Jack Cole's High Velocity Grandpa - A New Find From Circa 1938

I never cease to be amazed at Jack Cole's unmatched ability and desire to propel his characters through space. The Digital Comic Museum recently shared a rare, obscure Harry Chesler comic that contains a reprint of a terrific little 2-page story Jack did at the dawn of his career in comics, circa 1938-39 (thanks to Frank Young for this dating information). Although we don't yet know the original publication information for this story, it appears in The Komik Pages #10 (April, 1945). Incidentally, this was the only issue published! Even though it's unsigned, there's no doubt this story is written, penciled, inked, and lettered by Jack Cole. The manic energy and sheer quantity of comic graphic ideas in these two pages is unique to Cole, who embraced these elements of screwball comics and made them his own.

Harry Chesler was an early -- if not the first -- example of a comic book publisher of reprinting their own material. This is why we see a Jack Cole story in one of Chesler's 1945 books, years after Cole had begun to work at Quality. It's interesting to think that on some newsstands around February 1945, Cole's great Plastic Man comics stood alongside this unsigned reprint of his much earlier work. 

Foxy Grandpa is a character that can be traced back to early newspaper comics. How -- and why -- Chesler felt compelled to add such an ancient character to his own mix of one- and two-page comics, is a mystery. The idea of an old man doing funny things has limited appeal to me, but maybe it cracked up readers of Chesler's generation. Here's a Foxy Grandpa page from 1902, a dozen years before Jack was even born! I'm not sure who drew this.

In this episode, Foxy Grandpa cleverly foils two Katzenjammer-style kids and turns their own prank against them. Maybe this was wish-fulfillment for an older generation. You can find more of these enigmatic old FG comics, plus a ton of other amazing old comics at the Barnacle Press website. In any case, somehow, Foxy Grandpa has become an indelible part of our folk culture. A few years ago, I was startled to see a reference  top Foxy Grandpa in a Spongebob cartoon (One Krab's Trash) I watched with my son Reid:.

 

While others wrote and drew Foxy Grandpa at the Harry Chesler studio, Jack Cole's version of the character is uniquely his, imbued with superhuman energy that at times seems to rival Superman's and The Flash's powers. Check out the 1939 Foxy Grandpa story I posted earlier here, where he runs up and down the side of a mountain! "The body's old, but the motor's in high gear!" sez Foxy Grandpa. 

In today's addition to our digital archive of lost gems form the Cole-mine, Foxy Grandpa careens and ricochets across a frozen lake like a bullet shot from a gun. Cole clearly was consciously injecting high velocity into his cartoons to distinguish them. I think he was probably hugely influenced in this by the screwball school of comics, particularly Bill Holman's madcap newspaper comic strip Smokey Stover. (By the account of one of Cole's colleagues, Craig Flessel, Cole was a fan of Smokey Stover). See my earlier post here on Holman's influence.

I think Cole loved the speed and density of screwball comics, and created his own unique mix in the structure of a longer sequential graphic narrative. His breathless Plastic Man stories went up to 15 pages. Here, early on, he's experimenting with extreme speed in a two page story.

Foxy Grandpa 1 by Jack Cole - Komik Pages 10 (April 1945)

Foxy Grandpa 2 by Jack Cole - Komik Pages 10 (April 1945)

There are many remarkable aspects to this little dose of dizziness. Check out the car in page one, panel two -- I've observed before that Cole's cars rarely had their wheels on the ground. You see this a lot in his first run Midnight stories.

Page one, panel seven offers a terrific low-angle "camera" view, which is reversed in the first page of the next page. Page two, panel four shows us Foxy Grandpa underwater, and is a wonderfully abstracted, wordless panel on its own-- somehow Cole perfectly conveys the feeling of diving into dark water. He sure packed a lot into this throwaway story! It's terrific that we have the chance to appreciate it some 70 years later!

Plastic Man's Rare 1944 Cameo Plus a New Dan Tootin

It's my 50th birthday today, and I wanted to post something cool. Here's a largely unknown Plastic Man cameo from Hit Comics 32 (Summer 1944). The story looks to me to be done by Alex Kotzky, who assisted Jack Cole on many Plastic Man stories at Quality.

The abrupt and brief appearance of Plas in this story on pages 5-7 may have been a tribute of sorts to Cole. Kotzy was the truest imitator of Cole and he does a terrific job of rendering the stretchy sleuth in this story.

Many thanks to Digital Comic Museum (it's their birthday, too!) for sharing this great scan.

Here's the whole wacky story:

And, as an extra special treat, here's a terrific NEW Jack Cole Dan Tootin one-pager, also from Hit Comics #32. More great Dan Tootin pages by Cole can be found here.

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Please check out my NEW blog,  The Masters of Screwball Comics. This week, to celebrate my 50th birthday, I'm posting FIFTY rare screwball comics!

Two Rare Jack Cole Pencils of Playboy Style Cartoons

Sadly, very little of Jack Cole's pencil work exists in any form. Here are two extremely rare examples of his masterful drawing from around 1952-54. 

It's a sheer delight to see how loose Cole's pencils are, and how well he captures the necessary round, feminine forms. 

The bold strokes on these pages, which were probably done with a very thick pencil lead or perhaps a conti crayon of some sort  give us an indication of the strength of his compositions. For example, in the cartoon below, we can see how Cole intends for the lines of the brickwork and even the lines of copy in the newspaper to direct the eye towards the sultry siren he has so beautifully sketched.

These drawings are what is known as "roughs" of cartoons that were sent to magazine editors. It's not known if these cartoons were ever completed or published. In the top right corners of the pages, you can see Jack's address stamp from his New Milford, Connecticut home.

Instead of taking the effort to finish a cartoon, a cartoonist could send in a "rough" preliminary drawing. This also afforded the editor a chance to alter the cartoon or caption, as in the example below, where the caption has shifted towards a more screwball tone.

Jack Cole cartoon rough, probably for a Humorama publication

As in the first rough, this drawing's bold pencil strokes and composition elements indicate exactly where Cole wants the eye to go. 

For more on Cole's cartoon composition, see our popular guest post by Timothy O'Neil: Jack Cole's Playboy Style Cartoon Composition.

 

And, speaking of screwball, be sure to check out my new blog, The Masters of Screwball Comics. This blog features some way cool nutty stuff, including many rare comics scans from my collection that fans of Jack Cole will appreciate. This week's post features more incredibly wacky Gene Ahern comics!