Jack Cole Gets A Cloo: Racism, Morbidity, and Great Screwball Comics

Jack Cole wrote and drew about 700 one-pages for Quality comics, mostly from about 1940 to 1945. Some of these I've shared in this blog: Burp the Twerp, Dan Tootin, Windy Breeze, and Slap Happy Pappy. It's time we rolled out the last of Jack Cole's great one-pager series, Wun Cloo, The Defective Detective. Cole did not create the character -- that dubious honor goes to Gill Fox, who also created Windy Breeze. When Fox moved up through the ranks to become an editor at Quality, Cole took over many of his one pagers.

The premise of the Wun Cloo one-pagers is to present a screwball (and unknowingly racist!) send-up of detective stories. It was likely inspired by the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto books and movies featuring Asian detectives. I have put off posting anything about Wun Cloo because, by today's standards, the comic is painfully disrespectful to people of Asian descent. Fox and Cole don't even have the excuse that we were at war with Japan, since the character was created before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

In their feeble defense, such stereotyped portrayals were pretty common place and their comic was just one of many. Here's a comic from the same period, Ching Chow:

Ching Chow by Stanley Link offered daily pearls of wisdom

Amazingly, Ching Chow, which started in 1927, lasted until 1980! 

Nevertheless, some of the Wun Cloo pages are still of interest of to Cole fans -- if you can peel away the racism, there's some mighty fine screwball cartooning. This is something that modern fans of American Golden (and earlier) comics and pop culture have become expert at -- looking past the outrageous racism in the works. Plastic Man was also a humorous version of crime and detective stories, so Wun Cloo could be seen as a testing ground for what Cole later used in his Plas stories.

In fact, months before he created Plastic Man, Cole used the concept in a landmark morbid Wun Cloo 2-pager:

from Smash 17 (December, 1940)

As he did with many of his one-pagers, Cole played with his drawings and had fun. I've read that he would start his work session knocking off one of the one-pagers as a warm-up. Whew! This was a hard-working guy! In our next example, you can see Cole indulging his love of visual patterns...

Smash Comics #20 (March, 1941)

Despite his appearance, Wun Cloo often came out on top:

Smash #24 (July, 1941)

 For some reason, Cole seems to have populated Wun Cloo with a great deal of his darkly comic imagery, as in this next page:

Smash #29 (Dec, 1941)

 This next Wun Cloo one-pager features both a rare Jack Cole caricature of Adolf Hitler, and an example of his patented face-changing trick, which Plastic Man used on numerous occasions. The page is also looney as hell...

Smash #32 (March, 1942)

That's all for now! More Wun Cloos to come at a later date!

Thanks for reading and be sure to visit my NEW BLOG all about cool screwball comics, featuring original paper scans from my collection of Milt Gross, Rube Goldberg, The Squirrel Cage, Smokey Stover and more! This is the stuff that inspired Jack Cole. You can only find this stuff at The Masters of Screwball Comics!

Stretchily Yours,

Paul TwoClueMe

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.

GO HERE NOW!
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!

Cole's Screwball Roots: Wacky Inventions

One of Jack Cole's favorite themes was SCREWBALL inventions. He populated his stories with wacky stuff, such as Midnight's "secret vacuum gun," which fired an avenging suction cup at crime. 


One of his first series, Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor, is built around such nutty devices are the "time camera" and an accordion hat retriever. Of course, Plastic Man was filled to the brim with wacky inventions, starting with Plas inventing new forms to stretch his body into.

This theme has its roots in the great screwball comics, which in turn have their roots in the American entrepreneurial spirit. For more on crazy inventions and some great SCREWBALL comics, be sure to check out my article at my MASTERS OF SCREWBALL COMICS blog...


The Snoremonica: They Laughed When I Went to Bed

Lipstick Traces: Plastic Man in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Published in 1973, Thomas Pynchon's massive novel is widely regarded to be one of the greatest works of 20th century literature. Time Magazine included it in its list of "All-Time Greatest Novels." The book is considered to be a landmark work of what is known as "postmodernist" fiction. It plays with the literary novel form itself, much like Jack Cole's comics played with the form of comics. So, it's no surprise to discover that Cole's Plastic Man pops up here and there in Gravity's Rainbow.

