Midnight Episode 7 (second run) – Jack Cole subverts the boxing story

 

  Story this post:

“Masked Mayhem” (my title)
Story and art by Jack Cole

Smash Comics #74
(Quality Comics Group
Dec, 1947)

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

 

 

For such a seemingly mild-mannered guy, Jack Cole was pretty subversive in his creative expression. He not only pushed the form of comics into new directions, he also pushed the content of comic books in the 1940’s.

His greatest creation, PLASTIC MAN, was itself a parody of the super-hero genre that defied the story-forms conventions and moral standards. Plastic Man started out as a crook and, for his first dozen or so adventures, kept functioning as a crook – breaking the law with a jester’s playfulness while he also saved the day as Plastic Man. When you think about it, these stories turned the hero concept inside out, which may be part of the unique appeal of the series.

In his seventh MIDNIGHT story in his second run on the series, Cole subverts the classic boxing/fight story-form. The boxing movie has been a Hollywood staple for over 50 years, with films like Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, and most recently The Fighter.  In 1947, the year Cole wrote and drew this story,one of the big hit movies was Body and Soul, starring John Garfield (pictured left). In the film, Garfield becomes involved with fight promoters who are crooked and corrupt. Ernest Hemmingway wrote about rigged fights in his great 1927 short story, “The Killers,” which has been adapted into a movie four different times (so far).

By 1947, the story-form of the rigged fight was predictable enough that Cole could parody it in his Midnight story. No doubt, Cole was inspired by the great work E.C. Segar did in Popeye with his numerous parodies of boxing matches and fights. He starts the story with a comic reversal, showing a man with a massive, rugged fighter’s body and the sensitivity of a child…

Cole ends the story on a subversive note, with our hero, Midnight, actually holding up the crooks at gunpoint!

It is also of passing interest to note that this story is also yet another in a long series of Jack Cole stories that play with the concept of shapeshifting…. in this story, Midnight is almost interchangeable for Plastic Man in his ability to change his appearance.

Sadly, like many of the later Midnight stories, there seems to be something lacking in the energy of the story. Still, the art is terrific and the storytelling is masterful. Check out this lovely panel from page six that features a classic Jack Cole city scene:

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The Complete Midnight! by Jack Cole - Volume One: 1941
A handsomely designed 102- page ebook in .cbr format featuring the first 12 Midnight stories, exhaustive notes by Cole scholar Paul Tumey, and 3 BONUS Jack Cole stories!

 

 

As a way to support this blog and distribute this great work, I am offering for a limited time a nice little ebook I’ve made called The Complete Midnight by Jack Cole: Volume 1 – 1941 for $2.99. This is a great way to support this blog.

The book includes Cole’s first 12 MIDNIGHT stories, pages of notes and analysis written by me – Paul Tumey, and additional bonus material, including his wonderful single Quicksilver story from 1941. I have carefully restored the pages and put it all into an attractive unified format with archival notation and quality. I think that this is probably the best digital representation of this classic work available at this time.

Please note: Orders filled within 24 hours. Because this file is large, it is necessary for me to email you the file myself in order to avoid costly storage and data transfer charges. This keeps the price very low for you, but please be patient as I will need to check email and fill orders manually. Thanks a million for supporting this blog!

This is a great way to support this blog and get some great reading for cheap!

A Million Years Before Jack Cole's Playboy Comics - Dickie Dean and the Time Camera (1941)

Story presented in this post:
Dickie Dean (story, pencils, inks, and lettering by Jack Cole)
Silver Streak Comics #10 (May,1941 - Lev Gleason)

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The Complete Jack Cole Dickie Dean Stories
A 73-page .cbr format eBook featuring all eight of Jack Cole’s haunting and darkly poetic Dickie Dean stories. Includes Cole's Silver Streak Covers!
ONLY $1.99 – Buy now and support Cole’s Comics!
LIMITED TIME OFFER!

