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

 

  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 Complete Midnight! by Jack Cole - Volume One: 1941
A handsomely designed 102- page ebook in .cbr format featuring the first 12 Midnight stories, exhaustive notes by Cole scholar Paul Tumey, and 3 BONUS Jack Cole stories!

 

 

As a way to support this blog and distribute this great work, I am offering for a limited time a nice little ebook I’ve made called The Complete Midnight by Jack Cole: Volume 1 – 1941 for $2.99. This is a great way to support this blog.

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!

PLASTIC MAN Jan 1950: The Return of the Pointed Exclamation Mark!

 Story in this post:
”Kra Vashnu”
Story, Pencils, and Inks by Jack Cole
Plastic Man #21
January, 1950
Quality Comics

 

For a 13 issue run of Plastic Man (issues 17-29), Jack Cole wrote and drew almost all the contents in these issues. In the first story in Plastic Man #21 (Jan. 1950) most of the sound effects are punctuated with a “flat” exclamation mark (on left in illustration below).

 

But somewhere in the middle of the story, Cole draws a BAM! with a “pointed” exclamation mark (right side of illustration above). It’s even artfully arranged so the “M” breaks it up.

I believe this is important because it is a sign that Jack Cole was re-connecting with his original, pure source of inspiration after a few years of dampened enthusiasm brought on most likely by having other writers and artists forced on him to produce the large number of Plastic Man stories his publisher wanted.

The pointed exclamation mark populated almost all of Jack Cole’s comic book work for the first 6 or 7 years. This was when he wrote, drew and often even lettered his own stories – a highly unusual practice for the time and one which, I believe, allows us to consider his graphic stories as the developing work of a master of the form. In 1950, Cole began to flow the magic of his early work back into his stories, but this time – instead of a talented newcomer – here was an accomplished master employing numerous techniques with an almost casual virtuousity.

 

As Cole re-connected with his vitality and vision, his work in 1950 became became richer and more complex, developing into what could be called Cole’s “baroque” period. Plastic Man never stretched so outrageously and comically. I can think of no other comics that are as dense with humor and invention as Jack Cole’s 1950 Plastic Man stories.

Reading these stories is a jaw-dropping experience for any comics person. In just one page, Cole delivers a dazzling array of brilliant graphic design solutions. His stories have some much kinetic energy they almost vibrate on the page. There is often more than one thing happening in each panel so that it’s necessary to re-read the stories in order to fully engage with them (similar to the way the film Playtime by the inspired filmmaker and comedian Jacques Tati works).

In the “Kra Vashnu” story, the sudden and abrupt single appearance of the pointed exclamation mark heralds a new phase of focus and passion by Cole. The story certainly reflects this, with some astonishing panels and art, such as this one (with dialogue removed):

which shows quite well Cole’s uncanny ability to draw the less defined “in-between” poses – almost as if he was able in his mind’s eye to freeze the frame of a movie and then draw that. In so doing, Cole’s “freeze-frame” technique delivers some of the most abstract and beautiful art seen in comics.

The “evil magician” plot of “Kra Vashnu” is one that Cole used over and over, starting with his third MIDNIGHT story in March, 1941. Cole revived his first evil magician, CHANG-O, in December, 1941 with “The Return of Chang-O.”

Still, Kra Vashnu is quite a diabolical foil, and his appearance is pleasingly bizarre, with his tattooed forehead, cape, platform shoes, and – strangest of all – his long, unclipped toenails (in one sequence, Woozy tries vainly to clip them).

The story does contain some of Cole’s trademark themes, including doubling (doppelganger) and identity shifting. There is also a vivid misogynistic murder and attempted suicide. In the story’s climax, Plastic Man is seemingly murdered, his corpse resembling a deflated, punctured balloon. All of these violent themes are surrounded with non-stop gags and brilliant art, making it a Jack Cole classic.

