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.

Best Comics #2 (Dec 1939) - Jack Cole Cover Discovery!

It was one of those hot summer night phone conversations.

You know the kind. When the phone sticks to your ear with sweat, but you are your buddy are having such a great talk, you don't even notice.

Inevitably, my conversation with Frank Young turned to comics, and he casually mentioned, "Oh, by the way, I've found a new Jack Cole cover that probably not many people know about, if any." Through the magic of the Internet, I was looking at the cover of Best Comics #2 (December 1939, Nedor/Better/Standard) on my PC in minutes, and wow, did it blow me away!

What a great, iconic and yet unusual Golden Age cover! I asked Frank to write a few thoughts about it in a "guest posting" for this blog.

Frank Young is the former editor of The Comics Journal, and an accomplished comic book creator himself. Check out the blog on his and David Lasky's new graphic novel, Carter Family Comics - Don't Forget This Song, coming out from Abrams, here. And, of course, Frank is the creator and author of one of the best comic blogs on the Web, Stanley Stories, exploring the work of comics master John Stanley, and the inspiration for this here blog. Here's Frank's notes:

Published the same month as the debut issue of Silver Streak Comics [which starred Jack Cole's anti-hero THE CLAW], Best Comics was an early format experiment for the comic-book industry.

This comic book was printed sideways, or, to use modern computer-printer lingo, in the landscape format. According to the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, this title was also larger than the usual funnybook format, perhaps like Fiction House's Jumbo Comics. (The Overstreet Guide contains so much wrong information--including errors that have not been repaired in over 30 years of publication)that I'd believe this if/when I see an actual copy.

Best Comics #1 cover (not by Jack Cole)

Most Golden Age comics are proof of the adage, "you can't judge a book by its cover." Few popular culture entities are as powerful as the comic-book or pulp cover from the 1930s. The glorious come-ons of these covers almost never mirrored the tepid, half-formed contents beneath their shiny, bright faces.

Would that any moment of Best Comics had a twinkling of the dynamism, pep and visual flair of this unsigned but unmistakable Jack Cole cover. Alas, its contents, formatted to resemble counterfeit Sunday comics features, could put any live wire to sleep within moments.

Best Comics #4 cover (not by Jack Cole)

As one of our hero's first covers in the adventure/super-hero vein, this heretofore-unknown lump of Cole is a concealed diamond in thescattershot annals of early comic book publication.

Unless Cole did the covers for the other three issues of this short-lived title, I'd imagine this is his only landscape-format cover design. Cole makes impressive use of this unusual four-color canvas. I would imagine he had the contents of this half-baked issue described
to him on a penny postcard, hastily scrawled by the book's editor.

His depiction of THE RED MASK, a nicely-drawn but dreary sub-Phantom adventurer, hints at a bubbling excitement sure to stir any adolescent's heart. (Please note a very early "Female by Cole" at upper right corner of the cover. Cole had a long way to go before he would perfect the feminine form in his 1940s and '50s work.)

I quite like the orange-rimmed "cloud" that splits the two main action scenes of this cover. Cole made a habit of creating shapes in order toviolate them. In many of his covers and splash pages, strong geometric elements are judiciously placed so that human figures can bounce through, around, or over them. This is a simple but effective rough draft of Cole's developing flair for poster-like splash and cover schemes.

Delightful cartoon art rings these pulpy scenes of hot jungle action. Again, none of the actual renditions of these derivative humor features has a tenth of young Cole's zip and eagerness.

If Cole colored this cover, he did it well. The vivid figures sit on a bright yellow bed, accented with bold red. The blue modeling on the sailors' outfits provides an eye-catching contrast to the brighter primary colors that dominate the page. The odd glob of blue-green, atlower left, almost sabotages the cover's carefully balanced design. Because of the circles and diamonds that contain the book's backup features, this patch of blue doesn't detract from the overall effect.

Best Comics was a bust. Its publisher, Nedor/Better/Standard, rallied to become a major second-string comics publisher through the 1950s. While the content of their comics was seldom of interest, the company attracted a series of talented artists--of which Jack Cole was the first.

Judging from the small graphics of the other 3 covers, courtesy of the Grand Comics Database, it would seem that Cole's art only graced the second issue.

Best Comics #3 cover (not by Jack Cole)

If anyone has access to the other three issues of this title, and can inspect them for possible traces of Cole, please contact Cole's Comics!