Jack Cole's Roots: A Rare Wild Early Comic Story and a Documentary!

Jack Cole's work had -- and continues to have -- appeal in part because his work is a heady combination of screwball comedy and the darker side of human nature. It's a mix that shouldn't work, but somehow this one great cartoonist pulled it together.

The Landon School of Cartooning was a prime influence on Jack Cole's development as a screwball, "bigfoot" cartoonist, as we've previously noted.

Below, you'll find an informative and insightful 2009 10-minute documentary  well worth watching about the Landon School and it's influence. The documentary, produced by Enchanted Images, Inc., notes that Jack Cole, among many other notable American cartoonists, took the 28 lessons of Landon School of Cartooning's correspondence.

The documentary, created by artist and writer John Garvin at Enchanted Images (check out his new book, After Carl Barks), points out that the Landon course presented a practical approach to newspaper cartooning, so that "a young kid, working from home, could become a famous cartoonist with nothing more than Landon's lessons, some pen and ink, paper, sweat, and a little talent."

According to Jim Steranko's History of Comics Volume 2, Jack Cole did just that. Seeing an ad for the course, Cole asked his father, who was a hard-working father of 6, to pay for the course. When his Dad refused, the endlessly inventive Cole found a way. He began to sneak down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and quietly make a sandwich to take to school the next day. Cole smuggled the sandwiches to school in a hollowed-out textbook. In this way, Cole was able to save up his lunch money and eventually pay for the course, which, according to Cole's colleague and editor at Quality, Gill Fox, cost around $8 -- or $20 if you wanted to send your work in and get Landon's notes on it.

Garvin's documentary explains how Landon's method of cartooning differed from previous approaches and textbooks on cartooning. Instead of basing the figure drawings on a careful study of human anatomy, Landon developed a way to create humorous pen-and-ink drawings of people with stick figures and basic shapes. It seems to me that learning to cartoon using the Landon method may have freed Cole (and others) from focusing on representational images, allowing him to stretch and distort his figures, as he did so brilliantly, particularly in his Plastic Man stories.




In 1937, Cole created a rather brilliant one-sheet summation of the Landon approach to cartooning:



It's my theory that Cole may have created this one-sheet to self-publish and sell to make a few bucks. In 1937, he had moved from his home town in New Castle, PA to the big city -- New York -- with his new wife, to make a career. This instant cartooning course may have been an attempt by Cole to create an income. If so, it appears to be the only known time that Cole dallied with publishing, as the rest of his known career was as a freelancer and staff artist.

Here's a wonderful 4-page Jack Cole comic book story, appearing for the first time in this blog. It's taken from Ron Goulart's book, Focus on Jack Cole, hence the black and white printing. The influence of the Landon School of Cartooning is very evident in this early work by Jack Cole:

Star Ranger Funnies #1 (December, 1938 - Centaur)

Lest you think this is just too danged weird, a mainstream US television show watched by millions built an episode around a similar concept. "The Darling Baby" from The Andy Griffith Show has the 10-year old Opie Taylor (Ron Howard) narrowly escaping wedlock to a 3-month old baby. It's just them mountain folks' ways, I reckon! You can read a second HOME IN THE OZARKS story, in full color, by Cole from one year later, here.

Cole's cartoon work here is loose and fast, and delightful. The baby reminds me of Swee'Pea, from  Segar's Popeye, another prime influence on Jack Cole.

Cole, by all accounts, was a funny guy. In an Alter Ego interview from a few years ago, Alex Kotzky, a terrific cartoonist who worked with Cole on Plastic Man and the True Crime comics, provides a fascinating insight into Cole's demeanor: "You know who Willard Scott is? Physically, Jack could have been his twin brother. And he was the type of jokester that  Willard Scott is."



Enchanted Images, the creator of the informative documentary, has brought the Landon course back into print, and you can buy it from them for $24.95 at their website.

A Lost Jack Cole Cartoon from the Playboy Years!

In my last blog entry, I posted a new "Millie and Terry" comic strip by Jack Cole and theorized that he may have placed several items in various publication in 1954/55, the years that he left his 16-year career in comic books and transitioned to becoming the first star cartoonist at Playboy magazine. 

Fellow comics scholar, Jack Cole fan, and curator of the marvelous Fabuleous Fifties blog, Ger Appledoorn was inspired by my discovery to look around for other "lost" Jack Cole work from this period and made this wonderful discovery, from Look Magazine, the April 19, 1955 issue!

It's a wonderful example of how far Jack Cole developed his talent and style to fit a more sophisticated market. Could this strip have been a reject from Playboy, or did Cole create a sexy gag cartoon in a more mainstream, less sexual style for Look? 

In any case, be sure to look at the great expressions on the character's faces in the background. It's very nice piece that shows off Cole sexy gag work in a slightly different light than Playboy. Thank you to Ger for kindly sharing this scan with me and giving his blessing to post it here first. Enjoy!

