Dark Plas Halloween 2013: Plastic Man Stakes Out A Vampire!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

For the last 3 Halloweens, I've posted about the strange, dark last comic book stories of Jack Cole's career as a comic book artist.

This year, I present to you "The Evil Terror?" from Plastic Man #43 (November, 1953). This 10-page saga fluttering around a bat-winged vampire in the best Universal-Studios-Bela-Lugosi tradition is one of the last Plastic Man stories -- perhaps the very last one -- that Jack Cole appears to have created.

As I've written about earlier, the comic book stories Jack Cole wrote and drew in the early 1950s embraced the horror genre with the same verve and intensity that his 1940s comics embraced screwball humor. A strong argument can be made that Cole's 1950s horror stories reflect the undercurrent of anxiety and terror present in Cold War America. These stories are filled with images of people cowering in shadows, frozen with terror.

At some point in the late 1940's, Cole sat down at his drawing table and drew a three panel sequence (one of the many delights that will be found in The Blighted Eye, the upcoming volume by the legendary comics historian, archivist, and collector Glenn Bray) that represented a startling departure from his popular bigfoot-superhero style employed to great success in his Plastic Man stories. The drawings were realistic, not rubbery. In the sequence, a man and a woman embrace in a passionate kiss. The scene is set in a luxuriant, modern city apartment. The panels are filled with delicious black shadows that define the many objects in the room, the drapery of the character's clothes, and even the strands of their hair. On the extreme right side of the sequence, Cole drew a small caricature of himself and penned a note to his Quality Comics publisher, "Busy" Arnold: "Romantical stuff, huh, Busy? Just wondering if you'd like to give me a trial on a serious strip, for a change? Yes? No? I await! Jack"

Cole, an indefatigable innovator, had become interested in creating a new style of comics, with a more realistic feel. Arnold and his editors did give Cole more serious strips -- but instead of romance, they made Cole the signature artist of their new horror title, Web of Evil, where Cole wrote and drew one or two stories for the first dozen or so issues.Some of those stories are reprinted and discussed on this blog. A new volume collecting some of these stories has just been released from IDW, edited by Craig Yoe.

Cole also transformed his Plastic Man stories from baroque screwball comic operas to nightmarish, anxiety-ridden dramas of dread. It was as if Plas and Woozy suddenly began to know the future held nothing but horror -- and they dreaded it with existential despair. Many readers, including me, have missed that these last Plastic Man stories are sometimes (not always) by Jack Cole (often with others finishing the art and inking). In earlier posts, I have explained why I think that certain of these stories, including the Plastic Man horror stories, which I call "Dark Plas" are indeed the work of Jack Cole.

In "The Evil Terror?" Cole once again invests his masterpiece comics creation with some of his trademark screwball humor. It's as if, for this last effort, he had come full circle from goofy humor comics, to dark parables of horror and dread, and then back to humor. As a creator of sequential graphic narratives, Jack Cole was something akin to a roller coaster speeding across the tracks, veering from side to side from light to dark, humor to horror -- and we see that happening in the span of this story.

As a result, "The Evil Terror?" reads overall like an episode of Scooby Doo. As with the popular animated series, it turns out there is a mundane explanation for the seemingly supernatural element in the adventure. The scene on page 8, where Woozy Winks raids the fridge is a parallel to the pothead Shaggy who is eternally cursed with the munchies.

Nonetheless, the story is filled with potent, masterful images of existential terror that are worth your time to peruse, especially on Halloween!

"The Evil Terror?" by Jack Cole - Plastic Man #43 (November, 1953)

More Dark Plas!

"The Stairway to Madness" (January, 1953)

"The Witch of Wailing Woods" (July, 1953)

All text copyright 2013 by Paul Tumey.

Beautiful Sexy Witch Melts Plastic Man in a Superb Jack Cole Horror Story

In his work, Jack Cole certainly appears to have had certain unconscious dark obsessions. It's these very obsessions, combined with a wildly inventive mind, and a stunning talent for creating visual images that are the foundation of Cole's greatness, both as the creator of Plastic Man stories and as the signature Playboy cartoonist. We see evidence of all these elements, perhaps in their most potent form, in today's "Dark Plas" Halloween post, " The Witch of Wailing Woods," a  little-known, mostly overlooked story from Plastic Man #42 (July, 1953).

The story, like many of Cole's later Plastic Man adventures, is built around a beautiful evil woman. In this case, Cole offers us a gorgeous raven-haired witch named Zelda, clad in a fetching dress that splays the black strands of a spider and its web across her perfectly-formed breasts.

The more I look at this story, the more impressed I am with it. Jack Cole's last comic book stories are among his best, in my opinion -- although it is a far cry from the zany screwball antics for which Cole is best-known. It may be this puzzling and extreme shift in tone that accounts for why these Cole stories remain largely undiscovered and certainly unappreciated by his fans. In many cases, the stylistic and tonal shift is so extreme that the stories, unsigned, are often not identified as Jack Cole's work.

From Plastic Man 43

Admittedly, Cole's last comic book stories, from 1952-54 are dark, twisted, and disturbing -- put simply, they are not nearly as much fun to read as his humor-based work. Why did Jack Cole, a guy who did humor comics so well and so successfully, step into the dark world of monsters, death, dismemberment, and pure evil?

