THE JERRY MORRIS CLAW STORIES – Dreamslaves and the fiery brilliance of youthful comic book invention

Stories in this post:

THE COMING OF THE CLAW
Story, art, lettering by Jack Cole
Silver Streak Comics #1
December, 1939
Lev Gleason

 

HIGHWAY OF ICE
Story, art, lettering by Jack Cole
Silver Streak Comics #2
January, 1940
Lev Gleason

 

 

In late 1939, Jack Cole got his first comic book to edit, Silver Streak Comics. The first two issues were filled with lackluster leftover Chesler shop stories, but no matter. The lead stories featured one of Cole’s most feverish creations: THE CLAW.

Cole developed THE CLAW for the next 10 issues, culminating in a 4-issue mash-up epic, “Daredevil Battles the Claw.” This inspired idea for expanding a story across issues and including the line’s best heroes and villains all in one story set the tone for the Golden Age era of comics.

The first two CLAW stories featured the “chemist-adventurer” JERRY MORRIS as the hero. After this, Cole would pit his gargantuan oriental nightmare against heroes who had superpowers. The first two CLAW stories are, in my opinion, pretty special.

JERRY MORRIS has no extraordinary physical powers, but he appears to have no fear and, best of all, he has the ability to create mind-boggling inventions. In Silver Streak #3, Cole would introduce an extraordinary, slightly auto-biographical story cycle about another inventor, DICKIE DEAN, BOY INVENTOR.

Crazy inventions were a major theme of Cole’s work, and a story device he turned to time and time again throughout his career.

In this first CLAW story, Jerry Morris invents a “radium serum” that makes him immune to the Claw’s ability to control others through their dreams. (See the post on “The Dictator of Dreams” from Police Comics #78, in which Cole returned to this idea as a mature artist).

 

The first CLAW story is filled with elements that would become obsessive mainstays of Cole’s work: fire and water, dark forces, dreams and the sub-conscious, and wild inventions.

In this story, both the hero and the villain have cool inventions. Cole devotes most of pages 8 and 9 to explain THE CLAW’s ingenious method for secretly stealing ships’ cargoes. Thus, THE CLAW’s power is built on both supernatural evil forces and modern technology!

In the second CLAW story, Cole takes a major leap forward as an artist. We move from the rather standard treatment of the Claw’s towering evil presence shown on page three in story one to the astonishingly weird and elegant pose of the villain on page 5 of the second story.

 

 

This story is one of Cole’s wildest ever, and that’s saying a lot. sheer imagination and quantity of the inventions alone is staggering. It’s not the inventions alone that make this story remarkable, but rather their unusual and poetic application.The idea of a car that can travel on top of the roaring ocean waves is a brilliant juxtaposition of modern technology and powerful natural forces. Cole would recycle this idea with a melting ray mounted on a car in a Midnight story a few years later.

This story ranks among the very best of Cole’s early stories, along with “Sounds From the Past” (Dickie Dean, Silver Streak Comics #3), “Wizard Ward and the Boat Race” (Quicksilver, National Comics #13), and the formally perfect fourth Midnight story from Smash Comics #21.

Much in the way Cole created the Plastic Man character out of an evil man, in an almost unconscious reversal of the typical formula, he started his own title without a featured hero and instead made the all-powerful occidental villain THE CLAW the focus of the book. Art Spiegelman said THE CLAW made Ming the Merciless look like Mother Theresa, and even that is an understatement!

The prime creators of the early Golden Age comics channeled the evil forces around them that were growing in power. In the second CLAW story, from 1940 (before the United States joined the war), Cole includes Hitler and Nazi Germany.

In these stories, Cole also showed his own inner demons and darkness. At the bottom of page 5 in story two, the page with the weirdly graceful pose of the villain, there is a vivid image of a suicide.

In some ways, this story, created early in Cole’s 16-year career in comics, is very similar to his last comic book story, “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill” (Web of Evil #11, 1954) also about a towering giant menace. The difference in the early CLAW stories and “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill,” is a shift in the way technology is viewed. In his last story, Cole’s giant monster is a scientist trying to accomplish something good, and in the end, he does this by killing himself…. a solution Cole would enact in his own life. In the early CLAW stories, however, Cole displays a wholehearted, youthful, fever-pitch enthusiasm for technology and the belief (for it is as much a belief system as any religion) that humanity can invent it’s way out of any crisis.