There was Playboy and also... The Army? Jack Cole's Unknown Comic Strip

Playboy Magazine's great cartoonist of the 1950's, Jack Cole, wrote and drew a great, sexy, Playboy-like girlie comic strip called Millie and Terry... and almost no one knows this!

The comic was published in a Sunday funnies format for a  package syndicated by W.B. Bradbury Co. called American Armed Forces Features. This was an 8-page color newspaper that was available at stores on US military bases. The comic section included Al Capp's Dick Tracy parody, Fearless Fosdick, and several Sad Sack type strips. Cole's cartoon - the best one in the lot -- was the only sexy, girlie, pin-up comic strip in the paper.

 Jack Cole's first published PLAYBOY cartoon was in the April, 1954 issue. His last comic book story was dated two months earlier, in February 1954. This was a turbulent period in Cole's career, as he left comic books after a 16 year career. At the time, in the early 1950's, the American comic book industry was imploding due to changing public taste, and the widespread (and incorrect) perception that comics were corrupting children. Comic book artists who had paid off mortgages and raised families on their work were scrambling to make ends meet. In 1954, Cole had a very brief stint of 3 weeks at Charlton (I have yet to locate any published work of Cole's at Charlton). He probably contracted with Bradbury for the Millie and Terry strips, spent a week writing and drawing a batch of perhaps 5 or 10 episodes. As the Millie and Terry strips were published monthly, Cole moved on to other magazine markets. Very quickly, of course, he found steady work with Hugh Hefner as PLAYBOY took off.

It may very well be that there are several undiscovered Jack Cole cartoons (perhaps even comics!) from this 1954-55 scramble for work. In fact, here is the cover to Army Laughs #9 (Dec 1954/Jan 1955), another Army gag magazine that, according the eBay seller, has at least one Jack Cole cartoon in it:

Earlier, I posted a Millie and Terry comic at this posting. I am indebted to my pal and fellow comics historian, Frank Young (see his great comic blog, Stanley Stories), for discovering this unknown Jack Cole comic, which he found tossed out in someone's trash. A wonderfully kind soul posted a very informative comment about this strip that gave me information to locate another issue of this rare, virtually unknown comic section... and so, I proudly present to you a second installment of Jack Cole's great "lost" comic strip, Millie and Terry!

Millie and Terry  - November, 1955 - American Armed Forces Features #9

Isn't this great stuff? I love the the opening drawing, of the two women curving together. This sensuous image can be appreciated separate from the narrative, and reminds me of the Females By Cole series that became a staple in Playboy Magazine. Cole truly had a gift for drawing the female form!

The gag in strip is genuinely funny, and the drawings manage to be both cartoony and graphically sophisticated at the same time. By this time, Cole had written and drawn about 600 similar one-page filler strips for Quality Comics, so he had the pacing and style of the "short form" of the comic strip very well worked out.
Now that we have two installments of this strip, which I believe had at least 10 episodes, we can see that it really is a sort of missing link between Cole's sexy Playboy work and his 1958 nationally syndicated comic strip, Betsy and Me (personally, I prefer Millie and Terry). The drawing style Cole uses in Millie and Terry is very similar to the style he would use in his comic strip about a comically overwhelmed new father. Here's a couple of examples, to compare:

Betsy and Me - July 13, 1958

Betsy and Me - August 10, 1958

Betsy and Me  has more graphic invention, but we can see the similarity in character design. In the call-out below, a face from Millie and Terry (on the left) has a very similar rendering, facial expression, and head-tilt to a typical figure from Betsy and Me (right):

Cole is also using some of his tried-and-true techniques that he brilliantly employed in PLASTIC MAN and his other comic book work, including the artful use of fabric patterns. Terry's blouse has bold stripes, while Millie's dress has a tasteful polka dot pattern. Note that the dress is colored green, which makes it very similar to the blouse worn by Plastic Man's sidekick (and perhaps Jack Cole's most brilliant character), Woozy Winks:

This suggests that Cole may have colored this strip himself. One can also appreciate Cole's artistry and attention to details when you realize that his polka dots for Woozy's blouse are perfectly round and all the same size, suggesting a clown's costume. Millie's dress is less garish and comical, with more delicate dots of varying size and shape. Crass versus Class; both are funny. Cole put a great deal of thought into his seemingly simple cartoons, and this is just one example of that!

Jack Cole's work is filled with terrific women's outfits. In a Comics Journal interview with a fellow golden age comic book artist and colleague of Cole's, Craig Flessel relates: "(He was) very much in love with his wife. He bought all her clothes. He worshipped her. " Perhaps Cole's knowledge of women's outfits came from his clothes-buying trips for/with his wife. It's  charming to imagine the shy, quiet, tall and lanky Jack Cole in a ladies' wear store secretly taking mental notes for his comic book stories!

As more examples of Millie and Terry surface, I will share them in this blog!

Text and scans copyright 2011 Paul Tumey