Speed on Paper (Police Comics 95, 1949)

One of the hallmarks of the comic book work of Jack Cole is his seemingly inexhaustable ability to invent ways to depict three-dimensional movement on the static, two-dimensional printed page. Cole's comics are all about speed and movement. Consider some of his early creations: THE COMET and THE SILVER STREAK.

In his mature work, of which the story from Police Comics #95 (1949) presented here is a prime example, Jack Cole infused nearly every panel with something to indicate motion. He used anatomical distortion, speed lines, multiple images, blurry images, puffs of smoke, and the displacement of objects to suggest motion.

Sometimes, he even used the body of Plastic Man himself, stretched and twisted in reaction to the bullet-like propulsion of another character, as though the very air were being pushed back so forcefully that it pulled Plastic Man's body like a Jello sculpture inhaled by a vacuum cleaner.

At times, the images begin to resemble the deconstructionist/cubist artwork of the early 20th century. Compare the Pablo Picasso painting below, Girl With Dark Hair, and the panel taken from our featured Cole story at the top of this posting.

Jack Cole fan and expert, Art Spiegelman drew a marvellous cover for the April 17, 1999 issue of The New Yorker (which included his landmark essay on Jack Cole, later expanded into the totally awesome book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits) which gets at the same point.



Cole's art sometimes transcends the plot, and becomes a surreal excursion into what the world would look like if you could freeze-frame it and then make it two-dimensional. In some of his work from the late 1940's, I can't help but marvel at Jack Cole's miraculous drawings that showed several moments in time in a single panel. One thinks of Marcel Duchamp's famous painting of 1913, Nude Descending a Staircase.


High-falutin' comparisons to famous fine art, aside, the effects of motion and speed in Cole's comic book art are just plain fun to look at. Somehow, by showing the characters of his stories in motion, the stories become even funnier. We get a sense of what the character's body language is saying, which is often in comic contrast to their dialogue. Compare the self-proclaimed mastery of power of the villain's dialogue in the story presented here with his baby-like body movements.

I think Cole might have been a great animated cartoon director, if he had chosen to go that path. In his comic book work, he came to think in terms of motion, not static images stuck in square boxes. By the late 1940's, Cole routinely worked on a lofty level of graphic sophistication that few others have ever touched.

In December of 2008, the perpetually pleasing Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine posted one of the greatest examples of Jack Cole's speed on paper, the Plastic Man story from Police Comics #95 (1949). Thanks, Pappy! View it here.

Jack Cole's Influences - Bill Holman

Story presented in this posting:

Blue Ribbon Comics #2 (December 1939, Archie) - Knight Off (1 page) Story and art by Jack Cole

Every so often in our extended study of Jack Cole, it will prove insightful to consider what his influences might have been.

The greatest screwball comedy strip of all time, SMOKEY STOVER by Bill Holman, began appearing in newspapers in 1935. That was the year Jack Cole left his home town in Pennsylvania for the urban canyons of Manhattan to seek fortune and fame as a comic strip artist. Much like Cole's early work, the Smokey Stover dailies and sundays were jam-packed with gags. Some of the gags were visual puns, some were verbal, and some were just pulled out of the ether, such as the repeated use of the word "foo." Holman, shown below, was a true master of the form and it seems very likely Cole was influenced by his work.

It may be that Holman, who was 11 years older than Cole, blazed a path into fast-paced screwy satire on which Cole followed, paved, painted, and installed street signs.



Smokey Stover was a fireman, and often the strips involved the characters frantically running to put out a fire, exchanging vaudeville-style jokes as they zipped along. You got your money's worth with Smokey Stover, since Holman often stuffed his pages with jokes. I count 13 jokes in this 6-panel sunday strip, taken from Four Color #64 (Dell, no date on the issue), one of several Four Color issues devoted entirely to reprints of Holman's work.


