Karswell Posts Key Cole Story - The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1954)

Read the complete story here!


The master of all things comic book and horrorific, Steve Karswell, has posted "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" from Web of Evil #10 (January, 1954) at his always-fun blog, The Horrors Of It All. 


This is a key Jack Cole story. It was one of his very last comic book stories, and was published as his second-to-last story (for his final published comic book story, see my post on "I Was The Monster They Couldn't Kill" here). 


You can read "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" at Karswell's blog by clicking here. 


Firstly, there may be a question in some readers' minds as to whether this story actually is by Jack Cole. The Grand Comics Database currently lists the story as being by John Forte (they credit another story in Web of Evil #10 to Cole, "Death's Highway," which is not his work. Karswell has published that story on extensive blog as well, and you can read it by clicking here.)


I feel certain this story was written and penciled by Jack Cole. It is very much "of a piece" with the rest of his Web of Evil work. The title alone is similar to Cole's story from Web of Evil #1, "The Corpse That Wouldn't Die."


There are a number of "Cole-isms" in this story that indicate Cole's work, as well. These include Cole's characteristic sound effects lettering, as we see in this panel from the story (which, by the way, could also serve as a panel from any of his lurid True Crime stories):

Then there's the pervasive scenes of dread and anxiety. I think Cole was channeling Cold War nuclear fear. He went very, very dark at the end of his career. Even in Plastic Man. See my post on "Dark Plas" by clicking here. 

Lastly, there is the sense of movement in several of the panels. Check out this psycho-sexual portrait of speed and obsession:

The writing is by whoever else wrote the bulk of the Web of Evil stories Cole drew -- whether it's him or someone else. This story has the same dynamic between the twisted, broken individual who is at odds with society as several of the others, such as "Monster of the Mist," and "Killer From Saturn." 


The 16 Web of Evil stories that Jack Cole drew fall into two types: Unexplained Supernatural Events and Psychological Breakdowns.  It seems to me that Jack Cole may have written wrote the stories that fall into the latter category, if not all of them.

In the Unexplained Supernatural Events, characters come against bizarre circumstances, such as severed hands that still seem alive, or magic spells that somehow reanimate the dead . The characters inevitably fall victim to these terrifying phenomena, but no explanation is ever provided for the existence of these mysterious situations. They simply happen. These scripts are sloppy and tedious, and often even Cole’s extraordinary drawings cannot make them more than barely entertaining.

The second category of stories, which I think Cole wrote, and which I call Psychological Breakdowns are better written and have more clever and surprising plot twists.

These stories include:

The Killer From Saturn (Web of Evil #3)
The Man Who Died Twice (Web of Evil #5)
Orgy of Death (Web of Evil #6)
The Spectre’s Face (Web of Evil #6)
Death Prowls the Streets (Web of Evil #8)
A Pact With The Devil (Web of Evil #9)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Web of Evil #10)
I Was The Monster They Couldn’t Kill (Web of Evil #11)

In these stories the resulting horrific events are always shown to be result of a character’s mental breakdown. For example, in “The Killer From Saturn,” (which Art Spiegleman asserts is purely Cole’s work), it appears that a wildly frightening alien from outer space has landed in an American city and is murdering its inhabitants without cause or discernable reason. In the end, we learn the monster is actually a slight, timid man who has gone mad, dressing up in a monster costume and killing in a twisted form of revenge and ego gone wild.

In the case of this new find, "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," we learn at the end that Dr. Renard and "the brain" are communicating via thought-waves... maybe. The story puts the reader on a barbed-wire fence. On one side we have the possibility that Dr. Renard's invention is real, and on the other the possibility that he is mad. 

Cole gives us clues to this twist with visual foreshadowing. Look at how he visually combines Dr. Renard and the brain in this panel from page 4:

What gives "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" depth beyond the standard comic book horror story is the way Cole's imagery encourages us to consider the story as a metaphor for the self. It raises Phil Dickian questions about reality and what it means to be human. Is a brain in a jar a human being?

Jack Cole’s Web of Evil stories pulled the title out of a standard horror realm, and stretched the series into crime and science fiction as well. Instead of a horror story, Cole would write a crime story as if it were a horror story, playing with reader expectations.

These stories of people cracking under stress poignantly foreshadow the final outcome of Jack Cole’s life. After completing these stories, Cole not only left a dying industry for good, but also referred to his brilliant and accomplished career in demeaning terms. It seems likely there were hard feelings for Cole under the surface. In one story, which may or no be true, Cole is said to have taken his portfolio to DC (National) and was rejected. 

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die" as most readers will know, is the title of a very similar movie released in 1962. One wonders if Cole's horrific brain-in-a-jar imagery in this story inspired them.




