WINDY BREEZE 4 – 1946-49

This is the fourth and final segment of my chronological publishing of Jack Cole’s one-pager series, WINDY BREEZE. To read earlier installments, click here.

This set covers the last appearances of the series in National Comics 51-60. Some of these were written and drawn by Bart Tumey. Tumey (no relation to me, Paul Tumey, that I know of) was the first of the half-dozen or so assistants and ghosts brought on to help keep up the rate of production of PLASTIC MAN stories to meet the demand. Tumey, a decent cartoonist, wrote and drew many comics for Quality during the 1940’s. It’s my guess that these few WINDY BREEZES were a try-out to see if he could measure up to the Jack Cole magic.

As a special bonus, my adventures as a comic book archeologist recently took me down the slick, dangerous curves of Quality’s sexy title CANDY, where I found a couple of wonderful last WINDY BREEZES by Jack Cole.

It’s a shame that Cole didn’t continue the series and keep creating these one=page wonders. As you’ll see, he just got better and better… and also funnier.

National Comics #51 (Dec. 1945)

Great opening panel, huh?

 

National Comics #52 (Feb. 1946)

Cole didn’t commemorate Christmas in any of his stories, but he often marked Valentine’s Day, usually with a comedy of unrequited love, as in this story. The drawings of the lovely Zinnia are classic Cole and prefigure his work in PLAYBOY 10 years later.

 

National Comics #53 (April 1946)
Cole may have roughed this out, the figures and staging
are all Bart Tumey.

 

National Comics #54 (June, 1946)

Another one-pager by Bart Tumey. Note how different the figures feel. Where Cole’s figures have a subtle angularity, Tumey’s figures are round and lumpy. Also note how he stages the strip so the funny part of the corset being drawn to the car is not shown… something Cole would have relished drawing.

 

National Comics #55 (August, 1946)

Cole’s back! Perhaps inspired by sharing his turf with Tumey, Cole clearly puts more effort into this dense one-pager, which contains one of his classic crowd-going-crazy scenes. 

 

National Comics #56 (October, 1946)

Another one-pager by Bart Tumey. This one appears to be exclusively by him, script, pencils, and inks.  Note how different his females are from Coles. Where Cole’s women are sexy, dangerous… Tumey’s women tend to be wholesome, bossy, and matronly.

 

National Comics #57 (Dec. 1946)

One of the best in the series! Lovely artwork, funny writing. Notice how there is MOVEMENT in this story, as opposed to Tumey’s versions. Cole has put a bit more elbow grease into this one, perhaps spurred by Tumey’s presence. His panels have a level of detail and density that is simply insane for a throw-away one-pager. Great, forgotten comics!

 

National Comics #58 (Feb. 1947)

Another classic by Cole. That middle tier is a lovely way to show a flashback sequence that also suggest pages from the book Windy is “borrowing” from. 

 

National Comics #59 (April 1947) 

Wow. This is genius at work. This one never fails to make me laugh out loud. And then I admire the mastery of the layout, the drawing, and the beautiful sound effects. I love the first panel, where Windy’s sour notes are all falling from his mouth and crashing to the floor like lead weights. The idyllic country setting Windy and Stinky stroll through reminds me of some of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley sequences. But the pastoral beauty is merely a set up for the porcine stampede climax!

 

National Comics #60 (June 1947)

It’s the pose in panel two that makes me say that Jack Cole penciled this page. It’s the lumpy, round-jawed figure in panel three that makes me say Bart Tumey inked the page. Overall, the page ought to feel as dense and compositionally tight as the previous two entries, but it doesn’t. It’s still quite funny, though. This was the last WINDY BREEZE to appear in National Comics. With issue #61, the book reduced in size from 64 to 52 pages.  Cole did publish a a great BURP THE TWERP one-pager in National #65. You can read that here.

 

Candy #7 (Dec. 1948)

In 1948 and 49, as Quality juggled it’s titles to accommodate the changing market, Jack Cole’s one-pagers were shoehorned into unlikely titles. These last two WINDY BREEZES may have been left over from the National run, created for issues that never appeared. However, Stinky’s name has now changed to “Pee Wee,” so perhaps Cole did these fresh. This is another truly funny one-pager, dense with great ideas and art. Panel four made me laugh out loud.

Candy #8 (Feb. 1949)

This is the last published Windy Breeze, as far as I know. There may be a few others to be found. I hope so. I love how Windy is unimpressed by television in this story. This was a pretty early mention of TV. Cole was very interested in technology and inventions. The last panel is priceless. A great way to end this wonderful series!