Please note: Orders filled within 24 hours. Because this file is large, it is necessary for me to email you the file myself in order to avoid costly storage and data transfer charges. This keeps the price very low for you, but please be patient as I will need to check email and fill orders manually. Thanks a million for supporting this blog!
 

Long before he became Playboy’s first premiere cartoonist and comic artist, Jack Cole started out in the four-color world of comic books. Most famous for creating Plastic Man, Cole also created numerous comic book series that are all but forgotten today. One of my personal favorites is DICKIE DEAN, BOY INVENTOR, which appeared in Silver Streak Comics. DICKIE DEAN sprang from Jack Cole’s own boyhood, in which he invented various gadgets, including a way to listen in on his big sister’s romantic phone calls. As you can see in the first 3 Dickie Dean stories (published in this blog, with commentary here), Cole started the series out in his hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania.



Here, we present Jack Cole’s final Dickie Dean story, a wild, surreal crime story in which the past overshadows the present until Dickie’s time camera invention reveals the truth.

At it’s best, Jack Cole’s early work had a poetic, winsome quality, and was as bizarre as it gets. This was never more so than in his Dickie Dean stories, which were very likely fueled by melancholy memories of his childhood, contrasted with fantasies of what it could have been. Here, Dickie has a camera that looks into the past. In the first Dickie Dean story (you can read it here), he invents a similar device that reveals past crimes. The criminal's advantage? He removed his hair by electrolysis. Was any early comic book series ever more prosaic?

Cole gets a lot of mileage from Dickie’s sidekick comic relief character in this story, Zip, who at times prefigures the creation of his finest character, Woozy Winks, Plastic Man’s sidekick.
The art in this story is rushed, but still has moments of storytelling brilliance. Look at the bottom tier on the first page and see how Cole creates a sweeping cinematic camera movement from right to left and then into the sky.

One of the hallmarks of Cole’s imagery and storytelling is his gift for putting speed on paper. This story contains an early, iconic image of a car zooming into action in the climactic last page of the story.

On page one, Cole zoomed us into the air high above the characters, and on the last page, he shoots the speeding automobile from below. We see this image time and again in Cole’s early and mid-career comic book stories. Cole was an early master of dynamic “camera angles.”

The panel in this story also includes perhaps the first image of skyscrapers framed by a big yellow full moon. Cole was also quite fond using “celestial circles” as design elements in his early work. In fact, I’ve identified this as a “Cole-ism,” and one way to spot Jack Cole’s unsigned work. For more Cole-isms, see my article here.

Cole left his beloved creation behind when he joined Quality Comics and soon created Plastic Man, a series which owes much to Dickie Dean. Apparently, the publisher saw a lot of potential in the series. Lev Gleason published numerous Dickie Dean stories in Silver Streak 11-21, and Daredevil 1, 12-41. Some of the stories were drawn the Archie comics master, Bob Montana. Here's a delightful, patriotic 2-pager, "The Defense Bond Machine," by Bob Montana that first ran in Crime Does Not Pay #22 (July, 1942 - Dickie's only appearance in this title). I think it captures the spirit of Cole creation, showing that Montana was one of the very few people who could take a Cole creation and do it justice:

All text copyright 2011 Paul Tumey

Did Frederic Wertham Drive Jack Cole Out of Comics?

Imagine that you are one of the top people in your field. Imagine that you have worked hard for 15 years to not only master a demanding art form, but contributed significantly to the development of that art form. In so doing, you've proudly made a good living, supported yourself and your wife, risen out of your humble circumstances, and even managed to buy a large house in a nice neighborhood. 

Then, imagine that suddenly the field you have devoted yourself to is declared to be harmful to children and to society. Imagine how confusing that could be. And then, imagine opening a popular magazine and discovering that your work is being held up as a prime example of how your field harms children. 

That's exactly what happened to Jack Cole in November, 1953 when the Ladies Home Journal, a very well-read magazine of the time, published an anti-comics article and called attention to his work. 