Another interesting aspect to this story is that it is about a crazy inventor. From his 1939 "Dickie Dean" stories onward, Jack Cole populated his comic book work with brilliant, and often cracked, inventors. It's an archetype that Cole -- an inventor himself -- identified with, I think.

It's also worth noting that the inventor character in "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," Dr. Renard, is a Cold War version of Cole's longest-running inventor character, Doc Wackey, from his 40 or so Midnight stories published in Smash Comics. Physically, they are dead-ringers for each other:

The story ends perfectly, with the wildly protesting "talking" brain casually dropped into an incinerator to be destroyed. Is this how Jack Cole, after beating his brains out for 16 years in comic books felt?

The surname of the main character in "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," Renard, is a French-German name that means "strong decision." Perhaps Cole's choice of  the name, "Renard," was, consciously or not, an indication that he was making his own strong decision to leave comic books, Plastic Man, and Woozy behind.

By the time this story was published, Cole had left Quality Comics. After that, the only work in comics he found was touching up stories for post-code publication as an assistant to Marc Swayze at Charlton Comics in Derby Connecticut.  That's a little like hiring Ernest Hemmingway to write supermarket signs. No wonder Cole left after three weeks, never to work in the comic book industry again.

I am totally psyched to see this story appear here. Thanks, Karswell!


Note: The Grand Comics Database, which I love, has a few errors around Cole's work, which is understandable since a clear understanding of the different phases of his work is only just now coming into focus. I am working as an indexer/error tracker at that site to correct the errors, but it is a slow process. I'll add this correction to my list!


All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey

Jack Cole's King Kola Ads 1941-42

For all his talent and ambition, it's strange that Jack Cole didn't create more advertising art.  Here's two rare 1941 ads with Jack Cole art -- perhaps the only examples of advertising art in his entire career.The ads are from late 1941 and early 1942 books published by Harry "A" Chesler, Cole's first employer in comic books. The ads are for a product called "King Kola."


King Kola was supposedly made by the King Cole Beverage Company. A  little research on the Web turns up this tidbit, from a collection of 1941 copyright notices:

Thus, King Cola equals Harry Chesler, the comic book publisher!

A similar cola caper is much more well-known. In 1941, the grandiose comic book publisher Victor Fox began to promote a cola of his own, called "Kooba Cola." Here's the back cover of an unidentified Fox comic, circa 1941:

Fox pitched the cola hard, with interior ads and schemes:

What is brilliant and delightfully screwed up about all this is that the product was never manufactured! Fox, who owned the brand, was using his publications to create demand for a product that didn't exist. He planned to license the brand to a manufacturer, thinking the pre-loaded demand would make the licensing deal attractive. As far as we know, no manufacturer took him up on the deal.

In late 1941, Harry "A" Chesler made the move from packaging comics to publishing his own. He launched four titles: Yankee, Dynamic, Punch, and Scoop. He must have seen what Fox was doing, and thought it a great idea. Chesler seems filled with ambition in 1941. he named his cola after the hoary nursery rhyme figure, Old King Cole. For years, a 2-4 page comic series had come out of his shop called "King Kole's Kourt." This series was sometimes drawn by Jack Cole, bit he didn't create it -- despite the obvious connection with his name, and other artists worked on it seemingly randomly. Here's a couple of examples of Cole's work on the series. You can see the similarity between the cartooning style in these pages and the King Kola ads.

By Jack Cole. Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (MLJ/Archie, Nov 1939) 

By Jack Cole. CoCoMalt Big Book of Comics (1938)

As far as I can tell, there were only two house ads created for "King Kola." Here's the first, appearing on the inside front cover of Yankee Comics #2:

The art, though unsigned, is unmistakably by Jack Cole. It has Cole's exaggerated perspectives and frantic energy. The comic over-reaction of the doctor and the skinny patient wearing saggy socks held up by garters is pure Jack Cole. It's the humor of impotence he would soon wield in Plastic Man. The name on bag, 'Doc Smith," may be a tribute to science fiction writer E.E. "Doc" Smith, who had published his highly popular "Lensman" series in 1941-42 pulps (and we know Cole read and enjoyed the pulps). 

I don't think the lettering in the speech balloon is by Jack Cole. We do often see a jagged edged balloon in his work, but the lettering isn't his style. It's my guess he left it blank so Chesler could fill in whatever slogan he decided upon.

