizarre way that vengefully corrects an injustice. In this case, the man who kills the woman scientist is impaled on a church steeple. One can safely assume that Cole didn't stop to think too hard about the socio-religious implications he had made with this climactic ending. Part of the appeal of Cole's comics (and much of golden age comics) is the streaming flow of imagery and symbolism from the collective unconscious.

Incidentally, this church clocktower is the very one which Midnight swung into action across in the stunning opening page if this story. Cole has brought the reader full-circle, and provided a deeply satisfying poetic ending as the clock tolls midnight.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis of a true Jack Cole classic in which justice is served at (and by) midnight!

Manhunters (1940) - Second story in Jack Cole's early crime series

Story presented in this post:
"California's Kidnap-Murder Mystery" (Story and art by Jack Cole)
Top-Notch Comics #2 (Jan. 1940, MLJ/Archie)

Jack Cole's second MANHUNTERS crime story is perhaps the weakest of the three. The writing doesn't sell the co-incidences, breezing over just how a gun was found lying untouched, on a busy street, for example.

Top-Notch Comics #2 cover. Not by Cole

In the course of his career, Jack Cole would periodically turn in a very engaging story about child abuse. Police Comics #22 had the affecting and sad story, "The Eyes Have It," for example. The story here may be the first incidence of abuse of a child in Cole's work. The child here is "spunky" enough to fight back, but one still feels sympathy for the kid when she is ditched by the cop-killing kidnapper and is lost and traumatized.

As in the first story and in much of his 1939-41 work, Cole inserts an enagging information diagram:

Cole's obsession with movement and speed, another characteristic design theme in his comic book work, crops up in this story in a beautifully designed car/motorcycle chase sequence on page 2. In one panel, the speeding car is moving so fast, it even breaks out of the panel.

The pages below are the only scans we've been able to locate of this rare story. Unfortunately, the original images were quite distorted with curling. We have retouched the artwork to make it more readable and minimized the distrotion as much as possible. The curved edges of some of the panels in the scans below are due to this, not to Cole's design.

As with nearly all of his comic book stories, the story opens with a visually compelling splash page.

Manhunters (1939) - First of Three Early Jack Cole True Crime Stories

Stories presented in this post:

"Master Forgers" - Story and art by Jack Cole

Top-Notch Comics #1 (Dec. 1939)

Reprint - "Master Forgers" (Manhunters)
Story and art by Jack Cole
Authentic Police Cases #5 (Oct. 1948, St. John)

Before he strirred up a sensation with his 1946 True Crime comics, and before he stretched the comics medium to make one of the great comic book superheroes (Plastic Man), Jack Cole created a handful of gritty crime stories early in his career.

Surprisingly, these noir-ish police procedurals, with their grim sense of justice and off-color details mostly appeared in comics published by MLJ, soon to be renamed for their star character ARCHIE, and mostly known today for publishing an seemingly infinite stream of wholesome comics about all-American teens.

Concurrent with his two- story CRIME ON THE RUN series in Archie's Blue Ribbon Comics (see our post here), Jack Cole created MANHUNTERS, a three-story crime series that ran in the first three issues of Archie's Top-Notch Comics

Top-Notch #1 Cover. (Not by Cole)

The first MANHUNTER story appeared in Top-Notch Comics #1 (Dec. 1939, Archie). The story presented an involved, blow-by-blow account of how police cracked a ringer of check forgers. In the story, Cole began to employ information diagrams, such as this one:

These information diagrams added to the story's realism and amped up the interest level for any curious young boy. Jack Cole would insert information diagrams into several of his 1939-41 stories, including his famous anti-hero CLAW stories.

This first MANHUNTERS story ends on a harshly vengeful scene, as one of the criminal gang faces an angry mob. In an extraordinary panel, Cole draws 21 people filled with blood-lust, encircling the criminal, as police officers strain every sinew to keep them at bay. Despite the story's straight-arrow narrative, Cole's compostion tells another story, in which the criminal becomes a victim of society's unregulated rage. In this way, "Master Forgers" prefigures some of the moralistic EC Shock SuspensStories, created over a decade later, in 1952-54.

The story opens with a stylish splash panel, a hallmark of nearly all of Jack Cole's comic book stories.








Curiously, this 1939 story was reprinted almost 10 years later, in Authentic Police Cases #5 (October 1948, St. John).

The MANHUNTERS tag was changed to the limp and less visually interesting header "Science Corners Criminals." There were no other alterations in the reprint except a better recoloring, which breathed new life into the artwork. Here is a comparison of the 1939 and 1948 versions:

The next issue of the comic, Authentic Police Cases #6 (Nov. 1948, St. John), reprinted Cole's CRIME ON THE RUN story from Blue Ribbon #1 (Nov. 1939, Archie), showing the same knack for blandness, renaming it "Crime Clean-Up."

In it's first year of publishing, St. John must have bought the rights to the Cole stories from MLJ. They fit in perfectly with the theme of the comic, which shows that Cole was a bit ahead of his time with these early crime stories.

By the time of the 1948 reprints, Jack Cole's work had become infinitely more sophisticated -- some of the best comics ever done. It must have seemed puzzling to readers at the time who were following Cole's mind-boggling PLASTIC MAN stories to see these comparitively crude, and radically different comic book stories signed by Cole, with no indication these were reprints.

St. John must have liked "Master Forgers," because they ran it a second time, two issues later, in Authentic Police Cases #7 (April, 1950)! Here, then, is the St. John version, better colored, and better printed, still proudly bearing Jack Cole's name.