Jack Cole’s Comic Book Career – A Study

 Overview
Over the course of his 16-year career creating comic book stories, Jack Cole was astonishingly productive. I decided to make a stab at seeing just how productive one of the major creators in comics history actually was.
According to my findings, Jack Cole published approximately 3,600 comic book pages in 16 years, (give or take a couple hundred pages).
These are mostly pages that Cole:

• Wrote
• Penciled
• Lettered
• Inked
• Colored (on occasion)

In a word: wow. This output rivals anyone working in the same period in comics, including Simon and Kirby -- and there were TWO of them, or Will Eisner… and he had a whole shop of assistants (including Jack Cole for a brief stint).
The Impact of Plastic Man on Cole’s Career

Jack Cole will always be best known for Plastic Man, and that is where roughly two-thirds of his career output in comics lies. Out of a total of approximately 3,681 published pages of comics, 2,404 pages are Plastic Man stories.
However, that leaves  an impressive 1,277 pages of other work including:

• Crime on the Run (1939)
• Manhunters (1940)
• The Comet (1940)
• Dickie Dean – Boy Inventor (1940)
• The Silver Streak/Claw stories
• Midnight (1941-42, 1946-49)
• Death Patrol (1941, 1944)
• Angles O’Day (1951-53)
• Web of Evil stories (1952-54)

… and hundreds of funny and graphically inventive 1-pagers throughout the 1940’s, such as Windy Breeze.
Jack Cole’s work in comics is much more than just Plastic Man, as this blog attempts to show by exploring his lesser-known work.
Methodology
Mind you, these are all very rough numbers.
I arrived at this number by downloading the latest collection of listings of Jack Cole credits by year from the amazing and invaluable resource, the Grand Comics Database.
Next, I scoured each month of every year and listed Cole’s published pages by month and year. For all it’s merit, the Grand Comics Database listing has several errors, which I corrected.
Eventually, I arrived at a rough total for each year. Here’s a chart that illustrates my findings:

This chart omits 1 known page published in 1937 (Funny Pages Vol2, #1) and lops off Cole’s final 7-page comic book story published in Web of Evil #11 in February, 1954, The Monster They Couldn’t Kill.
After 1946, some of the Plastic Man stories that were published were NOT by Jack Cole at all. Therefore, to determine Cole’s actual page count on the Plastic man material, I referenced Ron Goulart’s book, Focus on Jack Cole (Fantagraphics Books, 1986), which contains a detailed checklist of Police Comics and Plastic Man. In many cases, my own conclusions, based on study of the actual stories, do not agree with Goulart’s, and so I also made adjustments to the page count, using my own findings.
The numbers were harder to estimate in Cole’s final years, because his visual style shifted and it’s my own conclusion that several of the last original stories in the Plastic Man title were written, penciled, and often inked by Cole. Also, after 1947, Cole’s pages were often inked by others. This chart does not distinguish between pages Jack Cole totally created, and ones that others inked. It also counts covers as single pages of comic book art.
The 1943-44 numbers do not take into account Jack Cole’s work ghosting the Spirit stories. This part of Cole’s career is, as of yet, not defined, and therefore could not be included. It would likely add 50-100 pages to the overall numbers to include the Spirit stories Cole wrote and penciled.
It must be stressed that my numbers are not definitive or exact. However, I do think they are within a 10% percent range and therefore can provide useful insight into Cole’s career.
The Peak Years: 1943-47
In looking at a monthly breakdowns of 1943-47, Jack Cole’s peak years of production, we can see what an impact the introduction of a Plastic Man comic book made on Cole’s career.
The first issue of Plastic Man was published in June, 1944. This chart effectively shows Cole’s published page count for that month effectively doubles to an astonishing 56 pages!
Plastic Man #1 is pure Jack Cole, cover to cover, and represents one of the crowning achievements of his entire career. The creation of this comic book must have been a huge effort for Cole, and represents his development into a mature, established professional at the top of his form. It certainly put Cole into an even higher level of production and opportunity.
The following year, in 1944, Jack Cole produced 354 pages … an average of almost a page a day!