This advertising art is more polished than Cole's usual comic book art, and he may have lavished time on it. Perhaps he was paid well for the art, and that was a motivation. Here  it is looking even better in color, from the back cover of Dynamic Comics #2 (circa 1942):

One wonders if Jack Cole himself colored this ad. It's got a certain something to it. Here's the second King Kola ad, this one from the back cover of Yankee Comics #3 (1942), also with nice coloring:

Again, the ad is unsigned, but there's no doubt in my mind this is art by Jack Cole. The gasoline splash drops, the cartoony figures, the lettering, and the overall tight composition. The concept of a gag cartoon approach is also very much Jack Cole, who jam-packed his work with creative ideas. In this case, the very idea of drawing a service station team swarming over a customer and car is so very much like Cole. 

The ads appeared long after Jack Cole had left Harry Chesler's studio and was working at Quality Comics. In fact, it's entirely possible that Jack Cole drew the art for these ads close to the same time he created the first Plastic Man story (which was published in August 1941). However, maybe Chesler lined up the ads earlier than this, perhaps even when Cole worked for him. We know from the copyright notice that he filed the paperwork on October 1, 1940, about a year before he rolled the ads out.

As far as I can tell, King Kola was never manufactured. After these two ads, it seems that Chesler dropped the scheme. Still, we can't be certain. Here's a collector's photo in which the middle bottle of King Kola is dated from 1939. 

The bottles look very different from the one in the ad, and I doubt that this is Chesler's product.

In fact, one wonders if Chelser really intended to sell the licensing at all, since his ad so clearly defined the look of the bottle. It seems odd that he would pick such a distinctive-looking bottle instead of letting a manufacturer/distributor design the packaging.Could it be that Harry Chesler planned to make the cola himself? Or, perhaps he was merely running fictituous ads in his magazine to perhaps attract other advertisers. One wonders if he was onto Fox's scheme, or if he saw soft drink ads suddenly appearing on Fox's comics and thought, "Hey, if he can get an advertiser to go for a full page color ad, so can I!"

In any case, whatever the true story of King Cola may be...

These are rare examples of Jack Cole advertising art and delightful to peruse. Perhaps, if he had lived longer, Jack might have been lured into the lucrative world of advertising, as many of his peers were in the late 1950s, early 1960s. The mind reels...

Cole in Your Stocking - 12 New Cartoon Discoveries!

The Jack Cole Christmas Cartoon Roundup: A Sprinkle of Playboy and a Dollop of Mirth!

A post made just 2 days prior to December 25th is the ideal place to share a Jack Cole Christmas story. After all, in his hundreds of comic book stories created in a 16-year career, there must be at least a handful of Christmas stories. 

Right? I mean, the man was born in December (December 14th).

At least one Xmas story. Santa's gotta be in here, somewhere, right?

Nope. 

To my knowledge, Jack Cole did not create a single Christmas-themed comic book story. Yet, he worked in an industry that delighted in exploiting the holiday for all it was worth, with numerous Christmas-themed stories and covers. What in the world does this say, if anything, about our friend and hero, Jack? Was he a bit of a humbug? Or, as a Methodist, was he reluctant to do much with the holiday out of respect? Perhaps Jack Cole was simply too much of an original to follow the pack and instead developed his own themes and subject matter. 

Whatever the reason, Cole and Christmas just don't seem to mix. Take a look at this 1939 one-page Christmas cartoons, the one piece of Christmas-themed comic book work by Jack Cole that I have found:

Funny Pages Volume 3, Issue 10 (Dec 1939)

It's not very warm and fuzzy, is it? This is from a black and white photocopy, by the way. Even so, you can see that Jack Cole's take on Christmas humor was not that inspired. This page seems to want to go into his penchant for funny crime situations, instead of Santa, North Pole, and well, all the tropes of the holiday.

As far as I can tell (somebody prove me wrong, please!), Cole doesn't touch on Christmas in his work again until 16 years later, after he's completely left comic books. In the December, 1955 issue of Playboy magazine, we find a Christmas card of sorts, by Jack:

It's one of five, and no doubt, Cole drew it as an assignment. Note that his card is accompanied by four others, all done by different Playboy artists. 

Aside from the sprig of mistletoe at the top right corner of his card, and the understated hues of red and green (the colors of Christmas), there doesn't seem to be anything Christmas-y at all in the visual aspect of Cole's piece. This is even less enthusiastic about the holiday than his early 1939 page above. Nonetheless, his art leaps out of the pile of rather wooden art examples, and his concept is extremely clever and sexy. Here's the original art for this piece, a thing of beauty that celebrates the feminine, rather than the holiday:

Art Spiegelman, perhaps the most insightful critic of Cole's we have, has said somewhere that the key to understanding Jack Cole's work is to see that his main theme is impotence. My studies of Cole's work bears this out, and we'll see some examples of that later on in this posting. 

However, it's worth noting that the above Playboy Magazine cartoon by Jack Cole is a rare portrait of masculine empowerment, rather than impotence. For this reason, it's always been a personal favorite of mine. A rare moment when Jack Cole stood up for his gifts and his own considerable power as an artist and generative human being. 