In the edition I have, the Plastic Man references show up in four places, on pages 207, 214, 331, and 751. Here's the first reference, which shows that Pynchon has a fine appreciation of the spirit of Cole's character:

It's interesting, though, to note that Pynchon refers to the character as "Plasticman," condensing the true name of Jack Cole's character, "Plastic Man," into one word. Perhaps this was a strategy to avoid to a copyright lawsuit. The next reference is brief, but once again very much captures the spirit and trappings of Cole's work:

Indeed, Plastic Man, where are you when we need you? A few pages later, Pynchon refers to a "Plasticman sound," which also shows an intuitive grasp of Cole's use of sound effects.

In the last reference, Plastic Man is joined by other golden age superheroes, plus Philip Marlowe, the Lone Ranger and... well... see for yourself:

In late 1971, DC published DC Special #15, a terrific reprint of Jack Cole Plastic man stories. This was my first introduction to Cole's work, and may have been an influence on Pynchon during the writing of Gravity's Rainbow, which was first published in 1973.

The Evolution of the Cole Female: Jack Cole's Early Magazine Cartoons 1938-45

Jack Cole fans know the story about how he left Plastic Man and comic books in 1954 adroitly stretching into a successful new career as Playboy magazine's first signature cartoonist. 


Despite appearances, Jack Cole's mastery of magazine cartoons - a vastly different form than the multi-page comic book story that Cole spent 16 years developing -- did not happen overnight. In fact Cole started out as a magazine cartoonist and continued to sell cartoons to various publications from 1938-45, while he was also developing a career in comic books.

Here's a look at a few of those early magazine cartoons, the result of hours of digging. Many thanks to Ger Apeldoorn, who found four of these rare items and first published them on his Fabulous Fifties blog.

In a 1956 Freelancer article (the first page of which is shown above), Jack Cole wrote about his early efforts as a magazine cartoonist:

"Here a buck -- there a buck --- I tried style after style until I finally sold one cartoon to Gurney Williams, then at Collier's Magazine."

The Freelancer article reprints that cartoon, but without the tagline. After much digging, I've finally located Jack Cole's first sale to Collier's Weekly! Here's the page it appeared on:

Collier's Magazine - August 27, 1938
Jack Cole's first cartoon sale to Collier's

 And here's the cartoon:

Collier's Magazine - August 27, 1938
Jack Cole's first cartoon sale to Collier's

It's important to note that, while this was a big event for Jack, it was not his first sale. By this time, he had already sold over a dozen cartoons to Boy's Life magazine. See my article on Jack Cole's Boy's Life cartoons for nearly 2 dozen delightful early works by the master!

During the 1940s, Gurney Williams -- the cartoon editor that Cole mentioned in his Freelancer article -- was the cartoon editor for Collier's, American Magazine and Woman's Home Companion, paying $40 to $150 for each cartoon. From a staggering stack of some 2000 submissions each week, Williams made a weekly selection of 30 to 50 cartoons, lamenting


"The other day I found myself staring at the millionth cartoon submitted to me since I became humor editor here. I wish it could have been fresh and original. Instead, it showed several ostriches with their heads buried in the sand. Two others stood nearby. Said one to the other: 'Where is everybody?' "  (Time Magazine, August 12, 1946)

A sale to Collier's in 1938 was an auspicious start for any new cartoonist, including Jack Cole. At the time, Gurney Williams was publishing cartoons by such greats as Otto Soglow:

Collier's - Jan 8, 1938 - Otto Soglow

William Steig:

Collier's - Feb 4, 1939 - William Steig

And Charles Addams:

Colliers - June 10, 1939 - Charles Addams

Cole's first sale to Collier's is drawn in a completely different style than his Plastic Man and Playboy work.

It's a loose, fragmented, agitated brush style. The eyeballs of the characters are black raisins. His first Collier's cartoon has an air of freshness about it that went beyond the visual style itself. The joke is genuinely funny and character-driven.  We feel that we know this sweet, old-fashioned dowager personally and find it amusing that she thinks an airmail letter is an adventure. 


