Sexy Nurses, Jive Genies, and Innocent Racism in Jack Cole's 1944 Private Dogtag Screwball Adventure

Story in this post:

"Private Dogtag: Aladdin's Lamp" (story and art by Jack Cole)

Military Comics #30 (July, 1944 - Quality)

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In 1944, the United States was all about fighting the war against Germany and Japan. Please keep this in mind when you read the extremely insane story in this post.

American comic book sales boomed during World War Two as cratefuls were shipped to American G.I.'s overseas. Comic book publishers like Quality altered their content to appeal less to the kiddies and more to the soldiers. PRIVATE DOGTAG was one of a fleet of comics about inept soldiers. From SAD SACK (begun in 1942) to BEETLE BAILEY (begun in 1950 and still running today), the concept was -- and has been -- enormously popular among U.S. military and civilians alike.

Jack Cole was one of the few healthy top comic book artists in America who wasn't called up to serve in the military effort (although his brother, Bob, served in the Coast Guard). 

As such, Cole had all the work he could take on. And take it he did, perhaps building up a cash reserve in case he was drafted. This was the year PLASTIC MAN got his own book, with Cole penning virtually every page of the first three issues. If you take a look at my year-by-year page count of Jack Cole's work (read the whole post, wit6h additional charts and interesting stats on Cole's career, here), it becomes clear that 1944 was a peak production year for the prolific Jack Cole.

In Military Comics #30 alone, Jack Cole not only contributed a wonderful 4-page Death Patrol story (which you can read on this blog here), but he also tossed in a terrific nine-page Private Dogtag adventure that features sexy nurses, a Zoot-suited jive talking genie, a plethora of Japanese stereotypes, and our hero impersonating a female!

I've restored the art to this story, for your reading pleasure. It begins with a great, bizarre splash panel that gives us a healthy dose of sexy army nurses...

From Military Comics #30

(July, 1944 - Quality Comics)

Note the story is signed by Bart Tumey. PRIVATE DOGTAG was primarily drawn by Quality staffer BART TUMEY, who had a pleasant cartoony style. Tumey worked in comics longer than Cole did, starting out in the mid-1930s and lasting until the late 1950s. He also penciled and inked several Plastic Man stories.

As some readers of this blog may know, my name is Paul Tumey. As far as I know, there is no direct relation between me and Mr. Bart Tumey. I wish there was, but we will have to simply be connected through an interest in comics and Jack Cole. 

There is no doubt that this Private Dogtag story is written, penciled, inked, and even lettered by Jack Cole. When you compare how Jack Cole and Bart Tumey drew Private Dogtag, there are several marked differences:

Tumey tends to draw Dogtag's huge, comical cowlick wider and fuller than Cole. Jack Cole's character design seems more organic and graceful, even though he is basically replicating a design someone else created. Tumey also structures Dogtag's head with a larger cranium (although the brain inside is probably fairly small!). In fact, the "bighead" style of cartooning was embraced by Tumey in some very odd and strange images:



Aside from the obvious differences in cartooning styles, we can identify the Private Dogtag story in Military #30 as being by Jack Cole (even though it is signed by Bart Tumey) from several "tells." First off, there's the Cole women. Jack Cole's mid-1940's women had a very distinctive face:

Also, the character of Sheik Bey Rum in the Private Dogtag story reminds me a lot of a character from the Woozy Winks origin story:

Comparing the two images above, it's clear that they were both penciled and inked by Jack Cole (as he did the vast majority of his work), which means we can probably eliminate the possibility that Tumey penciled and Cole inked this Private Dogtag story, or vice versa.

The mystery remains: why is this story, which is so clearly by Jack Cole, signed by Bart Tumey? Was this simply an editorial screw-up? Perhaps it's simply because the Death Patrol story in this same issue is signed by Jack Cole:

For some strange reason, it seemed to be an editorial policy at Quality that each story in a comic book of theirs needed to appear to be created by a different person. We also know that Cole was fond of using pen names, such as Ralph Johns, Jake, and Robert Bruce -- so perhaps it was Cole himself who drew Bart Tumey's signature to his wacky gem, lost for 60 years in the "cole mine."

Jack Cole's Playboy Style Cartoon Composition: A Guest Post by Timothy O'Neil

In 2007, blogger Timothy O'Neil published an astute visual analysis of one of Jack Cole's sexy "Jake" cartoons from the early 1950's. In another posting, I'll go more into the history of Cole's career as "Jake." For now, with Timothy's permission, I'd like to share his analysis with you (Thanks, Tim!). Timothy shared with me that this analysis of Jack Cole's composition took a lot of work, and it remains one of his favorite postings.

I've done a few of these visual analysis pieces myself, and I can attest to the fact that they are indeed, a lot of work and require a lot of looking and thinking. Tim's work here is well done and reveals the high level of craft and artistry that Jack Cole brought to his gag cartoon work. Tim concludes his visual essay with  a terrific point, that immediate accessibility is the major goal of most commercial artists. This is an overlooked, but important aspect to Jack Cole's art. His stories and gag cartoons are among the most immediately accessible work done in these mediums. A large part of that has to do with his mastery of composition.

