THE COMET (1940): Jack Cole’s First Superhero Streaks Toward Plastic Man

Before PLASTIC MAN, MIDNIGHT, and THE SILVER STREAK, there was THE COMET, Jack Cole’s first superhero. Let’s turn back the hands of time and go nearly all the way back to the beginning of Jack Cole’s career, and practically the start of comic books in America themselves.

In 1936, Jack Cole moved from his hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania to New York City, determined to jump start his career as a cartoonist. Like many penniless aspiring cartoonists in New York City at that time, Cole soon found work in comic books, which at that time were a brand new format that was taking off and needed new talent.

Cole started at the Harry Chesler shop, reporting for work at the shabby fourth floor studio of an old warehouse located on 23rd street (cited in Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-41 by Greg Sadowski). His earliest comics for Chelser can be found in the 1937-39 issues of comics published by the small conglomerate of interests best-known today as Centaur. These pages are all light-hearted, jokey, humorous cartoons in the exaggerated, “bigfoot” style of gag cartoonists. Here is a signed example from Funny Pages Vol 3 #10 (Dec. 1939), a very are instance in which Cole acknowledges Christmas in his work:

You can see numerous examples of this earlier, funny material and read my articles about it here.

At the time, this style of comical imagery was what cartooning was widely considered to be, and exactly what Jack Cole had trained for as a student of the Landon School of Cartooning (see my earlier post here) correspondence course. Here is a prime example of Jack Cole’s early bigfoot style (note the graceful curve of motion and energy, an early indicator that Cole was a natural for drawing action-oriented images):

Funny Pages Vol. 3 No 2 (Centaur, 1939)

 

In April, 1938, Action Comics #1 appeared, bringing the first superhero, SUPERMAN, into the world and rapidly changing what comic books were all about. The issue sold out and was reprinted several times, ultimately selling an astonishing 200,000 copies (cited in Fire and Water: Bill Everett and the Birth of Marvel Comics by Blake Bell). In a few months, sales of SUPERMAN comics hit a half million copies of each issue, and that meant big money for the magazine’s publishers. Needless to say, plenty of other publishers and entrepreneurs saw a great opportunity and soon, superhero comic books covered the newsstands.

Like many of his fellow comic book creators, in 1939-40, Cole shifted from creating humorous gag-oriented comics to designing stories of heroic figures with superhuman abilities. Superheroes were taking off, and whole careers would be made for those lucky creators who could develop characters that caught the public’s interest (and dimes).

In late 1939, Jack Cole moved from Centaur to MLJ and created THE COMET, his first superhero character. At MLJ, he also created gag cartoons, humorous stories, and invented the movie-inspired comic book true crime story (a story-form that fellow Centaur alumni Charles Biro later developed into one of the most successful comic book lines ever for Lev Gleason publications). It was an extremely fertile period for this young, ambitious, enormously talented writer-artist.

It’s fascinating to study Jack Cole’s 1939-1940 work for MLJ (later known as Archie Comics). All the elements that would come together in the brilliant PLASTIC MAN stories are present in these earlier stories. In PLASTIC MAN, Cole would combine the three types of stories he created in 1939-40: humor, crime, and superhero. The result was a unique story-form that transcended the conventions of all three styles and, like a modern-day DON QUIXOTE (with Woozy Winks as Sancho Panza), became a timeless classic that continues to deliver a satisfying mix of thrills and smiles to new readers generations later.

But before he could achieve his killer combo in PLASTIC MAN, Cole had to master the form of the superhero story, and he started with THE COMET.

THE COMET is a bizarrely vengeful and blood-thirsty superhero, even by pre-comics code Golden Age standards. In the first story alone, he angrily melts criminals into “nothingness” and cheerfully drops a criminal to his death from several hundred feet in the sky.

 

A deadly disintegrating ray flows from his eyes all the time, and only by wearing glass goggles (glass paradoxically – and poetically – being the only substance that can block his death vision) is THE COMET able to protect innocent citizens.

 

A similar version of the goggled disintegrating ray concept appeared about two decades later, when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the character of Cyclops for The X-MEN. They also used another Cole idea for MR. FANTASTIC of THE FANTASTIC FOUR, who stretches like PLASTIC MAN. To my knowledge, neither Kirby nor Lee ever publicly credited Jack Cole with being the first comic book guy to come up with these concepts, therefore it seems very likely they arrived at these ideas independently of Jack Cole. However, the success Kirby and Lee had with these ideas is a testament of sorts to how brilliantly inventive Jack Cole was.

It’s also worth noting that Jack Cole’s more famous superhero character, PLASTIC MAN, also wears something over his eyes, in this case, sunglasses. It’s such a shame that Jack Cole was never interviewed about his comic book work.

Interviewer: Mr. Cole, why did you decide to adorn Plastic Man with shades?

Cole: I was always looking for little details that would set my characters apart, and make them interesting. My brother was visiting me and he had just purchased a pair of sunglasses at a drugstore on 53rd, and it hit me that having the eyes hidden and dark would let the reader imagine what the eyes looked like – and that would be a lot more compelling. Sort of like Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. Plus, Plastic Man’s eyes were the one part of his body he couldn’t alter, so if he was going to be sure he could keep his identity a secret, he needed to hide his eyes.

Who knows what Jack Cole would have said if he were interviewed? A terminally shy man by all reports, perhaps he would have clammed up like the famous film director John Ford when interviewed by the well-informed, enthusiastic Peter Bogdanovitch near the end of his career:

Cole: I just did, that’s all.

Perhaps it’s just another facet of Cole’s obsession with face-changing. In any case, wearing shades adds greatly to the coolness of PLASTIC MAN, where THE COMET looks a little silly with his bathing cap and diving mask.

Though he may look silly when in costume, THE COMET is grimly serious when it comes to delivering justice. He isn’t content with delivering criminals to the police, who will deal with them. When face-to-face with a dirty thug, THE COMET lifts his glass visor and instructs the vermin to “PREPARE TO FACE YOUR MAKER!” This is one righteous crusader of justice!

His powers, as efficiently explained in the opening two panels of the first story (Cole’s typical full-steam-ahead fashion) are flight and heat vision. When studying the superhero characters of late 1930’s and early 1940’s comics, it is important to realize that they were all (mostly successful) attempts to cash in on the great demand for superhero stories that began with the first appearance of SUPERMAN in 1938.

Though THE COMET’S powers are derivative of SUPERMAN’S (who also flies and has heat vision – although I have yet to determine if Supes’ heat vision came before or after THE COMET –- anyone know?), Cole puts his own spin on them. THE COMET acquires his powers by scientific invention, a very common theme for Jack Cole. In fact, THE COMET’s power comes about as a result of a chemical introduced into his bloodstream, the same device Jack Cole used in the considerably more accomplished origin story of PLASTIC MAN, about a year later.

The rays that come out of his eyes are only deadly when they are crossed, making THE COMET perhaps the only superhero who is more powerful cross-eyed.

Cole wrote and drew the first four COMET stories, for Pep Comics 1-4. Here is the first of the four. Note the wonderful, well-designed splash page, a hallmark of Cole’s comic book stories. Note also the same graceful, energetic curve in the design that was also present in Cole’s “bigfoot” cover for FUNNY PAGES (above).

PEP COMICS #1 (MLJ – Jan,1940)

 

I love how, at the top of the third page in this story, THE COMET flies across the country on his back! The same playfulness found in Cole’s PLASTIC MAN Stories is found in these cruder, earlier stories.

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Jack Cole’s second COMET adventure is filled with wild invention, featuring a gang of crooks that terrorize the good citizens of Florida with blimps and light machines. I love the New York style skyscrapers that are magically transplanted to Florida. Cole was never that concerned with accuracy.

The imagery of the large, evil face in the sky is very similar to the images in Cole’s CLAW stories (some of which can be read here).

PEP COMICS #2 (MLJ - Feb, 1940)

 

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In his third COMET story, Cole – a student of the serial stories told in newspaper comics -- injects some continuity into his new series by carrying over the criminal mastermind from the previous story and bestowing him with a truly evil name: Satan!

This story features some of Cole’s most accomplished work to date, with the stunning page five standing out as one of the most effective pages of comic book work Jack Cole ever created! Vengeful destruction was rarely so graceful!

Pep Comics #3 (MLJ – March, 1940)

THE COMET was a perfect hero for Jack Cole, who excelled at depicting speed and graceful movement on paper. Cole’s stylized drawings of THE COMET zooming around the city so fast that his lower body is an elongated blur stretch towards the very same images he would use to great success in his PLASTIC MAN stories.

A terrific comic book artist, Jack Cole was also a great comic book writer. His work is so organic, it’s hard to separate his art from his writing. In fact, it seems he created his text and images all at once, a panel at a time, from start to finish. In this story, Cole the writer hits on the great concept of making THE COMET an outlaw figure. He keeps this continuity running in his fourth, and last, COMET story.

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Pep Comics #4 (MLJ – April, 1940)

 

Cole is tightening his art and learning his craft in this story. Panels are more carefully ruled and his lettering is much improved. His art is tighter and his inking more accomplished. His large signature in the opening panel is a sign of how proud he must have been of this story.

Starting with a classic splash page, Cole delivers a knockout story. The grim nature of THE COMET’s world is further developed as our hero is attacked by an angry mob on page two. “Peaceful citizens gone mad,” THE COMET says, marking for perhaps the first time Cole’s continuing theme of the madness of human groups (a theme which appears in, among other stories, “Plastic Man Products” from Plastic Man #17, May 1949).

By the way, it is interesting to consider once again the similarities between the X-MEN’s shunned social position and THE COMET’s.

As further evidence that in THE COMET stories Cole was working out the concepts he would use in PLASTIC MAN, there is a startling similarity between the third page of this story and the second page of the first PLASTIC MAN story, from Police Comics #1 (August, 1941).

Both pages depict the fallen hero rescued by a wise, unselfish hermit-like figure. The layout and pacing of the two pages is almost identical. In Eel O’Brian’s case, the encounter leads to a spiritual transformation that is very quickly followed by a physical change. Part of the appeal of the Plastic Man origin story for me has always been connected to thefact that Eel O’Brian found salvation before he discovered he had super-powers.

In THE COMET’s case, the wise old hermit imparts a new social conscience to him, pointing out an injustice perpetrated not by a mad scientist or an easily identifiable crook, but by a business tycoon. It’s not Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but for comics of the time, it was a little subversive.

Cole’s penchant for morbid story elements comes through when THE COMET uses his disintegrating vision to rescue a trapped miner by apparently amputating his leg!

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Overall, Jack Cole’s COMET stories are great fun to read and have some stand-out visual moments and great splash pages. More importantly, from a historical perspective, these stories featured Cole’s very first heroic character and show him quickly working out his own unique brand of superhero, developing elements that would later be recycled in the creation of his landmark superhero character, PLASTIC MAN.

A personal note: I offer my apologies to my steady readers for the length of time between this and my last post. I have been going through some absorbing personal challenges. Also, I am running of out non-copyrighted Cole material to reprint! I do have some fun new articles planned though, so stay tuned!

All text copyright 2010 Paul Tumey.

Midnight Episode 5 (second run) – Cole’s Americana

 Story this post:

The Beautiful Bovine
Story and art by Jack Cole (signed)
Smash Comics #72
August, 1947
Quality Comics

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

 

Cole set several of his stories in traveling carnivals and county fairs. He even co-created a series, The Barker, that featured the exotic members of a travelling carnival sideshow. Rural America is reflected beautifully in this lovingly drawn madcap MIDNIGHT adventure set in a country fair. Cole dresses this story up with an almost literary level of details, including a hog show, a daredevil motorcycle attraction, a lecture on animal husbandry, and hootchie kootchie dancers.

In the splash page, note that Cole has signed this story “J. Cole,” in plain block letters, with no attempt at flourish or style. Unlike many artists, Cole did not create a stylized signature and “brand” his work with it. Here’s Cole’s signature from the pages of Plastic Man #1 (1943).

He almost always signed his stories (when he did sign them, which was sporadically) with his full first and last name. So, it’s interesting that in this story, Cole signed with his first initial: “J. Cole.”

Of course, in his other, parallel career as a magazine gag cartoonist, Jack Cole was required to develop a more stylized signature, as was the custom. Nonetheless, his signature was very simple and unadorned. Here’s his “Jake” pen-name signature from the mid-1940’s:

In a similar plain brush-lettered style, here’s a signature from a 1957 Playboy cartoon:

I am also struck by the tombstone shape into which Cole has inserted his signature on the splash page. It’s possible to read too much into such things, but it is interesting to read the text in this headstone shape and discover that it discusses death in connection with devoted love.

I bring this up not to psychoanalyze a man over 50 years after his death, but to suggest that many of these second-run Midnight stories are not as fun as they should be, and that perhaps this is because the shadows in Jack Cole’s psyche had begun to grow.

However, it’s time to moo-ve on, so without further ado, here’s another remarkable, if flawed, forgotten story by a creative genius.

So what does it all mean? I wish I could say. I’ve read this story a dozen times, and it feels as wispy and hard to grasp as a dream. On the surface, it appears to be a standard Quality-style yarn, but what is one to make of the oddly human, but mute cow? Or the appearance of not just any stolen gem, but the world’s biggest star sapphire? Or the perky, sexy girl who has zero interest in the clean-cut hero and instead remains devoted to the low-life thug? The usual story elements are present, but they somehow they are subverted.

Like many masters of comic book storytelling, Cole mined his sub-conscious for stories and details. In the late 1940’s, as we see here, there is a curious development where his art and mastery of visual storytelling techniques reach a peak seldom passed by other comic book creators of any era, but his storytelling seems to collapse under the weight of some unseen, inner pressure.

Jack Cole in Black and White: Rare Claw and Plastic Man reprints

Nearly all golden age comic books were printed in color. Many times, the artist had no input at all on the coloring. At Quality, Jack Cole’s primary publisher, it is said the publisher, one “Busy” Arnold,  directed the coloring himself, preferring bright red reds and blues, often in shimmering combinations that have caused some to theorize that Arnold may have been color blind!

When you look at pages by a master such as Jack Cole in black and white, you somehow get closer to the art, and the artist’s intentions. You see the page as the artist saw and worked on it. When the artist inked his pencils, as Cole so often did, you can also more easily see and appreciate his careful line work and collection of techniques for rendering textures, shadows, and forms.

Since it appears that no original art for any of Jack Cole’s comic book work is in circulation, there are scant opportunities to study his line work without color.

Here are two Jack Cole stories, originally published in color and here reprinted in black and white.

The first comes from Golden Age Greats #10 (AC Comics, 1996). I’m not sure how this publisher derived black and white pages from the original color pages.  Perhaps they used a process called Theakstonizing (after comics historian and restorer Greg Theakston), which uses chemicals to leech the color from printed pages. The story could be traced, as well. The art has clearly been retouched, as grey tones have been added. Perhaps the story is simply nicely Photoshopped. In any case, it’s a treat.

Overall, the publisher has respected Cole’s work, and Cole’s magic is present in spades here. Golden Age Greats #10  is long out of print, so I feel it’s OK to share this wonderful story. Especially since only a blurry, almost unreadable microfiche scan is in digital circulation at this time. However, AC Comics is still active and has hundreds of great books available that tie into the Golden Age. Check out their site, where you can purchase these cool comics.

Here’s the story, originally published in Silver Streak #10 (April, 1940):

 

What a wild ride! Whew! This story is the last of Cole’s CLAW stories, a series he created for Lev Gleason and the first true signs that comic book stories by Jack Cole are something special.

Although the first CLAW stories were straight-ahead, deeply sincere hero stories, by issue 10, Cole has begun to experiment with the winning combination of superhero and humor that would come to define much of his comic book work in the 1940s.

The perfectly timed sequence at the end of page two (the set-up) and the start of page three (the punch line) is sublimely startling. We see the form of a shapely woman (another classic Cole motif making an early appearance here) and assume that she is no doubt THE CLAW’s next pitiable victim. However, our expectations –- created by the already worn-thin clichés of pulp magazines, adventure books, and even comic books – are delightfully thwarted as the beauty is shown to be wearing fake buck teeth. This mix of dread and humor, female beauty, and pranksterism all wrapped up in a satirical sequence that goes by in the blink of an eye is classic Jack Cole.

The “funny face” gag would reappear – with no less of a delightfully unexpected effect -- about a year later, in Jack Cole’s MIDNIGHT story in Smash Comics #22 (May, 1941), when the intrepid hero protects his secret identity from discovery by simply making faces. A panel from this sequence is shown at left.

I’ve written extensively in this blog about Jack Cole’s core theme of shapeshifting, most often manifested by face-changing. These two early humorous sequences are variations of Cole’s core theme.

The CLAW story also climaxes with an erupting volcano – another motif that Cole returned to over and over again. It is difficult, studying the image here in black and white, to escape the sexual/phallic symbolism. There are, after all, few things more climactic than sexual explosion. Just a few scant years into his career, Cole was already tapping into powerful archetypal imagery, probably unconsciously, at this early stage.

Looking at an example of Jack Cole’s art from 1940, one is surprised to see layers of detail that are often obscured by dark colors. In this panel from page two, Cole lavishes his time and energy to create a vertiginous cityscape that what most artists of this time would treat much more simply (and quickly). Note the Chrysler spire in this drawing. Cole was born and raised in the small town of New Castle, Pennsylvania. When he drew this spectacular image, he had lived in Manhattan for about three years. His drawing here, buried in a cheap, throw-away comic, is a powerful a hymn to the magic of New York in the 1940’s that, to my thinking, has qualities of fine art. Perhaps because so many comic book creators of the 1940’s lived and worked in New York, the city itself is almost a character in their work. When I first encountered Plastic Man (in the DC Special reprint book), I was living in a small southern town, and was fascinated by the urban settings.

Another technique that pops out in this black and white version is the way Cole draws stone walls. Simply filling in the numerous blacks in the above two panels must have been very time consuming., Incidentally, this very technique also shows up the early 1940s SPIRIT stories.

In all, even though Cole at this stage of his career is hardly an expert draftsman, and his anatomy is often awkward, we see the young artist putting in inspired touches at every opportunity.

To compare, here is a story from about 10 years later, from Plastic Man #30 (July, 1951). This was a period where the comic book industry in general was shifting from all superheroes to other genres, and in response, Jack Cole (as well as many other comic book artists of the time) adopted a new, more “realistic” and toned down visual style.

The story itself is pretty awful, and not one of Jack Cole’s best efforts, by any means. Reading this particular story, it is hard to see why anyone would rave over Cole’s work. Still, it is interesting to study the artwork itself, laid bare in black and white.

T he story was reprinted in the summer of 1952, about a year after it was first published, in an odd, thick, square bound volumes called The Ajax Adventure Annual. To the left is a page from the flyleaf, with a wonderfully crude drawing of Pals and Woozy. As far as I can tell, the book consisted of reprints from other comics. Why in the world such a lackluster Plastic Man story was chosen to reprint remains a mystery to this day, but I will say that the quality of the selection is in keeping with the rest of the drab material in this volume. In fact, the Plastic Man story is the best thing about this book!

The presence of a Plastic Man story in this black and white book suggests the art was created from the originals, or perhaps photostats. Thus, even though the story is nowhere near Cole at his best, it is perhaps the closet thing we have to being able to look at un-retouched original art from his Plastic Man work.

 

It’s possible that Cole’s pencils are inked by another artist, here, but it’s my best guess – drawn from hundred of hours of study of Cole’s work – that Cole penciled and inked this story himself.

Cole’s post 1950 Plastic Man stories shifted from brilliant, over-the-top baroque cartooning to a shadowy and disturbing style that, in its own way, is just as brilliant as anything Cole ever did. What we have here, is an example of a story from the beginning of that transition.

Here, we see Cole stretching Plastic Man less. In fact, Plastic Man’s body is often awkward and ungainly, perhaps reflecting how Cole – a tall, shy man - may have felt.

At first, one is tempted to dismiss these clumsy images of Plastic Man as the work of another, less skilled artist. I could be wrong, but to me, this is Cole all the way.

Much like Jack Kirby found a way, in his early FANTASTIC FOUR stories (which had a stretching man character) to both tone down the imagery and root it in a world that has a more direct correspondence with our time and culture, so Jack Cole was working to mature his style and character. In short, Plastic Man is growing up in these stories.

The exuberant but simple work of the 1940 CLAW story has evolved into a world where the fantastic characters are weighted down with worry, responsibility, and fatigue. And, in a few months, Cole would invest his characters with dread and terror.

In all of this, Cole delivers some criminally underappreciated wonderful drawings. For example, it is worth spending some time to study this tier of panels:

First off, the placement of figures and composition is masterful, constantly leading the eye from left to right. Second, the expressions on the woman villain’s face reveal a great deal of human emotion; in this case, annoyance. Contrasting with the representational figure and facial expressions of the woman is the cartoony Woozy. In the middle panel, his facial expression is pure “bigfoot” cartooning. Somehow, Cole makes the two visual styles work together naturally, even organically. It’s easy to dismiss Cole’s later work as being uninteresting visually, but a closer examination reveals layers of depth.

In ten years’ time, with thousands of pages under his belt, Cole had become an ace draftsman and inker. I, for one, have come to greatly appreciate the craftsmanship and mastery of this period of his work. Check out, for example, the expert inking of the striped suit in this panel:

It’s nothing short of marvelous how Cole gets the effect of a fold in the suit arm not with the usual slashing brushstrokes that almost every other artist of the time employed, but with a clever displacement of the striped pattern. (One way to tell this story is Cole’s art is to observe the loving use of patterns throughout).

One can also appreciate the strong individuality of the face of the man in the striped suit. Look at the mix of straight and curly hair, the slouching head, and the wattled neck flesh. This is no Chester Gould style bizarre villain, but more of a Daniel Clowes character -- fascinatingly ugly and unflinchingly honest.

It could be observed that, as a writer, Jack Cole lost a great deal of steam after 1949, but it’s clear that the level of craftsmanship in his visual art, and his inventiveness as a powerful stylist continued to evolve and improve right up until the abrupt end of his life.

In looking at Jack Cole’s comic book work in a couple of rare black and white examples, one comes away with an even greater appreciation of the artist’s massive talent and deep commitment to his craft.

 

All text copyright 2010 Paul Tumey