Once again, we can see what a huge impact the Plastic Man title made on Cole’s career. This second issue, also the loving work of work Cole cover-to-cover, was even better than the first! During 1944, Cole also created 12 Plastic Man stories in Police Comics that were 15 pages each (an unusually large number of pages given to a comic feature – by comparison, Superman and Batman lead stories ran 10-12 pages).
In this same year, Cole also created the brilliant second run of Death Patrol stories, some Spirit stories ( a probable example of which can be read here), some back-up filler stories (Blimpy and Inkie), the origin and first two adventures of The Barker, and about 45 great one-pagers. Whew! In 1944, Cole was on fire!
Somewhere, it’s been suggested that Cole took on extra work in 1943-7 because many of the top cartoonists (such as Will Eisner) were serving the war effort. It’s also thought that Cole was anticipating getting the call to serve himself (he didn’t) and so wanted to build up a cash reserve for his wife, Dorothy, in case he would be unable to earn for a year or more.
In 1945, Cole’s production dropped down a little as he settled into steady production of the 15-page Plastic Man stories in Police Comics and his regular run of 1-pagers that appeared throughout the Quality titles.

In 1946, the Plastic Man title went quarterly. Although issue #4 had to be created by other writers and artists, Cole managed to double his feat of previous years by producing two complete issues (#3 and #5) in one year!

Cole’s published work was a mixture of pages in which he did everything, and pages to which he only contributed writing and pencils. Therefore, even though the number is high, Cole’s overall involvement is not as intense. Nonetheless, he produced many brilliant stories in this year. The work in which he was fully involved ranks among some of best comic ever done.
The Thinking Machine (Police Comics 54, May 1946) was the first Plastic Man story to appear in Police Comics that has no involvement from Cole at all. The story, a disappointing effort, was likely drawn by Andre LeBlanc. In 1998, when I thought Cole had written and drawn every Plastic Man story, I won a copy of this comic on eBay. I was quite let down and puzzled by how dull it was. Quite likely, astute Plastic Man readers in 1947 felt the same way.

In 1947, Cole duplicated his heroic 1946 feat with two issues of Plastic Man, and bettered it by creating a whole new comic book title featuring his writing and art (with help from Alex Kotzky) called True Crime Comics #2 (there was no number 1).
In looking at the production of 1943-47, we see Cole achieving success with Plastic Man and then, almost as quickly, losing control of his creation and being forced to allow others to create less inspired copies of his work. Perhaps this is one reason Cole took on the creation of a new magazine for a different publisher (Magazine Village).
In any case, the statistics show Cole was at his peak when he made the True Crime stories. In the May, 1947 issue the infamous Murder, Morphine, and Me appeared. One panel from this story was used by the infamous Dr. Fredric Wertham in his scathing attack on comic books, Seduction of the Innocent.

In his book (co-authored by Chip Kidd), Forms Stretched to Their Limits: Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Art Spiegelman astutely writes of this story: “It is also among the most formally sophisticated comics stories I’ve ever seen; all the elements, including the panel shapes and the lettering, are deployed for narrative effect.”
The same could be said of much of Cole’s best work in his peak years. For example, the “trembling” panel effect was used several times in other stories.
However, there can be no doubt that Cole’s work reached a lofty, near superhuman peak with Murder, Morphine and Me. Although the rest of the stories in the book were inked by Alex Kotzky, Cole did everything on this one story… no doubt a pet project.
Certainly this feverish, intense story ranks among the ten most important works in Cole’s career, and one of the stand-out comic book stories of all time. In this story, the unique graphic storytelling vernacular Cole had developed up to this point crystallizes into a thing of beauty. All of his major themes are present in this story: the slippery-ness of identity, the potential for abuse and cruelty that exists, and horrific retribution.
Here then, to close out this article and provide you with something fun to read, is the complete story, in all it’s astonishing glory (thanks to Cole’s Comics supporter Daryl Aylward for the scans).
Murder, Morphine, and Me True Crime Comics Vol.1 #2 (May, 1947)
Writing, pencils, inks, and lettering by Jack Cole

The Barker, Part 3: The Klaus Nordling Connection, and a Surprise Late-Career Return to Early Form

There’s a lot of cross-over between the careers and styles of Jack Cole and Klaus Nordling. “Thin Man,” one of Nordling’s earliest stories (from August, 1940) not only vaguely resembles Jack Cole’s work of the same period, but it also presents the origin of a character who can stretch his body, pre-dating Plastic Man by a full year.

