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!