Compare to Jack Cole's zany one-pager below, from Blue Ribbon Comics #2 (Dec 1939, Archie). Cole contributed 17 pages to the first issue of Blue Ribbon, and 6 pages in the third issue, before moving on to bigger and better things. He only had one page in Blue Ribbon #2, but what a page! Aside from what must surely be one of the strangest panel layouts of 1939, what strikes me is the strong similarities with Smokey Stover. Our characters are running with Holman hoses to put out a fire, the knight inexplicably has a weather vane on his head, and there's a flash fire of jokes.

If you'd like to see more of Bill Holman's brilliant work, be sure to visit http://www.smokey-stover.com/, created by his nephew, Victor Paul, and loaded with great Holman comics. Here now a little gem by Jack Cole, no doubt inspired by the wacky work of comics master Bill Holman.

The Higrass Twins (Target Comics, 1940)

Stories presented in this posting:

Target Comics Vol.1 #1 (Feb. 1940, Novelty Press) - Higrass Twins (4 pages, Cole story and art)

Target Comics Vol.1 #2 (March 1940, Novelty Press) - Higrass Twins (4 pages, Cole story and art)

Target Comics Vol.1 #4 (May 1940, Novelty Press) - Higrass Twins ( 3 pages, Cole story and art)


In the first four issues of Novelty Press' long-running Target Comics, Jack Cole contributed a wacky humorous filler he called THE HIGRASS TWINS. Here, we present the stories from issues 1, 2, and 4. If anyone should happen to find Cole's story from Target Comics Vol. 1 #3, please email me and I'll post it on this blog.

Cole's work on The Higrass Twins is slapdash, but also brilliant and funny. The setting and characters are drawn on the folk stereotypes of rural country people sometimes called "hillbillies." Cole's ear for dialogue is especially keen and funny here with such words as "fokes" (folks), "thut" (that), and "we-uns." In one memorable piece of dialogue, one of the twins says "Thuh nerve uv some polepussys!!" (polecats).

Jack Cole was in good company in Target Comics. These early issues of Target Comics also featured a western hero by Bill Everett, a creepy superhero by Carl Burgos, and an eclectic mix of subjects into which Cole's hillbilly stories seemed to be just another part of a patchwork quilt of concepts. Later issues of Target Comics would feature Basil Wolverton's brilliant SPACEHAWK stories.

Cole must have thought hillbillies were funny, because he used the setting in several Plastic Man stories, and drew most of the 1-pager fillers of the hillybilly-themed SLAP-HAPPY PAPPY in Quality's Crack Comics (although his friend Gil Fox created the character, and authored the first few stories).

In the sadly long-out-of-print History of Comics, Volume 2 (1972), Jim Steranko devoted an entire chapter to Jack Cole. It remains one of the most well-researched and detailed pieces on Cole. In this essay, Steranko, referring to the character of Woozy Winks, writes "Here was Cole as he felt others saw him: an unsophisticated, foot-shuffling country yokel..."

I think, in the Higrass Twins stories, Cole is traveling the same psychological territory. He invites us to chuckle at the coarse ways and ignorant misunderstandings of the backwoods bumpkins in this series, and -- a small towner hustling in the big city, himself -- he makes sure the twins win out in the end.

The first story, from Target Comics Vol. 1 #1 (Feb. 1940) centers on the infantalism of adults (something that I now know some adults find fetishistic sexual pleasure in, thanks to the Internet!). The twins are brought by competing storks (shades of George Herriman) and mature into full-grown adult men, but are duped into believing they are still infants by their hillbilly parents. One day, Pappy decides to play a grand joke on the twins and tell them they are grown up. Maw gets so mad, she then diapers and infantilizes the grey-bearded pappy!

The second Higrass Twins story, from Target Comics Vol. 1 #2 (March 1940) story plays off the idea that drinking moonshine will make you see double.

Our third Higrass Twins story (the fourth and last Cole did) is from Target Comics Vol. 1 #4 (May 1940). I was particularly excited to find this story, as it is an outstanding example of Cole's fascinating face-changing theme (see the first posting on this blog, "The Eel-Like Slipperiness of Identity"). The last two pages are filled with Cole's trademark furious windmill hand movements that miraculously result in the re-arrangement of facial features. It's funny that the twins remain twins, even when their faces are changed!