Perhaps Cole and his editors at Quality Comics were attempting to keep pace with the breaking trend of horror comics, led by E.C. with titles like Haunt of Fear and Tales From the Crypt. It's one way to explain why Cole and Quality took a character deeply rooted in humor and slapstick and recast him into one supernatural horror story after another. In the issue that comes after the one in which this witch story appears, Plastic Man and Woozy battle a vampire.

At the  same time Plas and Woozy fought witches, werewolves, and vampires in the pages of the last Plastic Man comics Cole drew, Quality also brought out a new horror title, the sinister-sounding Web of Evil. The star artist at Web of Evil... Jack Cole.

It seems to me that the real story here is not that Cole made such a surprising left-turn from humor to horror in his work, but rather that he did it so well. It's easy to become preoccupied (and repulsed) with the darkness of his last dark comic book stories and miss the extraordinary level of accomplishment in creating sequential graphic narratives that Jack Cole achieved in this work.

Here's a video presentation I've made to analyze and appreciate the splash page of today's story. In looking at this one page alone, we find a high level of design, great inventiveness and craft, and -- of course -- a weirdness and particular shadowy tone unique to Cole's work.


And, without further ado, here's the story. Some notes and observations follow.

Whew! Pretty grim stuff! However, remember, it was in Police Comics 22 that Cole dispenses with a villain by snapping his head in a bear trap.

Upon closer examination, one can find traces of Jack Cole's shadow-side in his earlier work. Given this, it seems to make sense that Cole -- tasked with a new direction from humor to horror -- would be able to embrace it with gusto, as he does in this story, much in the same way Plas embraces the sexy witch.

"The Witch of Wailing Woods" features a woman who is both deeply desirable and extremely deadly. Plastic Man seems drawn to her as a man. He curls around her, extends and grows his body to encircle and embrace her. In one panel, Cole delivers a somewhat tender, sexually charged portrait of Plastic Man and Zelda that resonates with similar panels in his other stories of this period.

Woozy, an incorrigible womanizer, is the very portrait of a man bewitched when he gets close to Zelda. Cole plays it up with a dash of humor and a couple of cartoon sweat drops, but compared to the Tex Avery style wolf takes Cole was drawing just 3 years earlier, this is pretty restrained. 

A real witch (and talented), Zelda seems to be able to use a mixture of spells and voodoo to acquire a certain power to control and destroy both people and inanimate objects. She seems motivated to establish a new business model, by selling her services at a premium, as opposed to simply using her powers to get money. She appears to have no empathy at all, and kills two of her henchmen after making them suffer in agony. In others, Zelda, the beautiful sorceress, is as crazy as a bedbug.

Cole -- in his comic book stories, at least -- appears to be both drawn to and oppressed by beautiful women. In one panel, a man writhes on the ground in torture and gasps, "I can't stand it! She's killing me!"

Throughout the story, Cole uses the bright red body of Plastic Man (is that costume his skin, or actual clothes he's wearing?) to direct the eye through his shadow-drenched, inky-black tableaux.

In my video above, I spoke of how Cole created different visual planes and then broke them with vigorous movement through them in the splash page. Consider the smoke and Plas' left arm, which move away from the planes nearest the reader towards the rear planes.

And then the thug-monster's two arms move him the opposite direction, from the rear, to the front. When we step back and look at this composition, we see that all the elements swirl around the central figure of the luscious wicked witch. the smoke curls around her, as does Plastic Man's arm. She is the catalyst of this composition, as she is the catalyst of this story. So, the splash page is symbolic and perfectly in resonance with the story the will follow. This strikes me as pretty sophisticated and accomplished art, in any medium. Cole uses this multi-dimensional, depth-of-field technique in several standout panels within the story itself:

As the story reaches climax (cough cough) Cole makes his panels more dense.

While the story may be somewhat hackneyed and cliche-ridden, and the horrific nature of the visuals may be something of a turn off when one expects to see Cole's funny stuff, I maintain that his last comic books have great merit and encourage all readers to seek them out. I leave you with one of my favorite panels in the story. After drawing Plastic Man in exceptional volume and intensity for over decade, Cole had a unique feel for what a man who had a rubber body would actually look like in our reality, and in this panel, he delivers a beautiful and surprising image, that is both funny and challenging. 

This was one of Jack Cole's last Plastic Man stories. It's a shame that, having achieved this high level of expertise, and being so talented, he didn't stay in the field and make more comic book stories. 

Somewhat like Plastic Man in this panel, Cole's soul and emotional health may not have been up to its normal resiliency. The field he had worked so hard in for 15 years was rapidly changing and edging him out. Even though he was artistically successful (perhaps more than anyone realized until recently), his shift from humor to horror wasn't doing the trick. Like Plas, he knew he had to do something fast. A few months later, he submitted some gag cartoons to a new men's magazine, called Playboy, and made another virtuoso shift in artistic approach, from horror comics to sexy cartoons. This time, his work was noticed and celebrated -- but sadly, it seemed to make little difference to a man who must have still had the darkness we see in his last comic book stories locked up inside.

Happy Halloween 2012,

Paul Tumey

WANT MORE DARK PLAS? SEE MY 2011 HALLOWEEN POST HERE!

All text copyright 2012 by Paul Tumey

Dark Plas: Special Halloween Post!

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 mature relationships with 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 descent 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........