This double-page spread includes a panel from Jack Cole's classic story, "Murder, Morphine, and Me" (True Crime Comics Vol. 1 #2, May, 1947 ). The image is unforgettable, to be sure... and no editor worth their salt would pass up the chance to include this art in their publication as it would certainly draw interest. In the article, it is never mentioned that the scene the panel is taken from is actually a dream sequence, and the entire story is a cautionary tale. (The entire classic story is posted on my blog here). This iconic image simply sits, out of context, as one of the key images in the war against comic books that happened in the United States from 1948-55. (Many thanks to www.SeductionOfTheInnocent.org for the above scans)

Nonetheless, what decent human being would not read this article and ask themselves, "did I go too far?" The article was written by the infamous child psychologist Frederic Wertham. A few months after the Ladies Home Journal article, Wertham published a highly influential book, Seduction of the Innocent, in which he said that comics books harmed children and society. The book included a section of excerpted panels and covers printed on glossy paper in the middle, and the needle-to-the-eye panel from True Crime was one of the more vivid examples in that section.

The panel had also appeared in Wertham's first volley against comic books, about five years earlier, in an article he published in The Saturday Review of Literature in May, 1948:

In 1951, pages from "Murder, Morphine, and Me" appeared in an investigation conducted by the New York State government:

It all came to head when the United States Senate got involved. 

In 1954, hearings were held in Congress, for goodness' sake! Some of these hearings were even televised! This time, not only Jack Cole's True Crime Comics story was singled out, but PLASTIC MAN - his baby, his masterpiece, was labeled by the United States Government as "Objectionable."

Comics were in trouble. At the conclusion of the Ladies Home Journal article from November, 1953, Wertham calls for their extinction: "Whenever you hear a public discussion of comic books, you will hear sooner or later an advocate of the industry say, 'Comic books are here to stay.' I do not believe it." In no time, millions of comics were gathered and destroyed... in scenes that resembled the book-burnings in Nazi Berlin.

Good grief! How terrible would anyone feel if the work they had poured their talent and sweat into was being rounded up and eradicated from existence! 

As sales dropped, and publishers scrambled to adapt to the changing market, job opportunities for a comic book creator dwindled. Even for the greats, like Jack Cole. He left comics in 1954 and shortly after became the lead cartoonist for the brand new magazine, Playboy.

Could Jack Cole have looked at these articles and the TV broadcasts, and felt ashamed to even say he was a comic book artist? Could the rabid attack on comic books have shamed Jack Cole? Is this why he hardly ever mentioned his 16 years in the business? Is this why he barely gave himself any credit publicly for creating the Plastic Man stories, which now stand as one of the most appreciated and beloved groups of classic comics ever?

While we have no actual documentation or oral history to support the idea that Wertham's crusade drove Jack Cole out of comic books, it seems to be more than possible -- perhaps even very likely. 

The anti-comics crusade affected this emerging art form in a number of ways. Check out the article I wrote with fellow comics historian Frank Young at Comic Book Attic here. I'm happy to report that Roy Thomas plans to publish that article in the next issue of his great magazine Alter Ego.

Personally, I have always found Cole's comics to be anything but a corrosive influence. I remember being very affected by the humanity and humor of the few Plastic Man stories that were reprinted in the 1970's. To me, the witch hunt against comics may have been well-intentioned, but I don't think it was connected much to reality, which in this case was that millions were entertained by the great work of Jack Cole and his colleagues. As proof of that, here's a photo from the late 1940's  that shows how a sick kid found some enjoyment in comics.  Can you spot the Cole comic on his bed?

And finally, here's yet another photo of a young fellow enjoying a stack of comic books, with True Crime Comics  proudly displayed on top -- the title that contained the offending needle-to-the-eye panel (that perhaps Cole wished he'd never drawn). I don't know about you, but I identify MUCH more with this kid, than the politicians. Long live comics!