Jack Cole’s Comic Book Career – A Study

 Overview
Over the course of his 16-year career creating comic book stories, Jack Cole was astonishingly productive. I decided to make a stab at seeing just how productive one of the major creators in comics history actually was.
According to my findings, Jack Cole published approximately 3,600 comic book pages in 16 years, (give or take a couple hundred pages).
These are mostly pages that Cole:

• Wrote
• Penciled
• Lettered
• Inked
• Colored (on occasion)

In a word: wow. This output rivals anyone working in the same period in comics, including Simon and Kirby -- and there were TWO of them, or Will Eisner… and he had a whole shop of assistants (including Jack Cole for a brief stint).
The Impact of Plastic Man on Cole’s Career

Jack Cole will always be best known for Plastic Man, and that is where roughly two-thirds of his career output in comics lies. Out of a total of approximately 3,681 published pages of comics, 2,404 pages are Plastic Man stories.
However, that leaves  an impressive 1,277 pages of other work including:

• Crime on the Run (1939)
• Manhunters (1940)
• The Comet (1940)
• Dickie Dean – Boy Inventor (1940)
• The Silver Streak/Claw stories
• Midnight (1941-42, 1946-49)
• Death Patrol (1941, 1944)
• Angles O’Day (1951-53)
• Web of Evil stories (1952-54)

… and hundreds of funny and graphically inventive 1-pagers throughout the 1940’s, such as Windy Breeze.
Jack Cole’s work in comics is much more than just Plastic Man, as this blog attempts to show by exploring his lesser-known work.
Methodology
Mind you, these are all very rough numbers.
I arrived at this number by downloading the latest collection of listings of Jack Cole credits by year from the amazing and invaluable resource, the Grand Comics Database.
Next, I scoured each month of every year and listed Cole’s published pages by month and year. For all it’s merit, the Grand Comics Database listing has several errors, which I corrected.
Eventually, I arrived at a rough total for each year. Here’s a chart that illustrates my findings:

This chart omits 1 known page published in 1937 (Funny Pages Vol2, #1) and lops off Cole’s final 7-page comic book story published in Web of Evil #11 in February, 1954, The Monster They Couldn’t Kill.
After 1946, some of the Plastic Man stories that were published were NOT by Jack Cole at all. Therefore, to determine Cole’s actual page count on the Plastic man material, I referenced Ron Goulart’s book, Focus on Jack Cole (Fantagraphics Books, 1986), which contains a detailed checklist of Police Comics and Plastic Man. In many cases, my own conclusions, based on study of the actual stories, do not agree with Goulart’s, and so I also made adjustments to the page count, using my own findings.
The numbers were harder to estimate in Cole’s final years, because his visual style shifted and it’s my own conclusion that several of the last original stories in the Plastic Man title were written, penciled, and often inked by Cole. Also, after 1947, Cole’s pages were often inked by others. This chart does not distinguish between pages Jack Cole totally created, and ones that others inked. It also counts covers as single pages of comic book art.
The 1943-44 numbers do not take into account Jack Cole’s work ghosting the Spirit stories. This part of Cole’s career is, as of yet, not defined, and therefore could not be included. It would likely add 50-100 pages to the overall numbers to include the Spirit stories Cole wrote and penciled.
It must be stressed that my numbers are not definitive or exact. However, I do think they are within a 10% percent range and therefore can provide useful insight into Cole’s career.
The Peak Years: 1943-47
In looking at a monthly breakdowns of 1943-47, Jack Cole’s peak years of production, we can see what an impact the introduction of a Plastic Man comic book made on Cole’s career.
The first issue of Plastic Man was published in June, 1944. This chart effectively shows Cole’s published page count for that month effectively doubles to an astonishing 56 pages!
Plastic Man #1 is pure Jack Cole, cover to cover, and represents one of the crowning achievements of his entire career. The creation of this comic book must have been a huge effort for Cole, and represents his development into a mature, established professional at the top of his form. It certainly put Cole into an even higher level of production and opportunity.
The following year, in 1944, Jack Cole produced 354 pages … an average of almost a page a day!

