Machines of Death and Betrayal: A Nightmarish Comic Book World of Lies and No Redemption

Story presented this post:
The Man Who Died Twice
Story and pencils by Jack Cole
Inker unknown
Web of Evil #5 (July, 1953 – Quality Comics)

Note: For more on Jack Cole’s Web of Evil stories, his dark and strange last comic book stories, see my previous posting here.

This clever and disturbing story reads like an inky black film noir story turned inside out.

Or, perhaps more accurately, like a particularly morbid Alfred Hitchcock film. This is a story that David Mamet, the modern-day Hitchcock, could have written and directed. Cole devilishly plays with our expectations. Inserted into a comic book series filled with supernatural horror stories, and appearing on the stands among numerous other comic books that laid out straight horror stories, Cole tricks us into believing that we are reading a supernatural, back-from-the-death horror story.

Starting with Cole’s memorable cover, in which a man grotesquely laughs while strapped into an electric chair, we are both drawn in and duped.

Cole’s story, which as the lead spot in this issue, begins with a ludicrous – but nonetheless compelling -- splash page that in no way reflects the reality of the narrative, as the condemned prisoner, Les Paley, appears to be springing from the electric chair, revitalized by the surges of energy through his body. In the narrative (also false), Paley appears to be executed without incident – certainly there is no bounding up from the chair. Thus, before the plot begins, Cole has primed us for a set of events that actually never transpire. By the time we realize this, he has pulled off the virtuoso feat of delivering something even more engrossing than a man openly defying execution.

Cole’s writing is particularly vivid in this story, as in the narration for the scene of Paley’s execution:

“A human body strains as the lightning of legal vengeance smashes through its tissues.”

Cole is not merely being prosaic; his intensity helps to convince us that an execution is actually happening.

In literature and cinema, we find the concept of the unreliable narrator. That is, the person telling the story is lying, for their own purposes. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film, STAGE FRIGHT (which Cole may well have seen), the story famously begins with a long flashback sequence in which a woman appears to have committed murder, and a man appears to be seduced into covering up the killing to protect her. It is not until the final minutes of the film that we learn the shocking truth that what we thought was the story turns out to be a deception aimed at both characters within the story, and the viewers. Here, in “The Man Who Died Twice,” Jack Cole reaches new heights of sophistication by seamlessly integrating an unreliable narrator into a linear graphic narrative.

It is not until the last two pages of the 9-page story that we learn the execution was staged to fool both the people watching AND the man being executed. Up until this point, the story plays like a supernatural horror story. Part of the genius of this story lies in that Cole’s ability to convince us a man could actually believe he had died and came back to life.

After Paley’s “resurrection,” rays of heavenly light (also present in his trail scene) stream down on him, suggesting both an unearthly presence, and Paley’s own interior state of mind. His head, shorn for the metal helmet of the electric chair, makes him look saintly, as one who has renounced the pleasures of the physical world.

The rays come from the funeral director LeMort’s machine which supposedly brought Paley back from the dead and is keeping him alive. Thus, LeMort assumes godlike proportions, with the power to bestow life and to take it away with the flip of a switch. Of course, the resurrection machine is phoney, one of the rare instances in Jack Cole’s work when a crazy invention is a deception instead of the real thing – a sure sign that Cole was undergoing a personal transition tinged with disillusionment.

But Paley’s spiritual redemption is short-lived. “You… you did this for me?” Paley says to Cora, the woman who professes to love him. After a scant few panels, Cora has convinced Paley he must do as the funeral director, Le Mort (translates as “The Dead”) bids him: murder three people.

As he stumbles out to perform his terrible task, fate intervenes, and Paley runs into the path of a speeding car, which hits him and then speeds away (wheels within wheels: we get a momentary glimpse of the drama of the people in the car as the driver is commanded by a passenger to leave the accident since no one saw… another incident of a person being victimized and torn down by their involvement with someone less moral).

After being hit, in a spectacular panel in which his body is contorted like Plastic Man’s, Paley wonders if he is dead or alive. He rushes to the home of the doctor he was planning to kill minutes earlier, but now to ask for help. In an instant, the situation has changed, and just as quickly, it evolves again into something else when the doctor cowers at the sight of Paley and confesses his involvement in faking Paley’s death. The story is staggering and whirling like Paley’s body when it was grazed by the hit-and-run driver. It is a tribute to Cole’s mastery as a graphic storyteller that we are never lost in this convoluted narrative.

Now Paley knows the truth: he is alive, and his beloved Cora is only using him. Driven by cold rage, he exacts his revenge despite being shot nine times by LeMort.

The story, which began as a horror story, seemingly ends as one when the authorities in the last panel are stunned to realize that somehow Paley managed to kill Cora and Le Mort 24 hours after he was executed. While some of the characters in the story continue to be fooled by the brilliant deception, we the reader have come through the mirror, and know the truth. This is a story on a spit; it turns and turns on itself until finally the depths the characters sink to are far more disturbing than hoary supernatural phenomena.

