FANNIE OGRE – Jack Cole’s Great Lost SPIRIT Story (1942)

THE SPIRIT first appeared as a weekly comic book insert. It was so successful that a daily newspaper strip soon followed. SPIRIT creator Will Eisner wrote and drew the first six weeks of the strip. When the wartime effort drafted Eisner into military service, Jack Cole took over the strip. In August, 1942, Cole left the strip to create a new back-up feature in the pages of Police Comics, a little thing called PLASTIC MAN.
A couple of years later, in 1944, Jack Cole wrote and penciled some of the SPIRIT Sunday comic book insert stories, which can be found here and here.
 
Cole’s work on the SPIRIT DAILIES runs from May 18, 1942 to August 8, 1942, and covers a complete storyline, start to finish. In this post, we share the complete story, which features the proto-typical Chester Gould/Jack Cole comic strip femme fatale, FANNIE OGRE.
There are several “tells” in the artwork itself that this sequence was mostly penciled, inked, and even lettered by Cole. The artwork strongly resembles his MIDNIGHT (which was created as a SPIRIT duplicate) stories of the same period, and uses many of the same characteristic visual elements, including:

• Decorative patterns
• Pointed exclamation marks
• Distinctive lettering (so that the simple sentence “Oh ho! Do I!” has a wealth of nuance and tonality)
• Extreme camera angle
• Funnel-shaped sound effects
• Speed lines and clouds that include the speed sound effects of “zip!”
• Beams of light slashing through darkness, usually with pointillism effects at the edges

Many of these devices can be spotted in the following two strips:

Aside from the art, the storytelling is classic Cole. In the example shown above, we have a casual graphic description of torture and dismemberment, with a comic edge!
After an introductory bit of comic business with Spirit assistant Ebony and his con-man cousin Scallywag, Cole teasingly introduces the grotesque figure of FANNIE ORGE, a youthful, shapely woman with a horribly wrinkled face… sort of a female Prune Face (Cole borrowed a lot from Chester Gould’s DICK TRACY, and never more so than in this early newspaper strip effort).
Cole’s graphic stories were filled with crazy inventions, and this story is no exception. A jar of magical beauty cream erases FANNIE’s wrinkles, bringing Cole’s core theme of shapeshifting and identity/face change to the fore.
When he created the character of PLASTIC MAN, Cole had the inspiration of tweaking the superhero origin story by making the non-super self a crook and then having the hero keep the identity of the criminal (for a while, at least). This same playfulness around the conventions of the crime-fighter hero story is evident in FANNIE ORGE, when she extracts a promise from THE SPIRIT to lay off crime-fighting until August 1 (co-incidentally PLASTIC MAN’s birth date, roughly).
The story ends with, yes, you guessed it.. a suicide. For a man who ended his life in suicide, it is haunting that so many of Jack Cole’s comic book stories include suicide. More people killed, or attempted to kill themselves in Jack Cole’s “funny” comic book stories than in any other series in the history of comics and, possibly literature.

FANNIE ORGE’s death is almost an exact copy of the ending of the classic 4th MIDNIGHT story, written and drawn by Jack Cole about 8 months earlier, with the silhouette of the plunging figure and the clock tower tolling the death knell. Ask not for whom the bell tolls… it tolls for thee.
With the exception of Cole’s last work on his newspaper comic strip Betsy and Me, this story represents the longest sustained graphic narrative of his career, at roughly the equivalent of 24 pages in comic book format (the longest PLASTIC MAN stories were 15 pages in length).
It is interesting to note how Cole’s treatment of Ebony prefigures PLASTIC MAN’s sidekick, Woozy Winks. This story is the missing link between Ebony White and Woozy Winks, and shows the creative cross-pollination that happened between Jack Cole and Will Eisner.
A disclaimer is also necessary here. Cole’s depiction of Black Americans (thousands of which were off fighting for the United States in World War Two when this story was created) is inexcusable. We present this work here not to put anyone down, but to look at the artistic development of an important figure in American art.
I hope you enjoy FANNIE OGRE, a lost classic dug up for you from the Cole-mine!
 