Please be sure to visit Tim's blogs:

The Hurting
Rejected Breakfast Cereal Mascots

I'm happy to share with you this "guest post" on Jack Cole. If anyone else out there would like to write a guest post, please feel free to contact me.

LET'S TALK ABOUT COMPOSTION

This is a pin-up by Jack Cole ("Jake"), one of many produced for the Humorama line of mens' magazines in the years between his early comic book work on Plastic Man and The Spirit, and the Playboy work that defined the last period of his life. (This piece is excerpted from Fantagraphics' wonderful monograph, The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, edited by Alex Chun and released in 2004. It doesn't actually contain any of his Playboy material, unfortunately. Fantagraphics and Playboy recently collaborated on an excellent overview of Eldon Dedini's pin-up art, so the idea of the two publishers one day producing such a volume isn't that far-fetched.)


First, let's look at the general shape of Cole's picture. I've used red to delineate the piece's main focus - a central oblong focal point roughly corresponding to the curves of the secretary's body and the faces of the men crowding the opposite end of the office. Notice how most of the straight lines in the composition are tangential to the area of negative space at the heart of the picture, defining the negative space without violating it. 

Something which surprised me was how the picture's sight-lines also framed the focal space. Look at how the direction of each figure's gaze also manages to do a great job of pointing the viewer towards where the artist wants the viewer to look. I've colored each character's plane of vision with a different colored triangle - you can see, roughly, that they all overlap at the center of the picture, in a pentagonal figure roughly corresponding to the composition I outlined above. 

Here, I have colored the picture's three main elements: the figure of the secretary in the center, the furniture in the middleground and the office spectators in the background. Notice how every shape in the picture defines the secretary's figure. The secretary really pops out of the foreground when set against the staid, perpendicular lines of the furniture and her co-workers.

By flipping the colors we see something else entirely: a band of light across the lower half of the picture, roughly corresponding to the ostensible focus point, i.e. the secretary's breasts, torso, hips and legs. In the real piece, obviously, this band of yellow is dark, which also helps to pull the eye down towards the desired focal point. The darkest point of a picture pulls the eye towards it - contrast is one of the illustrator's most potent tools. (This is why flat compositions can present difficulty in terms of immediate accessibility to the viewer. In the case of pin-ups, as well as posters, comic-book covers and album jackets, immediate accessibility is a major goal - if not the major goal - of the artist.)  

This post is copyright 2011 by Timothy O'Neil.

Jack Cole's Mystery Chicken Comics

Here's a tasty tidbit for all you fellow cooped-up comic book people who, like me are - unh - scratching around to uncover more Jack Cole comics. 

But first, I'll fatten up this lean posting with a chicken story!

I grew up in a semi-rurual setting, outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had some pretty rural kinfolks that we stayed with from time to time. One morning, I woke up in an old farmhouse in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. I went out onto the big wooden front porch and peed into the yard. I said good morning to the fat old alligator in his fenced-in pond a few feet away. Yes, it was THAT rural -- maybe one reason I love Cole's hillbilly comics. Anyway, as I peed, the yard chickens came running up and hungrily pecked at the yellow droplets of urine as if they were corn! I'm not making this up!

That's when I realized that chickens, for all their great value in the food chain,  have rather flawed perception systems.

Jack Cole, however, had a pretty great sense of humor, and a huge love of comics, even when he - uh - winged it. Here's a one-pager from a feather-less (that is, cover-less) comic book that was probably packaged by Harry "A" Chesler, and most likely published by him, too. As usual for Cole, it's jam-packed with 5 one-panel gags and a 4-panel strip.The jokes are all pretty - unh - corny. 

We don't have a title or date for this one. My guess is it's around 1940. But really, at this point, we have no hen-ts to go on. At least, we can appreciate the sublime silliness of an entire page of chicken gags! It shows that Cole had a rather egg-zacting sense of humor:

The bottom strip is Jack Cole's own square egg comic book story, a concept that Carl Barks fully hatched years later in his classic "Plain Awful" square egg story ("Lost In The Andes, April 1949). And, lest you think I'm cracked in identifying this unsigned page of fowl humor to be by Jack Cole... one of the many tells is the patterned title lettering. This elaborate, distinctively-shaped lettering is similar to the title art from the last story in Plastic Man #2 ("Coroner's Corners", circa 1944). Here's that unforgettable splash page, for comparison:

I guess that's why we love the man's work: it's pretty -- clucked up -- in a beautiful way.

ANNOUNCEMENT! My two Midnight ebook collections, Volumes 1 and 2 are on sale for only $2.99! See the right-hand sidebar (or click "web view" if you are browsing on a mobile phone). Buy today for -- cough, cough -- chickenfeed!

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Note: see http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?ACT=addcomment&dlid=16231 for the complete unknown Chelser comic