Plastic Man Fights A Gang of Grotesques (1949) – The Strange, Dark Last Comic Book Stories of Jack Cole

Story this post:
”Plastic Man - Wanted Dead or Alive”
Story and art by Jack Cole
Police Comics #95 (October, 1949 – Quality Comics)
Building on his amazing comic book story in Police #94 (to read, see here), Jack Cole delivers another 11-page knock-out. It boggles my mind that these stories haven’t seen the light of day since their original publication, nearly 60 years ago.

As with most comics in the late 1940’s, the page count of Police Comics  dropped a 16-page signature taking a 52-page book down to 36 pages. As a result, the lead Plastic Man stories shrunk from 15 to 11 pages. This was not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact, I suspect the more manageable page count re-opened the series for Cole’s full-scale involvement, effectively taking away a third of the labor that had been required to produce a a four-color adventure of the stretchy sleuth and his rotund Watson. As a result, he was able to enjoy a last stint of producing stories more or less singlehandedly, in the organic method he used in the first half of his comic book career.

All of a sudden, the stories are tighter, have more bite, display about 5 times as much great ideas, and --- best of all – Jack Cole’s talent is at the helm again. Granted, the stories often sink into barely disguised despair, but even then the triumph of Cole’s mastery is astounding to behold, much like listening to a haunting blues song by Robert Johnson… you have to ask yourself “from what otherworldly place did this stuff come?”

In Cole’s last golden period of creating his 35 or so Plastic Man stories that appeared sporadically in the 1948-50 issues of Police Comics and Plastic Man, he accomplished some of the oddest, most unique comic book stories ever made, in my opinion.

In this story from Police Comics #95, Cole moves out of the shadows of the last story, in which Plas was very nearly executed for murder into an exercise in seeing how far over-the-top he can go in creating bizarre characters. First and foremost amongst the vast array of grotesque villains is Scowls, a fat midget who dresses in a Mickey Mouse tie and is always drawn with a sparkle on his gleaming bald head.

Cover by Jack Cole and Alex Kotzky

Jack Cole liked drawing bear traps. In Police Comics #22 (1943), he killed off a child abusing crook with a bear trap:

His use of the bear trap to snip at Scowls’ fanny in the splash page of this mini-masterpiece is less dark, but equally as compelling.

Overall, it is Cole’s compositions within each panel that are the star feature of this story. He crowds his panels with 5, 10, 15, even 20 figures. Each one is a real person, with real behavior. In the first panel on page three, for example, Cole draws no less than 11 individual people, all preoccupied in their own, comical way, including the great touch of having one crook pick the pocket of another.

No attention is drawn to this gag, and no further elaboration is made of it. The story does not depend on it. It’s merely there as an extra layer of entertainment. There are at least a dozen of these ‘extras’ in this one story alone. In this aspect, Jack Cole’s work prefigures the famous “chicken fat” style of Will Elder’s Mad and Panic stories that would appear in just few short years later, which were loaded with little gags, puns, and surreal jokes that were completely separate from the plot. This device can also be traced back to the great screwball comic newspaper comic strips, particularly SMOKEY STOVER buy Bill Holman (for an article on on Holman’s influence on Jack Cole, see here).  To my knowledge, this link has not been observed, or studied much at all.

Earlier, I described the extremely bizarre character design of Scowls. His associate, McGoon, is also quite strange, with his elongated torso and total lack of a lower jaw, not to mention the enigmatic “T” shirt he wears. There’s also a crook with a studded metal skull cap, and even a crook with a vaudevillian oversized old-fashioned suit. All of these character designs appeared in earlier Jack Cole stories. Cole is recycling a bit, here.

What makes this story a bit of a tour de force is that, where Jack Cole’s old Plastic Man formula was to feature just one grotesque, Dick Tracy-like villain, here he depicts a whole GANG of bizarre characters.

It’s as though every individual in the story has been shaped by some mysterious force into a weird form of themselves, and then frozen in that form. The only fluid person in the story is Plastic Man. It’s his ability to change and flow like water around the obstacles that makes him superior, and completely deflates the threat of being trapped in an air-tight room deep underground loaded with murderous crooks wielding an arsenal of deadly weapons.

At the end, a wholly amused Woozy brags on Plastic Man, actually explaining to us the importance of being able to change:

“Plas always springs the traps and drags the bait away to the big house.”