Plastic Man Fights His Greatest Enemies: Grannies and Boy Scouts!

Story this post:
”Say It Ain’t So, Plas!”

Writing, Pencils, Inks by Jack Cole
Inks/Finishes possibly by Alex Kotzky

Plastic Man 16
March 1949- Quality Comics
Left: Cover by Jack Cole

As we come up on marking our first year, this blog just exceeded 50,000 page impressions. It’s great to see such interest in the work of Jack Cole. Thanks, everyone!

Item: Thanks to the great guys over at Golden Age Comics, I’ve been able to locate the third CUTHBERT 1-pager. If you’d like to read these demented, wicked funny 1-pagers by Cole, see my earlier posting here, which includes the newly found example from The Spirit #5. For those of you who don’t wish to click away, here’th the new CUTHBERT, ish a good ‘un!

In this post, I continue with a selection and analysis of the best of the later Jack Cole PLASTIC MAN stories.

In my post on the great Concrete story from Plastic Man 14, we saw that Jack Cole was re-investing in both comic books and in his star character, PLASTIC MAN. The late 40’s were a spotty period for Cole as he was developing a shadow career as a magazine gag cartoonist, and no doubt struggled with the involvement of other writers and artists stretching his vision of PLASTIC MAN from a beautiful satire to a mediocre, unfunny and dull series of stories. In 1949, Cole rallied and returned to form, delivering a series of delightful, brilliant stories.

The second story in Plastic Man 16 is one such delight.

In typical Cole fashion, three criminals plot out how to murder PLASTIC MAN. Look what happens at the bottom tier of page 3:

This pre-Kurtzman sequence comically demonstrates “no honor among thieves,” as they pick each other’s pockets. All the while, involved in an intense discussion… almost stealing by reflex. This tier would be funny enough, but turn the page and here’s what you get:

Is this great, or what? Leave us not mention the crook with a crazy hairdo, or the other crook inexplicably attired in a fez… Wiggles and Goofy. It’s DICK TRACY on acid!

These panels are smaller, the first two of the top tier of three on page 4. Smaller panels mean shorter time… Cole has set the gag up with larger (more time) panels, and then delivered the punch line with smaller, faster units… comic timing in sequential graphic narrative: a textbook example, and super fun to read!

Without further ado, here’s the story, starting with a terrific splash page in which Cole delivers a cinematic crane shot of blissful comedic chaos:

 

There are several interesting aspects to this story. First, is the great cartooning. More than ever before, Cole is evolving from a master at depicting speed on paper into a wizard of time itself.

Consider pages two and three, the car chase sequence. The sequence consists of 12 panels, six to a page. The first 9 panels are hyper-kinetic cartooning, as forms are pulled, stretched, elongated, compressed, and blurred in a high-speed, high-stakes chase. These panels are smaller, and have less detail… so they go by faster.

Then, in panel 10, time seems to slow down… right when the car crashes into it’s own sound effect. Plastic Man’s body is frozen in time, suspended in the air. The last two panels, such as the one shown above,  are the largest in the sequence, filled with detail. These are almost painterly in their studied composition and density of detail. They are moments, frozen in time. This freeze-frame effect would, in 5 years, become a key part of Jack Cole’s Playboy cartoons (see my post “A Moment Frozen In Time”).

Another interesting aspect to this story is the matter-of-fact inclusion of the possibility of death at almost every turn in the plot. We start with a sequence in which it seems that Plastic Man might perish, then move into a sequence where criminals plot his murder, and finally, Plas himself stages a mock-suicide. Considering that Cole took his own life less than a decade after he created this story, such signals are hard to to take as just random plot elements. Cole’s comic book stories became darker and stranger as time went on.

