Libidinous Parrot Relentlessly Pursues Inter-Species Coupling; Crooks Caught: Midnight second run, episode 2

Story this post:

“Sinful Sir Nuts”
Story and art by Jack Cole
SMASH COMICS 69
February, 1946
Quality

 

(Cover by Jack Cole – signed)

The second run Midnight stories, in which Cole returned to his creation after a four-year hiatus were a deep-dish serving of Cole’s graphic brilliance and mastery of the vernacular of comics (a part of that vocabulary he created and refined).

It’s too darn bad that the mid-1940’s Midnight was such a bland character. He had little personality, no super-powers, and lacked the grim drive for vengeance that characterized the stories of the first run, in the early forties. Even the impractical but charming vacuum gun was left behind. Try as he might (and he mightily did try), Cole could only make the Midnight stories about a tenth as fun to read as his Plastic Man series.

Cole worked Midnight into a similar formula as Plastic Man. Namely, that of a sane man surrounded by loonies. However, with Midnight, there were a few misfires that may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but which leeched a great deal of potential out of the series. These misfires included moving Dave Clark’s inventive streak (he invented the vacuum gun) to Doc Wackey and surrounding the hero with a whole family of sidekicks so that no one single character ever got enough air time to develop of as anything more than a two-dimensional figure in the story.

That being said, there is still much to recommend these stories, such as the tight drawings, the wildly inventive page layouts, and the unleashing of a giant bag of techniques only Cole could deliver.

When he returned to the Midnight series in 1946, Cole must have been delighted to have total control over a series after being forced to work with a host of assistants on Plastic Man. He even signed this story on the first page, a sure-fire sign that Cole was 100% invested in this story, which features perhaps the horniest animal in pre-underground comics.

 

So, how about that parrot, huh? This pre-code comic book story is invested with bawdy humor that mostly circles around the idea of a parrot convinced sexual relations with a human woman are not only within the realm of possibility, but worth single-mindedly pursuing at any cost. Lustiness aside, the use of a talking parrot as a story device brings to mind “The Pixelated Parrot,” a story by another master of comics, Carl Barks that appeared in 1950 (Four Color Comics 282).

Cole begins the story with a sequence involving death that is typical of his work. In Cole’s universe, even when zany antics are afoot, the grim reaper is never far away. Note how Cole draws the doctor in the first panels of page two. With his restrained posture and buzzard-like stoop, he resembles an undertaker more than a healer.

In this story, Cole careens and propels his characters through space. The wheels of cars and the feet of people rarely touch the ground as they speed from locations to location, sometimes even breaking through the panel borders! On page four, even a sound effect breaks through the panel!

On the bottom tier of page 7, Cole employs his patented “shaky panel” to display the effects of an explosion. Cole used the quivering panel to both convey emotion (as in when a woman cowers in terror when a hypodermic needle threatens her eye in “Murder, Morphine, and Me”) and to show the effects of explosions and bangs.

On page 8, in the best sequence in the story, Cole delightfully plays with sound effects, slyly sending a wolf whistle between a woman’s sexy legs, creating a great visual pun. A couple of panels later, her shriek begins in her mouth. A whole book could be written on what Cole did with sound effects in comics.

PLASTIC MAN Jan 1950: The Return of the Pointed Exclamation Mark!

 Story in this post:
”Kra Vashnu”
Story, Pencils, and Inks by Jack Cole
Plastic Man #21
January, 1950
Quality Comics

 

For a 13 issue run of Plastic Man (issues 17-29), Jack Cole wrote and drew almost all the contents in these issues. In the first story in Plastic Man #21 (Jan. 1950) most of the sound effects are punctuated with a “flat” exclamation mark (on left in illustration below).

 

But somewhere in the middle of the story, Cole draws a BAM! with a “pointed” exclamation mark (right side of illustration above). It’s even artfully arranged so the “M” breaks it up.

I believe this is important because it is a sign that Jack Cole was re-connecting with his original, pure source of inspiration after a few years of dampened enthusiasm brought on most likely by having other writers and artists forced on him to produce the large number of Plastic Man stories his publisher wanted.

The pointed exclamation mark populated almost all of Jack Cole’s comic book work for the first 6 or 7 years. This was when he wrote, drew and often even lettered his own stories – a highly unusual practice for the time and one which, I believe, allows us to consider his graphic stories as the developing work of a master of the form. In 1950, Cole began to flow the magic of his early work back into his stories, but this time – instead of a talented newcomer – here was an accomplished master employing numerous techniques with an almost casual virtuousity.

 

As Cole re-connected with his vitality and vision, his work in 1950 became became richer and more complex, developing into what could be called Cole’s “baroque” period. Plastic Man never stretched so outrageously and comically. I can think of no other comics that are as dense with humor and invention as Jack Cole’s 1950 Plastic Man stories.

Reading these stories is a jaw-dropping experience for any comics person. In just one page, Cole delivers a dazzling array of brilliant graphic design solutions. His stories have some much kinetic energy they almost vibrate on the page. There is often more than one thing happening in each panel so that it’s necessary to re-read the stories in order to fully engage with them (similar to the way the film Playtime by the inspired filmmaker and comedian Jacques Tati works).

In the “Kra Vashnu” story, the sudden and abrupt single appearance of the pointed exclamation mark heralds a new phase of focus and passion by Cole. The story certainly reflects this, with some astonishing panels and art, such as this one (with dialogue removed):

which shows quite well Cole’s uncanny ability to draw the less defined “in-between” poses – almost as if he was able in his mind’s eye to freeze the frame of a movie and then draw that. In so doing, Cole’s “freeze-frame” technique delivers some of the most abstract and beautiful art seen in comics.

The “evil magician” plot of “Kra Vashnu” is one that Cole used over and over, starting with his third MIDNIGHT story in March, 1941. Cole revived his first evil magician, CHANG-O, in December, 1941 with “The Return of Chang-O.”

Still, Kra Vashnu is quite a diabolical foil, and his appearance is pleasingly bizarre, with his tattooed forehead, cape, platform shoes, and – strangest of all – his long, unclipped toenails (in one sequence, Woozy tries vainly to clip them).

The story does contain some of Cole’s trademark themes, including doubling (doppelganger) and identity shifting. There is also a vivid misogynistic murder and attempted suicide. In the story’s climax, Plastic Man is seemingly murdered, his corpse resembling a deflated, punctured balloon. All of these violent themes are surrounded with non-stop gags and brilliant art, making it a Jack Cole classic.

Plastic Man’s stretched poses and transformations are particularly brilliant in this story, as well, and worth paying attention to as you read this amazing story, which I have painstakingly digitally restored for your reading enjoyment:

 

MIDNIGHT RETURNS! Atomic Dice and Exquisite Layouts – Episode 1 (second run)

 Story This Post:
Midnight - “Atomic Dice”
Story and art by Jack Cole
Smash Comics #68
Dec., 1946

 

Before he invented PLASTIC MAN, Jack Cole created and lavished attention on MIDNIGHT, his first feature series for Quality comics. When the rubbery madness of PLASTIC MAN’s world caught on, Cole left MIDNIGHT to devote most of his energy to his breakout creation, which was granted an unusually generous 15 pages per story in POLICE COMICS.

After a four-year stretch (if you’ll pardon the pun), Jack Cole returned to MIDNIGHT for a glorious run of 19 stories that have been unseen and uncommented upon for over 60 years. I’m pleased to excavate these from the Cole-mine for you over the next few months. (If you’d like to read the earlier MIDNIGHT stories, look here.)

Many of Jack Cole’s second-run MIDNIGHT stories feature eye-popping art and design, convoluted stories, and regular touches of brilliance.

In terms of character, not much changed in the four years that PAUL GUSTAVSON owned the series. GUSTAVSON added a new character, the Woozy-Winks-like Sniffer Snoop, which Cole embraced and wrote as if he were Woozy Winks.

Cole returned triumphantly to his series with, “Atomic Dice,” a three-ring circus of a story – there seems to be more than one thing happening in almost every panel. In the four years he had been away from MIDNIGHT, Cole had matured into a master graphic storyteller. Many of the innovations he piloted in the early MIDNIGHT stories return here with polished flourishes, like the act of a seasoned magician.

For example, just look at the splash page and study how Cole positions groups of figures in the background and foreground in a strong diagonal to emphasize the movement. And, for the flourish, just look at the graceful, swirling, speed lines of the dangerous dice…

For this story, Cole returned to his tried and true formula of crazy inventions. But, this time, there are no rays that melt the ground, or freeze people into flavorful popsicles. There’s not even a vacuum gun. The invention this time reflected reality, perhaps indicating the more serious turn Cole – and the country – would take at the end of of the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Just as PLASTIC MAN was a covert satire of American life, this MIDNIGHT story reflects the onset of the Atomic Age in the “real” world. About a year earlier, the United States had unleashed atomic explosives on two cities in Japan, ending World War II.

Three years earlier, in 1943, Cole used dice as a design element in the splash of his lead story in PLASTIC MAN #1.

Cole’s art on this story is amazing. Consider this panel from page four, which already has a stunning layout without this elaborately-rendered house:

There’s the graceful plume of smoke again, by the way. But what really excites me about panels like this is how Cole breaks up time and space. Cole has shifted the camera angle to allow us to see one man entering while another is leaving, throwing the plot into high gear.

There are wonderful touches in the art throughout, such as the way Cole indicates the buildings with a field of white defined by a dark sky and shadows on the windows.

By the way, there’s 7 characters in this panel, each with distinctive body language. In fact, this is a classic Jack Cole panel, with speed, comically distorted bodies (as though the scene had been filmed with a high-speed camera and then freeze-framed for this one panel), graphic brilliance, and great dialogue, expertly lettered.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that if you have a gun on the mantelpiece in act 1, it must be fired before the play ends. Thus, being a master storyteller, Cole knew that if he introduced a devastating explosive device on page 1, he would have to have a massive explosion on the last page. Here’s the explosion, with the surrounding art removed.

 

Cole literally splits the page in half with one of his biggest sound effects ever (note the patented Jack Cole pointed exclamation mark). Even the letters in KABOOM! are cracking from the force! The explosion rocks the panel and throws the characters to the ground. Cole draws them as anonymous shadows… did he have Hiroshima and Nagasaki on his mind?

The wiggly panel borders were another Cole invention, used most famously in the needle-in-the-eye panel from “Murder, Morphine, and Me” (True Crime Comics Vol.1 #2, May 1947).