In the image, the artist paints a slightly Christmas-y tie on the topless beauty. However, the image also looks a bit like the artist has created the stunning model of feminine sexuality with his brush and paints. And, of course, this is exactly what Jack Cole has done. In fact, in the original art scan, you can see his raw brushstrokes and paint daubs on the bottom edge of the board. Nice stuff. Thus, the image (especially the image of the original art) becomes a meta statement about the redemption Cole found in creativity, and perhaps in creating these ultimate images of the Feminine. 

I also have in my files a lovely image of original art by Cole that looks as if it was created for a New Year's piece. I don't know if it was ever published. It's a lovely piece, a dazzling light and luscious vision.

In their terrific book, Forms Stretched to Their Limits: Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd publish a very rare, delightful Christmas card drawn by Jack Cole in the mid 1940s for his New Castle, PA family (note the name on the mailbox of the home the singing letter is being delivered to):

Again, there's a fascinating dearth of traditional Xmas art. I'm not sure if this type of approach to a "Christmash" greeting is typical of the time. Perhaps, in the ensuing generations since the 1940s, us Americans have built up the Christmas tropes - Santa, reindeer, a manger, 3 wise men, Frosty the Snowman, and so on. I'm not sure. But even so, there seems to be something a little off about Cole's black-drenched celebration of the season of light. 

That's about all the Christmas-themed Jack Cole stuff there seems to be. However, let's not end this post on a note of lack and darkness. In fact, I say let's let Jack Cole do what he did best, and cheer us up with some great cartoons. 

I just yesterday discovered on scanner superstar Bchat's blog, M.O.D.M a curious little humor digest from March, 1955 called Mirth. 

As you may recall, in the last few months, I've developed a theory that there are a lot of Jack Cole cartoons in 1954-55 publications that we have yet to discover. This was the period where Cole left a 16-year career in comic books and focused on magazine cartoons, which was a sort of parallel lesser career of his up until the mid-50's. Sure enough, this humor digest, scanned and shared by bchat (thanks!) has some Jack Cole in it.

In fact....

It's got TWELVE (!) Jack Cole cartoons in it! I could scarcely believe my eyes when I first paged through the book. This was a lovely gift from the Universe  and I thought it would be nice to share these cartoons with everyone, as a sort of holiday offering.

In the inside front cover, we find this delightful captionless cartoon:

This is a super-clever use of negative space, and obviously the editor agreed, giving it the place of honor on the magazine, and choosing it out of the batch of 12 Cole gems he had in front of him. How in the world 12 Jack Cole cartoons were published in one emphemeral, vernacular bon bon is a mystery that will likely never be solved. My guess is that these cartoons of Cole's are mostly rejects from higher markets, and that Cole shoved an accumulation of these rejects into an envelope and mailed it to an editor with a smaller budget who knew a good thing when he saw it and snapped up the dozen gems.

Speaking of cartoons that -- um -- don't speak, here's another captionless cartoon by Jack Cole that I love:

Cole has wandered into the same territory as more gentle, observational cartoonists, such as Charles Schulz (Peanuts), and offers us a fascinating glimpse of what a mature Jack Cole could have done with cartoons, had he not gone the Playboy route. 

Note the cartoons are all signed by Jack, in the same style signature he used for his Playboy cartoons. During this time, we find a number of "Jake" cartoons in the same sorts of magazines ("Jake" being Cole's pen name). Such as this beauty, also from bchat's website:

A-Laugh-A-Minnit #8(Toby Press/Minoan, circa 1955, exact date unknown)

Note that this art looks similar to Cole's virtually unknown Millie and Terry comic strip, but it's also looser and more "arty."

Another interesting aspect to the Jack Cole Mirth cartoons is that they are not "Jake" cartoons. They reach out to other topics and situations, with grounded, more domestic humor instead of a frothy chiffon of sex. Consider this sitcom of a cartoon from the Mirth series:

This is truly inventive, clever, engaging stuff. It is very similar to Cole's Saturday Evening Post cartoon published about a year earlier:

Both cartoons are sequential multiple images, and both are about domestic squabbles involving lights at night. For more analysis of this particular cartoon, see my post here. Jack Cole liked drawing splashes of light and shadow, and we see this in a comic book work a lot:

Here's another cartoon from Cole's Mirth series that seems delightfully different from his men's magazine work; almost a George Price New Yorker style cartoon.

Here are the remaining delightful  half-dozen Jack Cole cartoons from Mirth #36 (March, 1955). Thanks, Jack. Enjoy!

Cole's Comics wishes you all a happy holiday and a great 2012! Here's a silly card I drew for the kids and humbly offer.