Gold Thirsty Dogs (Blue Ribbon #3, Jan 1940)

Story presented in this post:

Blue Ribbon Comics #3 (Archie, Jan 1940) Crime on The Run (Story and art by Jack Cole)

In his second and last CRIME ON THE RUN story, Jack Cole delivered a wholly engrossing and exciting story. This time, the setting is in 1932 Los Angeles. As with the first story, Cole has made an effort to capture a few period details, as shown in the 1932 LA Times photo below of an LAPD policeman and plainclothes homicide detectives. Cole got the 3-piece suit right, although he gave his policemen jackets, which appears to be incorrect, based on this photo. One of his detectives has a pencil thin mustache, just like the detective in this photo.

Crime stories were already a big part of American movies and radio by 1939. The famous gangster film, Scarface, came out in 1932, and a chain gang of gangster films followed in its bloody footsteps. Lucky Strike cigarettes sponsored a popular nationwide radio program in ther 1930's dramatizing true life FBI cases. Cole was perhaps a bit ahead of his time by bringing the winning combination of moralism and graphic violence to comic books. Generally, the popular wave of American crime comics is considered to have begun in 1942, with the start of Charles Biro's Crime Does Not Pay series. (By the way, Biro drew the cover of Blue Ribbon Comics #3, a superhero scene, from which this story is taken).

As you might expect from Jack Cole, this story has a few quirky details. In the opening pages, the criminals are particularly sadistic. There's some great dialogue, including a detective referring to the criminals as "gold thirsty dogs," which I think would make a great title for a crime novel. On page 3, one of the criminal gang is revealed to be a black man, who is immediately shot to death and referred to as "the negro." Check out the cool drawing at the top of page 6 in which we get an aerial view of the climactic car chase. It was drawings like this that set Jack Cole above most of his peers. Cole was completely committed to the story.

The story delivers quite a bang when one of the victims of a bank robbery becomes so enraged, he grabs a gun, kills two of the criminals and chases the rest down the street. Look at how in this sequence (on page 3), Cole expands the panels out and pulls the camera back to sweeping long shots to emphasize the drama of the action. Cole would return to the true crime venue in 1947, designing and editing True Crime Comics (Magazine Village), in which his own stories would stand out as highlights of comic book history. In this January 1940 story, Jack Cole's gift is starting to accelerate and crime is literally on the run!

Crime on the Run (Blue Ribbon #1, 1939)

Story presented in this posting:

Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (November 1939, Archie) - Crime on the Run (Story and art by Jack Cole)

Jack Cole's 1947 True Crime comics are fairly well-known. They were examples of a supposed corruptive influence on America's youth in the infamous book, Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham. The stories were reprinted in the 1980's by Michael Gilbert in Mr. Monster's True Crime #1 and #2. In 2004, one of the True Crime stories was reprinted in Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits by Art Spiegelman and Chipp Kidd.

At the dawn of his career in comics, however. Cole took the "true crime" concept out for several trial runs. It's not yet clear what may have influenced Cole to create his series of gritty, pre-Dragnet police procedurals, but crime was obviously something that fascinated Cole.

Since we've been mining some of Cole's work at Archie, it seems right to continue by sharing the first of two true crime stories he made for Archie's Blue Ribbon Comics. Here, in late 1939, we see the embryonic efforts of Cole to draw realistically. After a year or two of this, he doffed the "realistic" straightjacket and unleashed his glorious natural cartooning ability in the work of the 1940's.

Although the draftsmanship is crude, the story displays Cole's solid sense of graphic design, and has some remarkable panels, such as page 4, panel 6, which almost looks like a woodcut. Perhaps more astutely, however, one can compare the art and tone in this story to the hard-boiled art of Chester Gould in his DICK TRACY strip, a likely influence on Jack Cole.

Quite rightly, Cole (or perhaps an editor) seemed to think that the fact the stories were true would make an impact. In this story, he starts by assuring us the story is taken from records and photographs in "Cleveland police files." It's my guess that Cole, who was cranking out comic pages to survive in New York City, probably did not journey to a Cleveland police station to research the story. More likely, Jack Cole lifted it from a magazine or book, or possibly even made it up.

It's interesting that this crime story, created in 1939, takes place in 1913, making it a historical story as well. Cole went to some lengths to show the cars, horse-drawn wagons, and clothing of the period, which suggests he probably did work from photographs.

In any event, here is CRIME ON THE RUN, in all it's grim glory. In our next post, we'll share the second story in this series.

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.