Cole did not call this “The Man Who Came Back From The Dead.” Even though we were fooled, Cole gave us the ending from the start with the fatalistic noir title: “The Man Who Died Twice.” The title works on several levels, since Paley loses all faith and hope when he learns of his betrayal by the woman he loves and his spirit does truly die.

Was this a prefiguring of events that were, or would transpire in Cole’s life? It has been speculated, but never established, that infidelity may have been part of Cole’s reason for taking his own life. © 2009 Paul Tumey

Happy All Hallows Eve – The Strange Dark Last Comic Book Stories of Jack Cole – Web of Evil 6 (1953)

The last comic book stories of Jack Cole are not what you’d expect. They are not fun; they are dark and disturbing.

They are an aborted new direction, truncated before it was barely begun. They are the end of a brilliant career. They are the last graphic stories by a master of the form who moved into new art forms and never looked back. These stories are deeply flawed, mostly failed efforts, and represent the mind of a great artist cracking. They are burn out, brilliance, and a bizarre foreshadowing of death.

After PLASTIC MAN ended, Cole created a comical private detective and a rich William Saroyan-like cast of characters. He called the series ANGLES O’DAY (you can read the stories and my essay on them here) and it appeared in the pages of Ken Shannon 1-8, an otherwise bland private eye comic published by his primary employer, Quality Comics. The ANGLES stories represent Jack Coles last lighthearted humor stories.

The very last ANGLES O’DAY story dropped most of the comedy and instead shifted into a grim, horrific world in which frightening supernatural events were the order of the day. Cole’s art even changed. His line became heavier, his panels were filled with menacing shadows.

In November, 1952 Quality stepped into the horror comic market with a new book: Web of Evil. It was clearly designed to be a new home for the work of Jack Cole, their premier talent who found himself adrift when his main superhero series had lost traction and faded away.

It seems a safe guess that Cole himself had a hand in the book’s creation and choice of his own direction. It strikes me as a little odd that he would swing so fully into the horror market, since the best selling comics of the period were romance and girlie comics (such as Quality’s TORCHY). Cole could draw sexy women so well that he would soon create the quintessential Playboy magazine cartoons. His stories through the 1940’s were populated with alluring examples of womanhood. Perhaps Cole could not stomach the inane conventions of the romance, girlie comic genre. Perhaps his stuff was too adult for the intended market. Or, perhaps Cole , who had a flowering career as a magazine cartoonist in men’s magazines, simply wanted to try a new direction and see what he could do with it.

Cole stayed on the title for about a year and half, until issue 11. He had the lead story spot in issues 1-9 and 11 (issue 10 had no Cole stories). He drew most of the covers, and many issues of Web of Evil contained two Jack Cole stories.

To say the Web of Evil stories are “Jack Cole stories,” may be a bit misleading. While it’s clear that Cole penciled all of these stories, his writing and inking contributions are harder to determine. In Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, Art Spiegleman writes: “… these horror comics, often scripted and barbarically inked by others look as if they were done for the money.” Cole’s other two biographers to date, Jim Steranko and Ron Goulart, offer no commentary at all on Cole’s last stories.

With the greatest of respect for Art Spiegelman, I see a lot of effort put into Jack Cole’s last comic book stories. These stories contain some of the most visually complex panels and images Cole ever created. His signature figure distortion has been re-purposed from comedy to creepiness, but it is just as brilliant.

The stories are all unsigned and uncredited. As far as anyone has been able to determine, no records of who worked on this title exist. It seems a safe bet to assume that in some cases the stories were inked by Cole’s protégé Alex Kotzky. A few years earlier, in 1947, Cole and Kotzky created the intense two issues of TRUE CRIME, and some of the art in the Web of Evil stories looks very similar to this work, reaching similar levels of atomic-powered intensity.

While I am unsure of which stories, if any Cole inked, I feel fairly certain about which stories Cole wrote. Cole’s 16 Web of Evil stories fall into two types: Unexplained Supernatural Events and Psychological Breakdowns. It seems pretty obvious to me that Cole wrote the stories that fall into the latter category.

In the Unexplained Supernatural Events, characters come against bizarre circumstances, such as severed hands that still seem alive, or magic spells that somehow reanimate the dead . The characters inevitably fall victim to these terrifying phenomena, but no explanation is ever provided for the existence of these mysterious situations. They simply happen. These scripts are sloppy and tedious, and often even Cole’s extraordinary drawings cannot make them more than barely entertaining.

In the second category of stories, which I think Cole wrote, and which I call Psychological Breakdowns are better written and have clever, surprising plot twists.