Even with the specter of Death hovering, this story is extremely satirical and funny. Cole writes a great reversal of the hero myth by making Plastic Man’s greatest enemies not the criminals in the story, but self-righteous old ladies and boy scouts. This story is very similar to the great, often reprinted, “Plastic Man Products” story that would appear in the next issue, Plastic Man 17. Plastic Man has to fight a crazed mob in that story, as well.

In fact, the last great period of Cole’s comic book stories seems to rest largely on the depiction of the individual against the mob. This new theme occurs over and over, right through his last Web of Evil stories.

Lastly, this story can be seen as a pre-cursor to the Harvey Kurtzman Mad comic book stories. Whether or not there was a direct influence, it’s hard to say. But perhaps it was just something in the air at the time. As post-WWII America slid into the conformity and quiet desperation of the early 1950’s, American pop artists such as Jack Cole and Harvey Kurtzman responded by poking holes in revered institutions and suggesting we take a closer look and think for ourselves.

Aside from the satire, this story also prefigures Mad in the amazing amount of “chicken fat” cartooning… that is, little bits of business that have little or nothing to do with moving the plot forward, but add a delightful dimension to the story, such as the pickpocket sequence described at the beginning of this article.

This forgotten story appeared quietly on the scene, and was muffled by the pages of lesser stories that Cole may have had his hand in, but in which his brilliance was considerably watered-down. I’m happy to pluck this brilliant gem out and share it. Enjoy!

Announcement: I have started a new blog, TUMEYLAND, in which I’m sharing some of my writings, songs, art and comics.

MIDNIGHT Episode 18 – Jack Cole Goes to Hell!

Story this post:
Midnight 18- Midnight Goes to Hell
Story, art, lettering by Jack Cole
Smash Comics 36, Oct 1942 (Quality Comics)

 

Here’s yet another Jack Cole story in which he explores death, to the point of actually killing off his hero and following him to the gates of Hell.

Jack Cole signed this story on the first page, a sure sign that he not only performed all the writing, penciling, inking, and lettering on this story, but also that he felt proud enough of it to affix his name to the finished product!

This story is certainly among the best of the Midnight series., and certainly one of the great Hell/Devil comic book stories (a sub-genre in itself) of all time. Bringing his character to Hell was great fun for Cole, who had a field day with his penchant for the grotesque in these pages.

Our story begins with a great opening page, followed by the wacky conceit of a car chase in which Midnight and the pursued crooks taunt each other using car radios! Perhaps they should have paid more attention to their driving…

Starting with a hot (if you’ll forgive the pun), splash page, this story delivers a wonderful brew of excellent design, great writing, and some of Cole’s keenest satire to date.

Cole loved to draw fire and flames. Many of his early stories shine brightly from the glare of monstrous flames leaping off the pages.

In Cole’s universe, Satan isn’t such a bad guy, after all… it’s the fiery red-head he’s married to that’s the real problem! Cole manages to make Satan’s wife look both shrewish AND sexy. It’s interesting to reflect that Cole, with his puritan, wholesome upbringing depicted Hell as a place where the misery could be traced to a woman. Notice how her hair resembles fire, a great design touch. Also that her dress is green… the traditional complimentary color for red-heads. I’m guessing that Cole had a hand in the coloring of this story, as well. Midnight’s cool blues work in contrast to the warm reds and oranges of Hell.

By the time Cole created this story, World War Two was in full swing. Hence, the topical reference to the Nazis.

Cole prefaces the story on the splash with an admonition not to take the story seriously, supposedly letting us know this is an imaginary tale outside the continuity of the series. But it matters little, since Midnight is actually brought back to life by a mysterious stranger.

Cole uses this mysterious stranger as a way of linking this story with the next, a device he would also use again in Smash Comics 38. For now, you can read the “sequel” to this amazing story – a story that is perhaps even more wonderful than this one – here, in an essay written several months ago looking at how Cole depicted speed on paper.