To underscore this story, similar to the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories that Carl Barks (Cole’s fellow satirist working in comics) was creating around the same time, Cole creates the character of the horse-grinned, foppish, limp-wristed, dandy who was formerly a criminal mastermind. It was his ability to change that gave him his freedom, even though he changed into just another ridiculous caricature.

While the writing in this story is good, it the wholly realized visual art that takes center stage in this adventure. Each panel is a picture that can truly stand on it’s own both compositionally, and as a powerful image in itself. I’ll leave you with a little gallery of three examples of many worth admiring from this exemplary, strange dark late comic book story by the great Jack Cole:

 

Plastic Man Goes to the Gas Chamber (1949) – The Strange, Dark Last Comic Book Stories of Jack Cole

Story this post:
”Plastic Man Turns Killer”
Story and art by Jack Cole
Police Comics #94 (September, 1949 – Quality)

Before we begin, I’d like to wish everyone a happy holiday and a new year. I’ve scoured the comic book stories of Jack Cole, but can find no story set at Christmas time, or using a Christmas theme. I guess this just proves that Jack Cole’s concerns were not in the realm of the warm and fuzzy! Now, on to the goodies!

When you think about it, given comic book master Jack Cole’s bent toward death and the tropes of violent crime and execution, it’s a wonder he didn’t create a story like this one sooner.

My guess is that Cole conceived of the series as a light-hearted satire and very deliberately kept it there for years. His dark side crept in plenty in the early stories, but the circumstances were so over-the-top that it was impossible to dwell in the shadows of the early Plastic Man comic book stories – they were just too much fun.

Cover of Police Comics #94 by Jack Cole and Alex Kotzky

By 1949, however, Jack Cole’s mind seems to have taken a deliberate turn into darker and darker alleyways of human events. In “The Dictator of Dreams,” Police Comics #78, Cole took us on a journey through the interwoven nightmares of four people, in pages loaded with surreal imagery from the more horrific areas of the collective unconscious. (To read this story, please click here).

Sixteen issues later, Cole – working now in an 11-page format instead of the lavish 15-page length he had been given over the last few years, the biggest page count of any continuing comic book hero of this era –- has become even darker, to the point where he begins this grim story with a scene of Plas being horribly executed in a gas chamber.

 

Jack Cole’s trademark themes of death and shifting identities form the basis of this strange story. Plastic Man’s usual carefree attitude towards life is clouded over when he thinks he has killed someone. (Thanks to reader oeconomist.com for pointing out the frame-up).

In this regard, this story a rarity, and an instance of Cole really pushing the boundaries, as he did in his infamous “Murder, Morphine, and Me” story from 1946 (True Crime #1).  By 1949, the comic book super-hero genre had an unwritten law that no hero could kill a crook, even if it was faked. Even the early Batman was known to occasionally pull out a gun and SHOOT the villain, but that all-too easy solution quickly vanished in favor of extended fist-fights in surreal settings… a much more highly ritualized encounter more suited to the hero myth.

This Plastic Man episode is not without its humorous moments, though. The middle tier on page seven, in which a crowd gawks at Plastic Man on trial is quite funny, with a fat lady standing on a cop’s head in her stocking-clad feet. The crazy ways Woozy shadows the bad guy on page 9 are great comedy.

I’d like to quote from the insightful comments of one reader (Tamfos):

“Plas has reached an alltime high in elastic comedy here, keeping pace with the extreme nature of the storyline. Obviously, this is at least partly due to Cole's style evolving to the point where even the bizarrely malleable antics of the "normal" people seem perfectly acceptable (witness the last panel of page two). Just gorgeous stuff.
And, of course, Cole still can achieve so much in a single panel. Witness panel three on Page Four. Plas is reading, AND attempting to answer the phone, while Woozy slaps Plas's hand away AND answers the phone himself. Any other artist, that's at least two panels.”

The drawings are quite stylized, showing that Cole never stopped growing and changing as an artist. His drawings of the various villains in this story, and even the reofrmed crook who appears at the beginning, are as bizarrely compelling as anything Chester Gould (Dick Tracy) ever did.

Jack Cole kept finding new ways to stretch Plastic Man’s body. In this story, made after 9 years of working with this character, Cole ends with the tour de force image of Plastic Man holding his own head, perhaps a macabre echo of the execution that was narrowly avoided!