Jack Cole: Colorist - Rare Golden Age Original Art (1941)

You just never know what you'll find when you troll the Web. This image has been up on Comic Art Fans for 5 years, but I just now discovered it! Sheesh! Many thanks to the site, and the art's owner for sharing this extremely rare piece! This is very likely the ONLY known page of 1940's superhero art by Jack Cole known to exist. It's the splash page from Silver Streak #10 (Lev Gleason, May 1941).

Note the "Good Luck" at the bottom. Could that be a note of encouragement to an aspiring comic book artist from Jack Cole himself? It's known that many comic book artists of the time gave pages of their original art to young visitors and fans as gifts. 

Even more interesting is the fact that this page is hand-colored, presumably by Jack Cole himself. Did Cole, before sending this page in the mail to a fan, perhaps take an hour or two and apply some color? I have long suspected that Cole colored at least some of his stories. He liked to do everything on his stories, if possible, from writing, penciling, and inking... and probably in some cases, coloring. At any rate, this page -- if it was colored by Jack Cole -- provides a clue as to the sort of color palette Cole preferred (at least in 1941!). 

A side-by-side comparison of Cole's coloring and the published version  (above) reveals that Cole had a more interesting palette, and a very different vision of the visual impact of the art than what was published. The published page has a lot of red and yellow... more garish primary colors. It is also interesting to note that, while the published page's splash panel treats the US map background as merely a non-distinguished field of light orange, Cole gives it a lighter color, making it an art element in the composition. It must have been frustrating for Cole and other artists of the time to create layouts and have the impact of them reduced by slapdash coloring. 

I've read that most of the stories at Quality Comics, Cole's main home for most of his career in comics, were colored by the color-blind publisher himself. 

The Claw vs. Daredevil story is pretty cool, by the way. We've published it on this blog in black and white, but since we are looking at color... here it is -- in its amazing, bizarre entirety in full, glorious (if sloppy) color, from a recently surfaced nice paper scan. Enjoy!

New Jack Cole Quality One-Pagers

Jack Cole created hundreds of genuinely funny one-page comics for Quality Publications in the 1940’s. In these one-pagers, Cole loved to play with double-meanings and the surreal images that resulted. In many ways, they are an extension of the gag humor style Cole based on the newspaper screwball strips, such as SMOKEY STOVER by Bill Holman (see my post on Holman’s influence on Cole here).

Part of Cole’s greatness was that he married the screwball “bigfoot” humor style and the 1940’s comic book superhero into stories that were both thrilling adventures and surreal, wacky comedy. In his Quality one-pagers of the 1940’s, you can see Jack Cole at his loosest, most fertile. He often warmed-up to his longer comic book stories by knocking off these one-page delights. Sometimes the gags are flat, sometimes the humor is too bizarre, and sometimes Cole’s pacing and art is just too sloppy to make much of an effect.

But sometimes, and more often than you’d reasonably expect for a guy carrying the creative workload Jack Cole had in the 1940’s, these tossed off one-page fillers that were buried in the back pages and which never really earned Cole much attention (or money) at all – are flashes of brilliance.

Here’s a few one pagers that are new to this blog, mined from new scans that have surfaced lately. Many thanks to the original scanners.

Hit Comics 22 (June, 1942)
A very typical Jack Cole comic of the early 1940’s, with humor wrapped a core of sadism. I really like the looseness of the art.Probably due to the fact that Cole had very little time to work on these pages. At this time, Cole’s PLASTIC MAN was taking off, and he still had his MIDNIGHT duties, as well as the several other one-pagers like this one he produced for Quality Publications every month.

Hit Comics 26 (Feb. 1943)
A great example of Cole playing with words and generating a bizarre, surreal image as a result.

Hit Comics 27 (April, 1943)
Cole’s style just gets looser and more assured. Look at the beautiful figure groupings. The three figures in panels 3 and 4 are grouped as one. Then, in panel 5, they separate as they compete with each other in bidding for Dan Tootin’s new, delightfully silly invention. In panel 7, they are once again grouped into a cohesive whole with Dan as they all take in the new, game-changing information at once. Beautiful pacing, great drawing. By 1943, Cole had mastered the semiotics of comic book storytelling.

Hit Comics 34 (Winter 1944)
Notice how Cole’s drawing style has changed from the 1943 page, above. The drawing is tighter, more angular. The content is also edgier, not as innocently silly. And, sadly, here is yet another reference to suicide. It’s worth noting that the image of the weeping man, with giant teardrops gets developed a year later in a Spirit story, and then eventually leads to one of Cole’s greatest stories, “Sadly-Sadly” (see my post here)

Crack Comics 49 (July, 1947)
Cole’s style, by the mid-to-late 1940’s had become quite baroque, and this one-pager is a great example of that. A more complex page-layout, the use of patterns, background detail, multiple characters, the list goes on. Cole is juggling a lot of balls by this time. This story has enough content for a 5-page comic. The drawings feel very much like the figures in Harvey Kurtzman’s HEY LOOK one-pagers (which were very likely inspired by Cole’s Quality one-pagers.) The story also feels a bit like Carl Barks’ UNCLE SCROOGE morality tales about money that would surface a couple of years later.

Candy 12 (October 1949)
The master at work, with a variation on Mark Twain’s classic story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County.” Once again, masterful figure grouping. This time, it's an accumulation of figures. As the page progresses, more and more figures are added to each panel, until we have a big clump in the last two panels. I suppose something could be said here about Jack Cole unconsciously exploring group dynamics, but it won't be... he created these things for a grin and a giggle, and that's exactly what I hope you'll get from this post!

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:

  Only $2.99
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!