Plastic Man’s stretched poses and transformations are particularly brilliant in this story, as well, and worth paying attention to as you read this amazing story, which I have painstakingly digitally restored for your reading enjoyment:

 

FANNIE OGRE – Jack Cole’s Great Lost SPIRIT Story (1942)

THE SPIRIT first appeared as a weekly comic book insert. It was so successful that a daily newspaper strip soon followed. SPIRIT creator Will Eisner wrote and drew the first six weeks of the strip. When the wartime effort drafted Eisner into military service, Jack Cole took over the strip. In August, 1942, Cole left the strip to create a new back-up feature in the pages of Police Comics, a little thing called PLASTIC MAN.
A couple of years later, in 1944, Jack Cole wrote and penciled some of the SPIRIT Sunday comic book insert stories, which can be found here and here.
 
Cole’s work on the SPIRIT DAILIES runs from May 18, 1942 to August 8, 1942, and covers a complete storyline, start to finish. In this post, we share the complete story, which features the proto-typical Chester Gould/Jack Cole comic strip femme fatale, FANNIE OGRE.
There are several “tells” in the artwork itself that this sequence was mostly penciled, inked, and even lettered by Cole. The artwork strongly resembles his MIDNIGHT (which was created as a SPIRIT duplicate) stories of the same period, and uses many of the same characteristic visual elements, including:

• Decorative patterns
• Pointed exclamation marks
• Distinctive lettering (so that the simple sentence “Oh ho! Do I!” has a wealth of nuance and tonality)
• Extreme camera angle
• Funnel-shaped sound effects
• Speed lines and clouds that include the speed sound effects of “zip!”
• Beams of light slashing through darkness, usually with pointillism effects at the edges

Many of these devices can be spotted in the following two strips:

Aside from the art, the storytelling is classic Cole. In the example shown above, we have a casual graphic description of torture and dismemberment, with a comic edge!
After an introductory bit of comic business with Spirit assistant Ebony and his con-man cousin Scallywag, Cole teasingly introduces the grotesque figure of FANNIE ORGE, a youthful, shapely woman with a horribly wrinkled face… sort of a female Prune Face (Cole borrowed a lot from Chester Gould’s DICK TRACY, and never more so than in this early newspaper strip effort).
Cole’s graphic stories were filled with crazy inventions, and this story is no exception. A jar of magical beauty cream erases FANNIE’s wrinkles, bringing Cole’s core theme of shapeshifting and identity/face change to the fore.
When he created the character of PLASTIC MAN, Cole had the inspiration of tweaking the superhero origin story by making the non-super self a crook and then having the hero keep the identity of the criminal (for a while, at least). This same playfulness around the conventions of the crime-fighter hero story is evident in FANNIE ORGE, when she extracts a promise from THE SPIRIT to lay off crime-fighting until August 1 (co-incidentally PLASTIC MAN’s birth date, roughly).
The story ends with, yes, you guessed it.. a suicide. For a man who ended his life in suicide, it is haunting that so many of Jack Cole’s comic book stories include suicide. More people killed, or attempted to kill themselves in Jack Cole’s “funny” comic book stories than in any other series in the history of comics and, possibly literature.

FANNIE ORGE’s death is almost an exact copy of the ending of the classic 4th MIDNIGHT story, written and drawn by Jack Cole about 8 months earlier, with the silhouette of the plunging figure and the clock tower tolling the death knell. Ask not for whom the bell tolls… it tolls for thee.
With the exception of Cole’s last work on his newspaper comic strip Betsy and Me, this story represents the longest sustained graphic narrative of his career, at roughly the equivalent of 24 pages in comic book format (the longest PLASTIC MAN stories were 15 pages in length).
It is interesting to note how Cole’s treatment of Ebony prefigures PLASTIC MAN’s sidekick, Woozy Winks. This story is the missing link between Ebony White and Woozy Winks, and shows the creative cross-pollination that happened between Jack Cole and Will Eisner.
A disclaimer is also necessary here. Cole’s depiction of Black Americans (thousands of which were off fighting for the United States in World War Two when this story was created) is inexcusable. We present this work here not to put anyone down, but to look at the artistic development of an important figure in American art.
I hope you enjoy FANNIE OGRE, a lost classic dug up for you from the Cole-mine!