From Mystic Comics #4 (August, 1940, Timely)

 

The story, when compared with Cole’s Plastic Man origin story from Police Comics #1,  is a good illustration of both the similarity and the difference between the two men’s approaches. Both stories are solid and imaginative, but Cole started with a crook and made him go good, turning the superhero myth inside out and establishing a sly tone of satire and self-parody that made Cole’s Plas stories a cultural landmark.

By the way, the THIN MAN didn’t catch on and the character was gone by issue 5, appearing only once. (He was brought back in the 1970’s)

At his best, Nordling matches Cole’s nothing-held-back commitment to the story. Just as Cole’s stories can transport you to a world all their own, the best of Nordling’s stories – especially the longer ones - are equally atmospheric.

Klaus Nordling was a Finnish-American writer-artist who worked in comics from the 40’s through the 70’s. He broke in through Will Eisner’s studio, and became one of Quality Comics’ best writer-artists.

His best-known feature was LADY LUCK, which appeared in various Spirit sections, as a back up in various Quality comics, and eventually in its own title (here Nordling hit a peak with long, funny, off-beat stories and a personal investment that matches the way Cole wrote and drew Plastic Man and Woozy Winks).

For more information on Nordling, read the Wikipedia article on him.

Nordling took over THE BARKER, the colorful feature in National Comics that Jack Cole and writer Joe Millard created (see earlier posts here and here) with the series’ third story. His style was similarly cartoony to Cole’s, and his sense of humor and imagination made him a natural to take a world Cole designed and flesh it out. He kept Cole’s character designs, right down to Col. Lane’s checkered vest. But he also layered on his own rich cast of oddballs.

Building on the Millard-penned BARKER story from National #43 (see here), in the fourth-ever Barker story, Nordling plays his own broadly comical riff on the mythical carnie story about a small town crook who tries to get the upper hand on the travelling carnival.

From National Comics 45 (Dec. 1944 – Quality)

 

The lisping, crooked mayor is particularly pungent in this story. Like Cole, Nordling built whole stories around strange, cartoony villains. Both men were likely heavily influenced in this by Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy stories, which splintered the human psyche into a bevy of bizarre bad guys.

Nordling wrote and drew BARKER stories from National Comics #44 to #67. In Autumn, 1946 the character got his own comic, starting with The Barker #1. Most of the 15-issue run was written and drawn by Nordling, although clearly other hands were involved. For over 30 years, each annual edition of Overstreet’s Comic Book Price Guide has listed Jack Cole as one of these hands. Here is the listing from the 39th edition of Overstreet’s:

How poetic it seems that Jack Cole contributed the first and last appearance of this wonderful character. The lead story in The Barker #15 has a definite dark, psycho-comics Cole feel, as inky black dark waters literally drag the characters down. Also, there’s a drawing of a sexy drenched damsel that barks (if you will) Cole’s touch:

 

It’s unclear if Cole penciled the whole story and Nordling inked it. The inking is so black and unlike Nordling’s airy feel that I almost want to say that Cole is inking Nordling’s pencils! Why this would be, I have no idea. I actually think Nordling had nothing to do with this story and more likely one of Cole’s tried-and-true assistants, such as Alex Kotzky or John Spranger did a lot of the inking and finishes. I think it’s very likely that Cole wrote this story, as it has dark overtones, typical of his later work. See for yourself:

From The Barker #15 (December, 1949 – Quality)

It’s interesting to reflect that Jack Cole was probably ghosting here for a fellow artist who got into deadline trouble. The same thing happened with Cole when Plastic Man became a monthly comic and other writers and artists were brought in to meet the demand that Cole, as prolific as he was, could not keep up by himself. Perhaps there was a deadline crunch and Cole, always scouting around for more work, and the original artist, after all, may have been asked to help out in an ironic twist.