These stories include:

The Killer From Saturn (Web of Evil #3)
The Man Who Died Twice (Web of Evil #5)
Orgy of Death (Web of Evil #6)
The Spectre’s Face (Web of Evil #6)
Death Prowls the Streets (Web of Evil #8)
A Pact With The Devil (Web of Evil #9)
The Monster They Couldn’t Kill (Web of Evil #11)

In these stories the resulting horrific events are always shown to be result of a character’s mental breakdown. For example, in “The Killer From Saturn,” (which Art Spiegleman asserts is purely Cole’s work), it appears that a wildly frightening alien from outer space has landed in an American city and is murdering its inhabitants without cause or discernable reason. In the end, we learn the monster is actually a slight, timid man who has gone mad, dressing up in a monster costume and killing in a twisted form of revenge and ego gone wild.

Further evidence that Jack Cole wrote these lies in the fact that the stories all play with the theme, coming at from different angles, which is very typical of Cole’s restless, inventive mind. In the story below, from Web of Evil #6 (Sept. 1953), a contract killer appears to have stepped into the Twilight Zone:

Cole’s stories pulled the title out of a standard horror realm, and stretched the series into crime and science fiction as well. Instead of a horror story, Cole would write a crime story as if it were a horror story, playing with reader expectations.

These stories of people cracking under stress poignantly foreshadow the remainder of Jack Cole’s life. After completing these stories, Cole not only left a dying industry for good, but also referred to his brilliant and accomplished career in demeaning terms. There can be no doubt there were hard feelings for Cole under the surface. In one story, which may or no be true, Cole is said to have taken his portfolio to DC (National) and was rejected.

It may be that Cole was burned out in comics. He wouldn’t have been the first. Another Quality comics staffer killed his own wife and went to prison. Quality Comics artist and editor Gill Fox said later that the grind of the 1940’s in comics got to many people. It’s rarely acknowledged that these “funnybooks” of the forties about colorful heroes, goofy characters, and sexy girls were created by people working long, grueling hours in a seemingly never-ending cycle to support their families.

Four years after he left comics, Cole took his own life in a fit of despair. His last stories, filled with darkness, images of suffering, and turning on mental breakdowns can be understood in the shadows of this disturbing event. As readers familiar with Cole’s work know, there were traces of darkness all along. In “The Eyes Have It” (Police Comics #22, Sept. 1943), Cole deals with child abuse and exacts retribution on the abuser by severing his head from his body with a bear trap. Many of his “funny” stories throughout the 1940’s involve the characters attempting or actually committing suicide.

It is often said that comedians are the most depressed people. Perhaps it is the ability to see the truth and use this perception to create laughter that also burdens them with melancholy. It seems that in his last comic book stories, Jack Cole, one of comic’s true masters of comedy was trying to come to grips, through his art, with his darker side.

Next post, we’ll look at another Cole-scripted Web of Evil story, one which bears all the hallmarks of his obsessions!

BLIMPY – The Wild Cartoon Satyr PAN Goes Nuts in one of Cole’s Busiest Months Ever

 Story in this post:
Blimpy - “The Satyr Strikes”
Story and art by Jack Cole
Feature Comics #76 (March, 1944)

In March, 1944, Quality’s comic magazines published nearly 40 pages of work by Jack Cole. Considering that Cole was doing it all: writing, penciling, inking, lettering, and probably even coloring -- his rate of more than a page a day is pretty impressive. The heavy workload for this period probably explains the less detailed look of this BLIMPY story, although Cole was also fitting his work into the previously established look and feel created by Quality Comics staffer Tony DiPreta.

In this story, Cole’s imagination and sense of fun are fully engaged as he has the brilliant idea of inserting the sex-crazed PAN into the otherwise bland and pre-pubsescent world of BLIMPY. Check out the sexy girl on page 5, panel 6 (wolf whistle).

Cole even directs his satyr into a burlesque show… with predictably comical results!

In the splash panel, the over-sexed satyr seems to be dragging the child-like BLIMPY into a room marked “Ladies Only.” This panel, to me, seems to be almost an illustration from Cole’s  (and most men’s) sub-conscious world where their lust [the satyr] is in conflict with society’s taboos and morals [Blimpy]. Heavy stuff for a children’s story. BLIMPY readers must not have known what hit them.

Of course, in wartime 1944, more comics were selling to American soldiers than children. Cole and his editors must have known this. In fact, it was around this time that Quality began to stuff their seven anthology titles with stories involving scantily-clad heroines and girl-next-door teens who just happen to spend most of the story in lingerie and skimpy swim suits.

On page 2, panel 2 and on page 6, panel 1 we see Cole’s oft-used device during this period of silhouettes in profile against a large full moon. (see the post on Cole-isms here)

Jack Cole created two BLIMPY stories. This is the only one I’ve found, so far. Please pardon the quality as the pages are from micofiche scans, the only versions available at this time.

I hope you enjoy this lost gem from the Cole mine!