Once again, we can see what a huge impact the Plastic Man title made on Cole’s career. This second issue, also the loving work of work Cole cover-to-cover, was even better than the first! During 1944, Cole also created 12 Plastic Man stories in Police Comics that were 15 pages each (an unusually large number of pages given to a comic feature – by comparison, Superman and Batman lead stories ran 10-12 pages).
In this same year, Cole also created the brilliant second run of Death Patrol stories, some Spirit stories ( a probable example of which can be read here), some back-up filler stories (Blimpy and Inkie), the origin and first two adventures of The Barker, and about 45 great one-pagers. Whew! In 1944, Cole was on fire!
Somewhere, it’s been suggested that Cole took on extra work in 1943-7 because many of the top cartoonists (such as Will Eisner) were serving the war effort. It’s also thought that Cole was anticipating getting the call to serve himself (he didn’t) and so wanted to build up a cash reserve for his wife, Dorothy, in case he would be unable to earn for a year or more.
In 1945, Cole’s production dropped down a little as he settled into steady production of the 15-page Plastic Man stories in Police Comics and his regular run of 1-pagers that appeared throughout the Quality titles.

In 1946, the Plastic Man title went quarterly. Although issue #4 had to be created by other writers and artists, Cole managed to double his feat of previous years by producing two complete issues (#3 and #5) in one year!

Cole’s published work was a mixture of pages in which he did everything, and pages to which he only contributed writing and pencils. Therefore, even though the number is high, Cole’s overall involvement is not as intense. Nonetheless, he produced many brilliant stories in this year. The work in which he was fully involved ranks among some of best comic ever done.
The Thinking Machine (Police Comics 54, May 1946) was the first Plastic Man story to appear in Police Comics that has no involvement from Cole at all. The story, a disappointing effort, was likely drawn by Andre LeBlanc. In 1998, when I thought Cole had written and drawn every Plastic Man story, I won a copy of this comic on eBay. I was quite let down and puzzled by how dull it was. Quite likely, astute Plastic Man readers in 1947 felt the same way.

In 1947, Cole duplicated his heroic 1946 feat with two issues of Plastic Man, and bettered it by creating a whole new comic book title featuring his writing and art (with help from Alex Kotzky) called True Crime Comics #2 (there was no number 1).
In looking at the production of 1943-47, we see Cole achieving success with Plastic Man and then, almost as quickly, losing control of his creation and being forced to allow others to create less inspired copies of his work. Perhaps this is one reason Cole took on the creation of a new magazine for a different publisher (Magazine Village).
In any case, the statistics show Cole was at his peak when he made the True Crime stories. In the May, 1947 issue the infamous Murder, Morphine, and Me appeared. One panel from this story was used by the infamous Dr. Fredric Wertham in his scathing attack on comic books, Seduction of the Innocent.

In his book (co-authored by Chip Kidd), Forms Stretched to Their Limits: Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Art Spiegelman astutely writes of this story: “It is also among the most formally sophisticated comics stories I’ve ever seen; all the elements, including the panel shapes and the lettering, are deployed for narrative effect.”
The same could be said of much of Cole’s best work in his peak years. For example, the “trembling” panel effect was used several times in other stories.
However, there can be no doubt that Cole’s work reached a lofty, near superhuman peak with Murder, Morphine and Me. Although the rest of the stories in the book were inked by Alex Kotzky, Cole did everything on this one story… no doubt a pet project.
Certainly this feverish, intense story ranks among the ten most important works in Cole’s career, and one of the stand-out comic book stories of all time. In this story, the unique graphic storytelling vernacular Cole had developed up to this point crystallizes into a thing of beauty. All of his major themes are present in this story: the slippery-ness of identity, the potential for abuse and cruelty that exists, and horrific retribution.
Here then, to close out this article and provide you with something fun to read, is the complete story, in all it’s astonishing glory (thanks to Cole’s Comics supporter Daryl Aylward for the scans).
Murder, Morphine, and Me True Crime Comics Vol.1 #2 (May, 1947)
Writing, pencils, inks, and lettering by Jack Cole

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.