It's interesting to note that the man who would become the creator of some of the sexiest cartoons for men's magazines ever drawn started out with a charmingly innocent cartoon featuring an elderly spinster.


It's also worthwhile to note the details Cole has stuffed into this small, narrow cartoon: the silhouette portraits on the wall that bespeak of a graceful time of the past, the antique grandfather clock, and especially the adorable cat blending into the rug at bottom left -- very similar to one Plastic Man's first tricks:

Police Comics #1, August 1941

Another golden age comic artist, Hal Sherman (known for his early 40s work at DC on Dr. Fate), also had a sale to Collier's around the same time, indicating that the twin trajectories of Jack Cole's careers in magazine cartoons and comic books was not totally unique:

Collier's - March 11, 1939 - Hal Sherman

I've scoured the pages of Collier's Weekly from 1938-1940, and turned up just one more Jack Cole cartoon - one that has been "lost," until now:

Collier's - May 20, 1939 - Jack Cole

Note this cartoon is in the exact same modernistic bush style as Cole's first Collier's sale. Here we have a man, a woman, and a toaster. The woman resembles nothing of the sexy "estrogen souffles" that Cole would become famous creating for Playboy and Humorama (as "Jake"). There is nothing sexy about this woman at all, but it may not be for lack of trying. The decorative hat and veil suggest feminine energy, and foreshadow the filigree touches Cole would use in his Jake and Playboy cartoons. In fact, she seems to be wearing the same old-fashioned clothes as the spinster in the earlier cartoon!

 Evidently - and rightfully so -- Cole thought toasters were funny. he created another toaster joke in 1955:

Mirth, 1955 - Jack Cole

Jumping back in time a little, here's another cartoon sale Jack made in 1938, this time to Judge -- another one of those "buck here, buck there" events:

Note the different signature, which is closer to Cole's Boy's Life cartoons of the period. The art style is a less aggressive version of the loose brushwork. The gag is solid, and... what's this? A nurse? yes, a nurse that once again is nothing close to the sexy nurses and women Jack Cole would later turn out like a man possessed, such as in this 1944 comic book story:

Military Comics 30 - July, 1944 - Jack Cole

Jack Cole was considerably more innocent in his younger years and earlier cartoons. His drawing abilities were evolving rapidly, with uneven results. He leaned toward a goofy, screwball sense of humor in his work, such as in this unidentified delightful Rube-Goldberg-style lunch counter scene:

Or in this pair of cartoons from a 1942 issue of the over-sized Gags magazine, which appear to be chopped up to make room for blocks of copy:

Gags Magazine, 1942 - Jack Cole

Gags Magazine, 1942 - Jack Cole

Even as late as 1945, while he was a master in comic books, Cole was still struggling to master the gag cartoon -- especially the sexually loaded cartoon, as in this example from Judge, which -- oddly -- has the same left-leaning pose as the dental cartoon above!

Judge - December, 1945 - Jack Cole

This may have been Cole's first published wash cartoon. By now, some 7 years after the non-sexy Collier's and Judge cartoons of 1938, Cole has developed a desire to depict sexy women in his work. Yet, he hasn't quite got it. This drawing is too labored over and wooden to be appealing. It contains only hints of the greatness to come. Compare the 1945 Judge cartoon above with this masterful wash composition from sometime in the early 1950's:

Jack Cole 'Jake" cartoon reprinted in 1962 Humorama publication

It's interesting to me, though, to note that Cole hasn't thrown away his desire to draw little swirly filigree abstract designs to suggest sexual excitement and feminine energy, in the same spirit as the woman's veil in his 1939 Collier's cartoon:

It's the same idea we find in the mouth-watering Humorama cartoon above, just done about a thousand times better.

++++

Jack Cole In The News:

Silver Streak 6 on the Auction Block

A key Jack Cole comic is at auction on Ebay. Currently, the bid is $1,000.00. The auction ends Feb 12, 201211:15:10 PST.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Silver-Streak-6-Classic-Jack-Cole-cover-Origin-Daredevil-Claw-returns-/160730014101

UPDATE: The book sold for $1,447 sheckles!

All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey