New Paul Tumey and Frank Young Blog - Comic Book Attic!

I've teamed up with my friend and fellow comic book writer, artist, and scholar Frank Young to start up a new blog. Frank and I have created in-depth blogs that study the work of one particular creator (in Frank's case, John Stanley at Stanley Stories). From time to time, we run across lost gems in comics that we'd love to share and comment upon. So, we created Comic Book Attic.

Our first post looks at a wild Nazi horror story from 1953, and compares it to a bizarrely altered version published in 1958. As Frank put it, this example shows very well how the Comics Code Authority negatively affected comics.

Comic Book Attic affords us a chance to write about—and share—other comics material, both great and effed-up, from the tattered history of the four-color medium.

We look forward to the fun we’ll have here, and we hope you’ll enjoy our musings as well.

Check it out and let us know what you think. More great stuff to come!

Jack Cole and the Art of the Splash Page: Part 1 (1938 to 1941)

Jack Cole’s comic book stories stand out in part because of they often featured unique, brilliantly designed splash pages. Cole was a master of the art of the splash page, perhaps second only to Will Eisner. His opening pages contained more energy, more eye-candy, and more dramatic action than most comic book stories of the time had in their entire 6 or 7 pages.

Note: many of the stories connected to the splash pages shown in this article have been reprinted in their entirety in this blog. I’ve included links to the stories in this article, but you may also consult the Cole-Mine directory at right.

The term “splash page” refers to the opening page of a comic book story. Usually, but not always, the splash page is a page-sized panel filled with vibrant action and detail. Sometimes the splash page may contain a large opening scene and logo integrated into the first two or three panels of the story. The idea behind the splash page is that it draws the reader into the story with a splash, setting the mood and tone of the tale that it introduces.

While the origins of the term “splash page” are hazy at best, one can trace the adoption of this cornerstone of graphic storytelling in American comic books to around 1939-40.

The first comic books were reprints of newspaper comics. Since newspaper comics of the time were mostly limited to a full page at most, there were no splash pages. Sometimes newspaper comics had a splash panel, but usually the page was laid out in a grid, like these pre-historic comic book pages from New Fun #2 (March, 1935):

 

Note the narrow rectangular decorative header at the top of the page, followed by a first panel of text that introduces the episode and recaps previous story developments. These elements are the embryo of what would eventually become the splash page.

Comic books took off in a big way after 1935. Soon publishers ran out of newspaper comics to reprint and the demand for original material quickly soared. The first original comic book stories were made using the grid-like form of newspaper comics, such as this page by SUPERMAN creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster from Detective Comics #1 (March, 1937):

Even though this is the first page of a four-page story, Siegel and Schuster employ the the same narrow header strip and grid approach as color Sunday newspaper comics of the time,  However, Jerome Siegel and Joe Schuster were inventive young men themselves, and for their second story in Detective Comics #1, they delivered a very early example of the splash page:

Jack Cole came into comics around this same time, and his first work for Centaur follows the newspaper comic format, as did most of the material in the Centaurs of 1937-40. Here is one of Jack Cole’s first published comic book pages, from April 1938 (Funny Picture Stories V2 #7):

You can see the antecedent of of the splash page in the first panel of the above page. The scene shown in the first panel is connected to the scene that follows, but features a different character, the husband. The joke in the first panel, “wife insurance policy,” is funny on its own merit, but the first panel gains depth after the entire page is read. This is a more layered, sophisticated approach than any other strip in the book, and indeed than in most comics of the time.

Cole opens “Home in the Ozarks,” his four-page hillbilly epic that appeared in Star Ranger Funnies V2#1 (Jan, 1939) with a splash panel in the top tier. He cleverly uses the clothes hung on the clothesline, holes and all, to form the title. He uses logs, instead of lines to frame this panoramic entry into the wacky backwoods world of the Ozarks.

Jack Cole’s first adventure story, “Little Dynamite,” (Keen Detective Funnies #6, Feb. 1939) again claims the top tier for a less imaginative but considerably more dynamic opener:

Published in December, 1939 (Silver Streak Comics #1, MLJ), Jack Cole’s first CLAW story opens with a splash panel that now takes up one third of the page. As with “Home in the Ozarks,” the splash panel contrasts an object in the foreground with a panoramic landscape view in the background.

The boldness of the CLAW splash panel is striking, suggesting the crushing grip THE CLAW has on the island. Note the lengthy introductory text in the vertical panel on the left. Cole’s early adventure/heroic stories often began with an unusual amount of narrative text. I think he was intuitively balancing out the immediate, visceral impact of the splash panel which can be grasped in a few seconds, with the depth of explanatory text, which takes a few minutes to read. The narrative opener is also a hold-over from the “story so far” openers of  some adventure newspaper strips.

Most significantly, in THE CLAW splash above, Cole is moving towards his unique “reverse L” splash page, with the top horizontal and left vertical elements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This “reverse L” layout appears in “California’s Kidnap-Murder Mystery” (Top Notch Comics #2 (Jan 1940, MLJ/Archie):

In this splash, very unusual-looking for the period, Cole has fully adopted his use of bold, multi-colored  lettering of the series name, with the story title as a secondary sub-title. This was a device he would use in virtually all of his hundreds of comic book stories. Also, Cole has begun to work with the arrow shape as both a decorative element, and a design device for directing the reader’s attention.

 

 

 

 

Cole delivered one of his most dazzling reverse-L compositions in the splash page of his first COMET story, also published in January, 1940 (Pep Comics #1, MLJ/Archie):

Notice how Cole places his bold art elements: we start with a burst at lower left, lead up to the top, then arc across, down and back to the lower left in a loop. At the top of this loop, THE COMET literally bursts off the page. This is a brilliant layout; dynamism exponentially multiplied. You can’t NOT read this story!

Cole’s decorative lettering of the series name is bold yet stylish. Like so many of his contemporaries in early comics, Jack Cole acquired the ability to create exciting, eye-catching logo art – a special skill in itself, and a vital component of the comic book splash page.

The April, 1940 splash for “The Man With A Thousand Faces,” Cole’s long-forgotten but fascinating DEFENDER origin story, the one story of Jack Cole’s to be published in a Hillman comic) again has a strong vertical element on the left side:

In the left panel, Cole dramatically crops a close-up of a face in the foreground and creates a wallpaper effect in the background with a solid color overlaying line drawings of faces.

In the right panel, Cole arranges the elements of square and round panels with narrative blocks in collage-fashion, as it they were cut-out and placed on TOP of the black rectangle.  His mid-1940’s work for Quality would often treat panels as if they were pasted on top of the page, tilted and with corners curling up.

Also in April, 1940, Cole published one of his finest splash pages in Pep #4 (MLJ), a masterful use of his “reverse-L” layout, this time with a downward thrust:

April, 1940 saw the first appearance and origin of yet another now-forgotten Jack Cole character, the Indian shapeshifter, Mantoka. This splash page from Funny Pages #36 (April, 1940 – Centaur) employs several winning design elements that would become a staple of Cole’s work: the use of bold, colorful patterns, vibrant logo art, and the dynamically tilted panel:

 

Cole’s first full- page splash appeared the following month, in May, 1940 in Silver Streak Comics #4. It is an iconic image of speed in the modern age:

This was his longest published story to date, signed by his pen name, “Ralph Johns.” Cole had graduated from 5 and 6 page stories buried in the back pages to an 11-page lead feature. For the first time, he had breathing space and room for the luxury of a full-page splash. Cole was also the editor of this Lev Gleason publication, and that didn’t hurt matters, either.

One month later, in Silver Streak #5 (June, 1940), Cole delivered another kinetic gem that is all about dynamic diagonals:

Cole presents the character of the Silver Streak’s “creator,” Ralph Johns in a heartfelt, boyishly enthusiastic introduction addressed to the reader. Speaking directly to the reader from the splash page would be a device that Cole would use continually throughout his career, although he would usually have characters address the reader instead of the “creator.”

In addition to the Claw/Silver Streak/Daredevil stories in the front of his comic book, Cole wrote and drew a wonderful, long-forgotten series about a boy inventor. In this splash, resplendent with fiendish glee, also from Silver Streak #5 (June, 1940), Cole once again employs the reverse-L layout:

 

Cole created a hallucinogenic full-page splash for Silver Streak #7 (August, 1940):

The above splash page suffers from a lack of cohesive visual design, a rare anomaly in Cole’s work. In addition to editing this particular issues, Cole created 38 pages of it, delivering four exceptional stories. Here’s another splash from the same issue (Silver Streak #7, August, 1940) that displays a stronger layout idea (this time, it’s an “X” instead of an “l”), but nonetheless suffers from a lack of polish”

Perhaps the task of editing a monthly book, filling a nearly a third of it with pages he wrote, penciled, inked, lettered, and most likely colored himself was taking its toll.

At this point in his career, Cole left Lev Gleason and Silver Streak Comics to work for a new publisher, Quality Comics Group, where he settled in for the next 13 years, the rest of his career in comic books. Smash Comics #18 (Jan, 1941) debuted yet another new Jack Cole creation, MIDNIGHT, introduced by a much slighter splash panel than his exciting Silver Streak extravaganzas:

At first, working at Quality meant Cole had to shift from the epic 12-16 page stories he had created for Lev Gleason to just five pages. This may explain the rather cramped, lackluster splash panel of the first MIDNIGHT story, above. Just three issues issues later, in Smash Comics #20 (March, 1941) , Cole’s splash panel work shows the first influence of Will Eisner and Lou Fine, whose brilliant splash pages were also appearing in  Quality comics.

By the next month, Jack Cole had brilliantly adjusted to the 5-page format, and drew a supremely elegant reverse-L splash page for one of his greatest comic stories in Smash Comics #21 (April, 1941):

A key element in the success of the above splash is the limited color palette. By some accounts, Quality’s publisher, Everett “Busy” Arnold, handled the coloring chores himself. Said to have been color-blind, Arnold colored his comics with vibrating color combos and lots of red. In the above splash, Arnold either managed to transcend his limitations or another person –- possibly even Jack Cole himself – colored it.

Aside from the effective use of color, Cole’s choice of camera angles in each panel is particularly adept at creating both a flowing and interlocked visual collage. He’s also begun to use a mix of squares and circles in his composition, which add visual interest. The logo art is also very accomplished, with a strong, confident line and expert drop shadow. Cole’s choice of an archaic, older font for the logo art suggests the timeless quality of the tale that is about to play out: murder, a world thrown into chaos, and then the heroic restoration of balance and order,

Lastly, the use of the clock-tower/steeple as a set piece and (as we learn upon reading) an integral element in the story is particularly satisfying. When the villain is impaled on the steeple, the immediacy of the expertly-rendered architecture in the splash gains a level of sophistication, much like the splash panel in Cole’s INSURANCE IKE one pager from above.

 

 

 

Cole’s MIDNIGHT splash page of a couple months later  (Smash Comics #23, June 1940) is one of his more unique ideas – and that’s saying a lot when you are considering the work of the always inventive Jack Cole. In this case, Cole draws a bird’s eye view of Midnight sailing across the tops of skyscrapers, putting his “camera” in a totally unexpected location. The square rooftop of the building at lower left is cleverly employed as an introductory narrative panel.

 

The following month, in the pages of National Comics #13 (July, 1941), Cole designed a memorable splash page for his only story in the QUICKSILVER series. The attention-grabbing target icon is used to great effect in this splash. Once again, Cole is working out how to draw speed on paper in this terrific splash page. Note how the speed “tail” has the series’ tagline in it (The Laughing Robin Hood) and also leads you into the bottom tier of panels, starting the story. Cole’s drawing is very tight, and his inking is almost overdone.

 

 

Cole’s splashes were becoming more exciting and accomplished by the month. It all came together for Cole in his splash page for Police Comics #1 (August, 1941), introducing a new character:

Perhaps it’s the knowledge that this splash page introduces one of the great comic book characters and begins a collection of truly wonderful stories, but there is something so perfect about this splash page that it stands out as a landmark in the history of American comic books.

In contrast to his QUICKSILVER splash (above) published the previous month, Cole provides just the right amount of detail in the opening two-tier wide splash panel. It may be that his idea of a humorous, light-hearted superhero series suggested a simpler art style to Jack Cole. In any case, he crated a new amalgam of his early “bigfoot” style and the super-hero look of the day. This is a delicate, intuitive visual balance  between realistic, representation drawing and comic exaggeration that no other comic book artist attempting to draw Plastic Man stories has been able to achieve. The “Plastic Man” logo art looks as though the letter were cut from sheets of rubber. Interestingly, Cole’s organic letters are very similar to the style of lettering used 25 years later, in the 1960’s psychedelic era.

As he did in the splash from Silver Streak #7 (above), Cole shows centers a large image of the character on the page. And what a face… a wide grin, curly black hair, red suit, and shades! He’s at once satanic and heroic! Plastic Man’s torso is set behind an introductory scene that is equally compelling, as Plas very literally demonstrates the long arm of the law. Plas and the crooks are standing on the panel border – a visual witticism that announces this is a self-aware comic book story, perhaps the first. The front view of the large figure beautifully sets off the side view of the small figures. This combination works so well that it is surprising that Cole did not use this layout more often. As an introduction to a new character, though, it can’t be beat.

In the next part of this article, we’ll survey Cole’s splash pages from 1942-48, a period in which he reached dizzying heights of comic art excellence!

All text copyright 2011 Paul Tumey

Foreshadowing Playboy: Jack Cole’s Boy’s Life Cartoons (1936-40)

 

From 1936 to 1940, Boy’s Life magazine regularly published one-panel gag cartoons by Jack Cole. These previously unknown cartoons trace his development from a rank beginner to a distinctive stylist. In these cartoons, Cole develops the layered ink/watercolor/wash visual style he would return to 14 years later as Playboy magazine’s signature cartoonist. I have spent days searching through back issues of Boy’s Life to cull out two dozen wonderful Jack Cole cartoons that, as far as I know, have never seen the light of day since their original publications, nearly 75 years ago! Reading these cartoons in chronological order reveals Jack Cole’s amazing growth as an artist and humorist in his early years. You saw it here, first folks!

It is believed that Jack Cole began his cartooning career with a 1935 sale to Boy’s Life magazine. In a wonderful, but somewhat slanted autobiographical piece that Cole published in a 1956 issue of the Freelancer magazine (Issue #2), he recounted this momentous event:

“…I had taken a job with the American Can Company and was well on my way to the normal life when one of my idle-hour etchings made a sale to “Boy’s Life” magazine in 1935.”

Here’s the whole wonderful article (thanks to  Harry Green, who recently published the page  (courtesy of David Miller, who provided the scans) on his wonderful comic blog, Hairy Green Eyeball 2, and to loyal reader and supporter of this blog, Daniel McKiernan, who made me aware of the post.

  

Just a few thoughts about this new find. Notice how Cole glosses over the major effort of his life, his 16-year career in comic books. Also, the “minor class magazines” that Cole mentions are the Humorama line (Joker, etc.). A nice collection of these cartoons were collected in The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, by Alex Chun. A few of these cartoons can be viewed at this link.

In Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s top-notch book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, they reprint the first page of an article that Cole wrote and illustrated about his epic 1932 cross-country solo bike ride (which I transcribed and commented on, in this earlier post). The caption for the page reads:

“Cole’s first professional sale, to Boy’s Life in 1935, recounts his 1932 adventure bicycling all across America and back.” (p. 10)

I am a huge fan of Art Spiegelman’s work, but recent scholarship on my part suggests this is incorrect; very likely a mistaken assumption. The first sale to Boy’s Life was not this article, but very likely a one-panel gag cartoon.

Spiegelman was recently kind enough share with me that he got the reproduction of the article’s first page from Cole’s brother, Dick Cole, who had no date information. I think it was a reasonable assumption to make that this article was Jack Cole’s first professional sale. Boy’s Life published articles of this ilk, and in the early 1950’s, I even found a very similar (if much less well written) article in which a teenager tells the story of his west-to-east journey across America by bike, even hitting some of the same out-of-the-way towns as Cole!

However, after searching through Boy’s Life magazine back issues for 1935, I can find no trace of anything by Jack Cole. Not the bike trip article, nor a cartoon or illustration. Nothing. I looked through every page of every issue five times.

In fact, I looked through every page of every issue of Boy’s Life from 1933 to 1941, and I did not find Cole’s “A Boy and His Bike” article. So where was this article published, and when? It’s a mystery, as of this date. My friend and fellow comics curator, Frank Young (see Stanley Stories, his superb and groundbreaking blog on John Stanley) suggests that perhaps the article appeared in his hometown newspaper, the New Castle News (which, unfortunately has no archive for these years). Frank says that the article looks to him like the typical layout of Sunday newspaper rotogravure magazines of the time. Indeed, the layout of this page doesn’t look anything like the layouts Boy’s Life used, although the fonts are similar.

In any case, although Jim Steranko, Ron Goulart, and Art Speigelman, as well as Jack Cole himself all state that Cole’s first professional sale was to Boy’s Life in 1935, I can find no trace of a cartoon in those pages. The first Jack Cole cartoon I have located appears in 1936, not 1935. Could it be that Cole simply mis-remembered? Heaven knows that if you asked me the date of my first fiction sale (“Toy Chest River,” in a hardcover anthology called Christmas Forever), I would very likely get the date a year or two off – and that was a major event for me.

The first issue of Boy’s Life in which Cole’s work appears in is the October issue of 1936. Cole had two cartoons in that issue. It’s possible these represent his first professional sales (I am not sure where the “circa 1934” cartoon shown caption-less in the above Freelancer article comes from. That could be the first sale, or it may even be a rejected cartoon Cole dug out for this piece.)

Boy’s Life (October, 1936)

From the start, Cole is displaying technical prowess with wash and watercolor. 14 years later, his Humorama and Playboy cartoons would in part be so successful because of Cole’s mastery of watercolor.

If I haven’t missed anything in my search, Cole did not place another cartoon in Boy’s Life for 11 months. During this time, he borrowed 500 dollars from his hometown merchants and moved to New York City with his wife Dorothy. By the time his next Boy’s Life cartoon appeared, Cole had begun his comic book career, finding a salaried job at the Harry “A” Chesler studio, the first packager of original comic book material. Talk about being in the right place at the right time -- Cole got in at the ground floor of the development of a whole new art form and branch of publishing!

Boy’s Life (September, 1937)

A typically wacky Jack Cole invention. Cole’s work is filled with surreal inventions such as this one. Compare to the story of the invisible “Flit” spray in Plastic Man #1

Cole had a second cartoon in this issue, as well…

Cole was particularly creative in his next cartoon, creating an irregularly-shaped cartoon cleverly designed to slot into the magazine’s 3-column layout:

Boy’s Life (October, 1937)

Cole’s inspired design supports the subject of the gag very well…

 

Boy’s Life (November, 1937) 

More surrealism. The sort of play with reality that we see a lot of  in Cole’s Burp the Twerp one-pagers….

Boy’s Life (December, 1937)

Here we see similar motion and energy that Cole invested in his Plastic Man stories.

Boy’s Life (January, 1938)

Cole’s first published hillbilly cartoon (and a funny one, at that). Hillbilly humor and rural settings are a staple of Cole’s work. See The Highgrass Twins (1940) for starters

Cole had a second cartoon in the Jan 1938 issue… delightfully  surreal and again with the invention theme…

Boy’s Life (February, 1938)

Note the use of pure wash effects with no defining border lines… a characteristic of Cole’s stunning 1950’s Playboy cartoons.

Boy’s Life (May, 1938)

Funny drawings…

Note in the above cartoon that Cole’s signature has begun to evolve from the ornate, labored anchor-shaped icon/logo he designed in the earliest cartoons to a more simpler and assured signature. A study of the development of Cole’s signature in his 1936-40 Boy’s Life gag cartoons reveals a march toward simplicity and grace.

The last signatures in this progression are very close to the signature Cole used for his famous Playboy cartoons, some 14 years later.

Boy’s Life (July, 1938)

Impotence was a theme Cole explored in both is comic book, gag cartoons, and in his syndicated comic strip, Betsy and Me.

Boy’s Life (August, 1938)

 

Boy’s Life (September, 1938)

Only Cole could think of an impossible gag like this… and make it work.

Boy’s Life (January, 1939)

Cole’s visual style is evolving from the “puppet” figure shapes to more organic and flowing forms. You can feel the fluidity of Plastic Man in this image…

Interestingly, a cartoon by Fred Schwab appears in this issue, as well. Schwab worked with Cole at the Chesler studio, and I get the sense they were chums. When asked about the Cole-Schwab connection, Art Spiegelman kindly shared the following information: “Cole really got along well with Fred Schwab since they shared an affinity for screwball Smokey Stover cartooning. I interviewed him for the book (he worked in production at the NYT, but turned out to be an affable man with almost no specific memories.” I suspect that Cole probably helped Schwab get this sale to Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (January, 1939)

 

Boy’s Life (February, 1939)

Ah, an “Eat at Joe’s” cartoon by Jack Cole. That’s like finding a “Kilroy was here” cartoon by Harvey Kurtzman. Notice how effectively Cole has begun to use patterns to create a more richer visual experience. His comic book stories are filled with patterns, such as Woozy Wink’s polka-dotted blouse.

Boy’s Life (May, 1939)

Fred Schwab placed two more cartoons in this issue. These are the last of the Schwab cartoons in Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (April, 1939)

To borrow Jeet Heer’s great phrase, the comedy of locomotion…

Boy’s Life (June, 1939)

Cole is becoming more confident and accomplished visually. It is interesting to compare this evolving painterly technique to his still-crude pen-and-ink line work in his 1939-40 comic book stories…

Boy’s Life (September, 1939)

Wow.. look at the motion and the sense of a moment captured in time. Cole has found the underlying mechanism of the visual expression of time and space, and has invented a way to stuff a captured moment with the implied events that occur just before and after the moment, adding enormous depth and profundity to his work. Compare this to the similar waterfall gag of October, 1937 and you will see how much Cole has grown in a very short time. The legendary bluesman Robert Johnson is rumored to have made a deal with the devil to suddenly transform into a master of the guitar. Did Cole make a similar deal in 1939 to acquire the ability to manipulate time and motion in comic book images like no other artist before or since? His growth in this period is uncanny and unexplainable. By the way, this was the largest cartoon I saw in 10 years of Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (November, 1939)

 

Boy’s Life (December, 1939)

Another impressive motion-on-paper moment, and a funny gag, too… almost iconic… just when you think you’re bad off…. there’s a cactus that’s waiting to break your fall….

 

Boy’s Life (January, 1940)

This gag reminds me of Death Patrol… look at those gorgeous speed lines… Cole has clearly become fascinated with showing motion on paper…

 

 

Boy’s Life (June, 1939)

Motion, motion, motion – funny, funny, funny. Cole is now by far the most distinctive stylist of the cartoonists in this run of Boy’s Life. His cartoons leap off the page.

 

 

Boy’s Life (October, 1940)

And then, it ends… sadly, here is the last of Cole’s marvelous cartoons for Boy’s Life. In New York City, Cole had taken on the job of editor for Lev Gleason, and devoted himself wholly to comic books for the next 14 years. Look at how this lovely cartoon leaps off the page…

 

Tuba or not tuba, that is the question…This is the only cartoon in the Boy’s Life panoply that has no caption. Cole has graduated to a “pure” form of gag cartooning with this last entry.

Overall, Cole’s heretofore unseen and unknown Boy’s Life cartoons are a revelation. We can see, more clearly than in his comic book work of the same period, his meteoric growth as a cartoonist.

Somewhere out there, a 4-CD bootleg of Bob Dylan’s unreleased 1962 songs exists, Dylan 1962. Listening to this CD, one can hear in a few tracks the “wild, thin mercury sound” of Dylan’s famous albums of a few years later. The tracks totally undermine the story of Dylan’s artistic development as an acoustic folksinger into an artist who suddenly picked up an electric guitar in 1965. He had the electric sound in 1962, and brought out this new style when it best suited his career.

Similarly, Cole had developed his wash/watercolor gag, compressed-time gag cartoon approach some 15 years prior to his landmark work for Playboy magazine, starting in 1954.

All text is copyright 2011 Paul Tumey