In any case, the way the extraordinary splash page (no pun intended!) works as both an intro to the story by showing a vignette of the climax and as a kind of symbolic picture of the power of the sub-conscious, suggests that Jack Cole wrote and drew this story. In this respect, the story feels very much like Cole’s multi-level Web of Evil stories of the early 1950’s.

The use of water as a compelling visual and symbolic device reminds me of a great 1940 story Cole did with his semi-autobiographical character DICKIE DEAN (see here) in which the drawings of water have the same inky-black darkness as the images in the above Barker story.

The note at the bottom of the above Overstreet’s entry for The Barker is intriguing: “Cole art in some issues.” I’ve scoured several issues of the Barker and one story does stand out for it’s dark atmosphere, jam-packed story, and general weirdness. I think it’s a lost Jack Cole gem.

from The Barker #6 (Winter, 1948 – Quality Comics)

     

Why these two stories are signed by Klaus Nordling when Cole worked on them is a mystery. Perhaps there’s a clue in this quote from Quality editor Gill Fox about Nordling:

“Nordling was a little guy. Good-looking. And involved in local theatre. He had a very vivid imagination and was a good writer. In later years I'd send some work in his direction. But if you did something for him, he'd think you wanted something back. We got to know each other socially, but he still mistrusted people. Even me.”

Perhaps there had been a promise to Nordling to “brand” the Barker stories with his name as he built a career. Or, perhaps the editor of the book wanted to avoid conflict. Or… perhaps I am wrong and this is all the work Nordling, but after studying the comic book stories of Jack Cole intensely for the last eight months, these stories feel like Cole to me, even though it’s hard to be 100% certain.

This is a pretty clever story, you’ll probably agree. I think there’s a case to made for this being a Cole script and pencils with Klaus Nordling providing the inking and finishes. Just the imagery of the carnival setting up on the side of hill in front of a deserted ghost town alone is enough to convince me. Here’s yet another of those weird, veiled stories in which Cole’s sub-conscious seems to be saying something is not right. I get this sense very strongly in the beautifully cinematic night-time scenes, like this one:

We also get Cole’s core theme of shape-changing when Carnie Callahan (The Barker) disguises himself as a western owl hoot. And there’s the doppelganger theme that Cole toyed with throughout his career, when the performers of one circus go to battle with their alter egos who work for the rival circus.

The pacing, the richness of ideas, and the sheer quantity of ideas feel very much like a typical overstuffed Jack Cole story. In fact, this story is really quite a lost gem. The old western towns have a palpable presence. When you read the story, you can feel the “Cole magic.”

Whenever Cole set a story in the old west it was always vivid. Perhaps that’s due to his own vivid impression gained by biking through the western desert of the United States when he was only 18. See my article about his epic bike trip here.

The story also has several instances of some of Jack Cole’s oft-used graphic devices, or “Cole-isms,” as I call them (see here). One such Cole-ism is depicting a crowd in a very interesting way in which each person is more realized than a comic book artist of this era would typically bother with. You can see this in the night-scene panel above.

Also silhouetting the tents, banners, and circus roustabouts is very typical of Cole’s work. Lastly, his use of a full moon in story, 5 times times by my count, is something Cole’s drawings are filled with.

This is a very special story. In this story, Cole returned to his earlier style and also recovered, for the span of these 14 pages, the youthful exuberance and astonishing energy of his best early 1940’s graphic narratives. This story feels like the early MIDNIGHT, QUICKSILVER, and PLASTIC MAN stories.

Jack Cole would soon hit a wall in comics, as he personally became burned out and as the industry changed rapidly and classified him as too old-school for their needs. He would become a major magazine cartoonist and then create his own successful syndicated newspaper strip (Betsy and Me).

But back in early 1948, Cole somehow brought back some of the style and energy of his early 1940’s work, and created a lost gem in the back pages of an obscure comic.