Is This Cole? – Will Bragg (1949) – A Rare Portrayal of A Woman Pilot in Early Comic Books

Story this post:
”Will Bragg – Air Circus”
Story – unknown
Pencils (and inks?) – Jack Cole
Modern Comics #101 (Sept. 1950-Quality)

 

Here’s a neat find by comic book artist, writer, and fellow comic book archeologist Frank Young. Unlike the character featured in this article, WILL BRAGG, Frank WON’T brag, so pardon me if I do a little braggin’ on him, here.

Frank just caused a splash in the comic book world with his discovery of two heretofore unknown Fletcher Hanks stories. Frank also is creating with the talented and inspired David Lasky one of the richest, most entertaining historical graphic novels I have ever seen, Carter Family Comics: Don’t Forget This Song. As if this weren’t enough, Frank is THE scholar on Little Lulu writer/artist John Stanley, with an extensive blog called Stanley Stories. Thanks for this gem, Frank (and the unknown scanner)!

Jack Cole had trouble single-handedly keeping up with the demand for PLASTIC MAN stories and was forced to work with assistants. It’s interesting, and even a bit of a paradox, that he also created a fair number of comic book stories that appeared in the back pages of various Quality Comics titles. I see this as the result of his restless nature and up-and-down energy. I think new projects held a great deal of appeal to this inventive, ever-growing artist.

Take a look at the following story and see if you agree with Frank Young and myself that Jack Cole drew it. Just look at the curl of smoke in the last panel on page one… nice, huh?

 

WILL BRAGG began as a back-up feature in Modern Comics #47 (March, 1946). Quality staffer Paul Gustavson created the series, writing and drawing most of the stories.

However, it appears to be none other than Jack Cole who delivered pencils and inks on the Will Bragg stories in the last four issues of Modern Comics, issues 99 to 102.

In the story above, from Modern #101, the most obvious Jack Cole touch is the woman pilot. In fact, she stands as one of the more appealing of women in Cole’s stories, being a very upbeat tomboy who is generous of heart and easy on the eyes. It’s easy to see why Will Bragg makes a fool of himself over her!

The “regulars” character design in this series (not the woman pilot) is very UN-like Jack Cole, but he was forced to work with the cartoony, almost ugly figures as originally designed by Gustavson, for continuity. It’s too bad he couldn’t have known in advance the series was ending with these stories and really cut loose. Even so, there are moments which are satisfying, and it’s cool to see Jack Cole’s graceful drawings of a cool old biplane in flight.

Perhaps Cole got this series because of his years one-page stories that featured another boastful blowhard, WINDY BREEZE. (To read the WINDY BREEZE stories, click here). In any case, the stories do not seem to be written by Cole, as they lack his breakneck pacing, satire, and darkness. However, the artwork – to my eye – certainly does look like his work, and there are some nice examples in the WILL BRAGG stories.

This was some of Cole’s last cartoony work. In short order, he would shift his style into a more sober, realistic, and shadowy world, as seen in the Angles O’Day  and Web of Evil stories.

What do you think, dear readers… IS THIS COLE? Your comments are welcome and add much to this blog.

To help you decide for yourself, here are the other Cole-ish WILL BRAGG comic book stories, from Modern Comics 99, 100, and 102. Alas, these available only in microfiche scans which, at their best, are pretty muddy and washed out. Even so, it is possible (and fascinating) to see the hand of Jack Cole all over these pages.

 

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: