Dan Tootin 1941-46: A Selection of Jack Cole’s Madcap Masterpiece

A liquid that can make a mountain out of a mole hill. A chemist that can jump into a microscope and battle germs. A spaceship made from a giant loaf of bread. These are just a few of the astonishing imaginative leaps Jack Cole took in his unknown series of one-pagers featuring DAN TOOTIN – THE MADCAP CHEMIST.

Of the five one-page series Jack Cole wrote and drew in the 1940’s, DAN TOOTIN ( a play on the phrase “Darn Tootin” which means “you’re right.”) comes the closest to matching the brilliance of his most famous creation, PLASTIC MAN.

DAN TOOTIN is a pure Jack Cole creation. Cole inherited some of the one-pager series (such as WINDY BREEZE and SLAP HAPPY PAPPY) and was forced to work within the constraints of another artist’s basic premise. With DAN TOOTIN, Cole let loose and the result is a staggering stream of surreal bon bons.

Brilliant inventors regularly appear in Cole’s work from the early series DICKIE DEAN, BOY HOOD INVENTOR, to Doc Wackey in Midnight, to various characters in PLASTIC MAN, to “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill,” his very last comic book story. In DAN TOOTIN, Jack Cole immerses himself in the world of a magical chemist.

The series had its own visual flavor, often with sophisticated coloring and playful typography.

The series appeared in most issues of Hit Comics 9-46, as well as a few other places. Here is a selection of this remarkable series, presented in chronological order:

Hit Comics #9 (March 1941)
The first appearance in the series is already invested with great originality and creativity. Cole adds a small 5th tier to depict a hilarious Jeckyl and Hyde transformation. This page has the same energy of the first PLASTIC MAN story.

Hit Comics #10 (April, 1941)
Most of the examples of this series I have are from low-quality micofiche scans. However, given the rarity of these brilliant pages, it seems worthwhile to publish them.

 

Hit Comics #12 (June 1941)
In a word, WOW. Beautiful coloring (surely Cole colored this page), elegant visual gags (blank verse, indeed), lovely drawings, and a fantastic capper gag.

Hit Comics #13 (July, 1941)
This page is fabulously lyrical with the conceit of escape into a giant loaf of bread. I’m reminded of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (which also resembles the amazing Cole story from Police Comics #10 in which a a criminal gang roams the world in a giant 8-ball).  “A world of your own made of bread. Hop on and sail away from this wicked earth.” At its best, Cole’s work operates on multiple levels of comedy and tragedy all at once.

 

Hit Comics #16 (October 1941)

Check out that accordion-fold smash in panel 7, and the foreshortned foot in the last panel. Cole often drew the bottoms of shoes.

 

Hit Comics #19 (Jan 1942)
Panel 7 made me laugh out loud.

 

Hit Comics #20 (Feb 1942)

 

Hit Comics #25 (Dec 1942)

Cole’s writing, always good, is particularly brilliant in this page. Not only does he use wild slang and outrageous puns, but he makes it rhyme, rivaling Dr. Seuss and Edward Lear. Cole is was most likely influenced by the greatest newspaper screwball strip of all time, SMOKEY STOVER (see my article on this connection here).

 

Hit Comics #26 (Jan 1943)

 

Hit Comics #27 (April 1943)
A rare early use in comics of the multiple-tailed speech balloon, a device that Little Lulu master John Stanley would use to great effect in his work.

 

Hit Comics #29 (Sept 1943)
The last panel makes me think of Robert Crumb!

 

Hit Comics #30 (Nov 1943)
The impossibly buck-toothed weeper is a patented Cole caricature that shows up in some of his PLASTIC MAN stories.

 

Hit Comics #34 (Winter 1944)
One of numerous references to suicide that appear in Jack Cole’s comics. This page has an edge to it. Cole’s style has evolved, and so has the tone. 

 

Hit Comics #37 (Autumn 1945)
This story, in which a character humorously comments on his own actions as he performs them is very Kurtzman-like.

 

Hit Comics #39

Hit Comics #46 (May 1947)
The last Dan Tootin to appear in Hit Comics is a beauty in both layout and writing. Cole really sunk his, um, TEETH into this page.

 

All Humor #15 (August 1949)
There may be others, but this is the only non-Hit Comics example of the series I have found. This story is a companion piece the Cole’s amazing PLASTIC MAN dream story from Police Comics #89 (April 1949)

Slap Happy Pappy – A Selection

During the 1940's, Jack Cole created 400 to 500 one-page funny episodes that appeared in the pages of various Quality Comics titles. This is a major part of Cole's work in comics and deserves attention as such.

These one-pagers (on rare occasion, two-pagers) featured a handful of characters, some of which Cole invented and some of which others created and Cole later took over. In his great 1986 book, Focus on Jack Cole, comics historian and science fiction author Ron Goulart calls this material "out-and-out funny stuff," and I agree.

I once dismissed Cole's one-pagers as filler fluff, but a more systematic study of these has led to a sincere appreciation for this material. Jack Cole's one-pagers are usually very inventive graphically, extremely well-written, and downright funny.

I think Cole found probably found an outlet in these that partially satisfied his earliest yearnings to become a syndicated cartoonist. In a way, these monthly one-pagers functioned as a sort of regular comic strip. In fact, one could regard this work as a precursor to Jack Cole's 1950's syndicated comic strip, BETSY AND ME.

Aside from brief runs of Cuthbert, Fuzzy, and Poison Ivy, there were five main characters in Cole's stable of Quality Comics one-pagers:

• Burp the Twerp (Police Comics)
• Dan Tootin (Hit Comics)
• Slap Happy Pappy (Crack Comics)
• Windy Breeze (National Comics)
• Wun Cloo (Smash Comics)

When you consider that Jack Cole wrote, drew, and lettered 5 one-pagers a month for most of a 6-year stretch from 1941 to 1947, it's almost as if Cole single-handedly created his own Sunday comics section every month!

And this was on top of monthly creating PLASTIC MAN and MIDNIGHT stories, the various back-up stories scattered all over the pages of Quality comics, and several covers!

Even though several of Cole’s early humor comics centered on hillbilly humor (such as Home In The Ozarks) , quality staffer and editor Gill Fox actually created the Slap Happy Pappy strip. Fox’s pages ran in Crack Comics 1-8. Here’s a selection of Gill Fox’s enjoyable pages, which shows off his precise line and clear writing style (it’s no wonder Quality publisher Busy Arnold made Fox editor):

Crack Comics # 1 (May 1940)

 

Crack Comics 3 (July 1940)

Crack Comics 6 (Oct 1940)

Jack Cole’s first entry in the series shows him working closely from Gill Fox’s character designs, although Cole has injected his screwball, surreal humor into the strip. Note that Cole is using his pen name “Ralph Johns.”

Crack Comics 9 (Jan 1941)

 

Crack Comics 11 (March 1941)

Fox’s character design is still in play, but Cole has begin to use his own wild page layouts and artful titling (a la Eisner’s SPIRIT splashes). It’s outrageous that Cole would design new title art for a ONE page strip. Amazing!

Crack Comics 14 (July 1941)

Crack Comics 22 (March 1942)

Crack Comics 23 (April 1942)

Crack Comics 26 (Nov 1942))

Crack Comics 30 (August 1942)

Crack Comics 36 (Winter 1944)

 

Crack Comics 40 (Winter 1945)

 

Crack Comics 41 (Spring 1946)

   

Crack Comics 46 (Jan 1947)
A bizarre gag based on spousal abuse, with just gorgeous cartooning chops – the essence of Cole, weirdness mixed with virtuoso technique. This page was reprinted in Plastic Man #18 (July 1949)

 

Crack Comics 47 (March 1947)
One of Cole’s last Slap Happy Pappy 1-pagers and it’ a doozey. Beautiful, crisp drawings,  satisfying dense page layout (check out that thin horizontal borderless second tier), and sexy girls.

Plastic Man #17 (May 1949)
Very likely a reprint from some earlier, as yet undiscovered publication, or a page that was probably created in 1947 and unpublished until a slot was found in 1949. A fine example of Cole’s nested jokes technique in which puns are wrapped inside of a larger joke. In this page, the meta-gag is that Pappy mistakes his own ignorance for shrewdness!

Note: I just discovered a new FUZZY one-pager at the end of the Clap Happy Pappy run! I’ve added it to the FUZZY posting, here.

Jack Cole, Front and Centaur: Early Work 1938-39

Aside from his Boy’s Life cartoons, Jack Cole’s earliest known published work appears in the pages of the comic books published in 1936-39 by a group of publishers known today as Centaur.
In 1936, shortly after moving to New York from his hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania, Jack Cole landed a job with the Harry “A” Chesler shop,  the first-ever art studio set up to supply the newly born comic books with original stories (many of the first comic books were reprints of newspaper comics).
Cole started out at the shop as an assistant, providing inking, backgrounds, and the occasional one-pager, such as this inspired bit of lunacy from the April 1938 issue of Funny Picture Stories (Vol. 2 #7):

I love how INSURANCE IKE dives behind the last panel. Also note that the flood of tears would later be used several times in PLASTIC MAN stories, most notably, the celebrated Sadly Sadly story, created over a decade later.
Jack Cole’s first work in comics embraced what is today known as the ‘screwball’ comic. Exemplars of the screwball strip are SMOKEY STOVER and the great comics of Milt Gross.
Jack Cole’s wholehearted investment in developing a screwball style is especially present in these black and white scans from Funny Pages Vol 3 #10 (Dec. 1939). Note the presence of Cole’s signature in the first page, a rare instance in which Cole acknowledges Christmas in his work:
 

During this time, Jack Cole actually  worked in a room with other artists and writers, including Bob Wood, Martin Filchock, Fred Guardineer, and Charles Biro (of CRIME NEVER PAYS fame). Cole picked up tips and tricks from these artists, and no doubt there was a great deal of cross-pollination that occurred between the hard-working men.
I think Cole, to some extent, may have been influenced by fellow Chesler studio artist Fred Schwab. Take a look at this page, also from Funny Picture Stories Vol. 2 #7 by Fred Schwab (initialed “F.S.” in the 5th panel):

This page contains several qualities that became part of Jack Cole’s style: the breakneck pacing, the full moon framing device, the integration of sound effects into motion lines, and the use of bold patterns. One almost wonders if Cole did the backgrounds and fills on this page.
Here’s another page from the same issue of Funny Picture Stories in which one has to look closely to tell whether this is Schwab or Cole:

This is indeed by Jack Cole. Note the very same pattern used on both INSURANCE IKE’s pants and those of the character shown in panel 5, above.  In panel two Cole inserts a rare name-check (Garbo Schwab) to the Chesler artist he must have been most attuned with. I believe that Cole and Schwab may have collaborated on some stories in the 1937-39 Centaur comics.
In this 1938 page, Cole’s bodies are already impossibly and comically distorted, far beyond anything Schwab (or any other Chesler studio artist) attempted. Check out JOE TICKET’s twisted rubbery legs in the last panel – how many times do we see PLASTIC MAN’s body do the same thing?
The Centaur books were a great training ground for a beginning comic book creator. The stories were all pretty short, ranging from 1-5 pages. There was plenty of of room for different styles and different kinds of stories. You can see all the early Centaur artists experimenting and quickly dialing in on what worked best for them.
Cole quickly developed an appealing style and offbeat sense of humor. You can see a sampling of his Centaur pages in my earlier posting, here. As time went on, Cole won more and more of a starring position in the Centaur books, with longer stories in the lead position, and even covers, such as this honey from March, 1939:

Here’s another beautiful gem of a cover that has just surfaced, thanks to the great folks at The Digital Comic Museum:

This cover is from the Vol. 2 #1 issue  of Star Ranger Funnies (Jan. 1939). By this time, Cole had arrived as a bigfoot cartoonist. The gag is bizarre (which means interesting)  and his execution is supremely confident. Also we see here the early appearance of some devices Cole would use throughout his 16-year career in comics. The lamp beam is something Cole would employ on many covers and splash pages. The polka dot snowstorm is actually a pattern, which Cole used in a great deal of his work to add visual interest.
Another sign that, by 1939, Jack Cole had streaked like a meteor into higher and higher levels of success is seen when we turn the cover of this issue and this early four-page masterpiece of weirdness which Cole signed twice, once as ‘Zeke Cole’ and once with his own name:
 

Cole worked with funny hillbilly characters a lot in his early years. For example, he had a series called THE HIGRASS TWINS that appeared in 1940 issues of Target Comics (Novelty Press). Ron Goulart’s great biography, FOCUS ON JACK COLE, reprints an earlier “Home In The Ozarks” story, suggesting this was one of Cole’s first series.
This story is simply wonderful. There is a density of gags presented within a satirical framework that prefigures the Kurtzman/Elder MAD stories of more than a decade later.
It’s interesting how much these pages resemble Basil Wolverton’s great comedy series, POWERHOUSE PEPPER. I doubt there was any influence in either direction. Both creators simply settled on a winning formula and set of visual techniques.
Cole, of course, quickly moved on past this style as he took on serious crime stories and super-heroes. However, in his best creation, PLASTIC MAN, Jack Cole kept a generous helping of the slapstick gag humor that he mastered in his early years at Centaur.