Beautiful Sexy Witch Melts Plastic Man in a Superb Jack Cole Horror Story

In his work, Jack Cole certainly appears to have had certain unconscious dark obsessions. It's these very obsessions, combined with a wildly inventive mind, and a stunning talent for creating visual images that are the foundation of Cole's greatness, both as the creator of Plastic Man stories and as the signature Playboy cartoonist. We see evidence of all these elements, perhaps in their most potent form, in today's "Dark Plas" Halloween post, " The Witch of Wailing Woods," a  little-known, mostly overlooked story from Plastic Man #42 (July, 1953).

The story, like many of Cole's later Plastic Man adventures, is built around a beautiful evil woman. In this case, Cole offers us a gorgeous raven-haired witch named Zelda, clad in a fetching dress that splays the black strands of a spider and its web across her perfectly-formed breasts.

The more I look at this story, the more impressed I am with it. Jack Cole's last comic book stories are among his best, in my opinion -- although it is a far cry from the zany screwball antics for which Cole is best-known. It may be this puzzling and extreme shift in tone that accounts for why these Cole stories remain largely undiscovered and certainly unappreciated by his fans. In many cases, the stylistic and tonal shift is so extreme that the stories, unsigned, are often not identified as Jack Cole's work.

From Plastic Man 43

Admittedly, Cole's last comic book stories, from 1952-54 are dark, twisted, and disturbing -- put simply, they are not nearly as much fun to read as his humor-based work. Why did Jack Cole, a guy who did humor comics so well and so successfully, step into the dark world of monsters, death, dismemberment, and pure evil?

Perhaps Cole and his editors at Quality Comics were attempting to keep pace with the breaking trend of horror comics, led by E.C. with titles like Haunt of Fear and Tales From the Crypt. It's one way to explain why Cole and Quality took a character deeply rooted in humor and slapstick and recast him into one supernatural horror story after another. In the issue that comes after the one in which this witch story appears, Plastic Man and Woozy battle a vampire.

At the  same time Plas and Woozy fought witches, werewolves, and vampires in the pages of the last Plastic Man comics Cole drew, Quality also brought out a new horror title, the sinister-sounding Web of Evil. The star artist at Web of Evil... Jack Cole.

It seems to me that the real story here is not that Cole made such a surprising left-turn from humor to horror in his work, but rather that he did it so well. It's easy to become preoccupied (and repulsed) with the darkness of his last dark comic book stories and miss the extraordinary level of accomplishment in creating sequential graphic narratives that Jack Cole achieved in this work.

Here's a video presentation I've made to analyze and appreciate the splash page of today's story. In looking at this one page alone, we find a high level of design, great inventiveness and craft, and -- of course -- a weirdness and particular shadowy tone unique to Cole's work.


And, without further ado, here's the story. Some notes and observations follow.

Whew! Pretty grim stuff! However, remember, it was in Police Comics 22 that Cole dispenses with a villain by snapping his head in a bear trap.

Upon closer examination, one can find traces of Jack Cole's shadow-side in his earlier work. Given this, it seems to make sense that Cole -- tasked with a new direction from humor to horror -- would be able to embrace it with gusto, as he does in this story, much in the same way Plas embraces the sexy witch.

"The Witch of Wailing Woods" features a woman who is both deeply desirable and extremely deadly. Plastic Man seems drawn to her as a man. He curls around her, extends and grows his body to encircle and embrace her. In one panel, Cole delivers a somewhat tender, sexually charged portrait of Plastic Man and Zelda that resonates with similar panels in his other stories of this period.

Woozy, an incorrigible womanizer, is the very portrait of a man bewitched when he gets close to Zelda. Cole plays it up with a dash of humor and a couple of cartoon sweat drops, but compared to the Tex Avery style wolf takes Cole was drawing just 3 years earlier, this is pretty restrained. 

A real witch (and talented), Zelda seems to be able to use a mixture of spells and voodoo to acquire a certain power to control and destroy both people and inanimate objects. She seems motivated to establish a new business model, by selling her services at a premium, as opposed to simply using her powers to get money. She appears to have no empathy at all, and kills two of her henchmen after making them suffer in agony. In others, Zelda, the beautiful sorceress, is as crazy as a bedbug.

Cole -- in his comic book stories, at least -- appears to be both drawn to and oppressed by beautiful women. In one panel, a man writhes on the ground in torture and gasps, "I can't stand it! She's killing me!"

Throughout the story, Cole uses the bright red body of Plastic Man (is that costume his skin, or actual clothes he's wearing?) to direct the eye through his shadow-drenched, inky-black tableaux.

In my video above, I spoke of how Cole created different visual planes and then broke them with vigorous movement through them in the splash page. Consider the smoke and Plas' left arm, which move away from the planes nearest the reader towards the rear planes.

And then the thug-monster's two arms move him the opposite direction, from the rear, to the front. When we step back and look at this composition, we see that all the elements swirl around the central figure of the luscious wicked witch. the smoke curls around her, as does Plastic Man's arm. She is the catalyst of this composition, as she is the catalyst of this story. So, the splash page is symbolic and perfectly in resonance with the story the will follow. This strikes me as pretty sophisticated and accomplished art, in any medium. Cole uses this multi-dimensional, depth-of-field technique in several standout panels within the story itself:

As the story reaches climax (cough cough) Cole makes his panels more dense.

While the story may be somewhat hackneyed and cliche-ridden, and the horrific nature of the visuals may be something of a turn off when one expects to see Cole's funny stuff, I maintain that his last comic books have great merit and encourage all readers to seek them out. I leave you with one of my favorite panels in the story. After drawing Plastic Man in exceptional volume and intensity for over decade, Cole had a unique feel for what a man who had a rubber body would actually look like in our reality, and in this panel, he delivers a beautiful and surprising image, that is both funny and challenging. 

This was one of Jack Cole's last Plastic Man stories. It's a shame that, having achieved this high level of expertise, and being so talented, he didn't stay in the field and make more comic book stories. 

Somewhat like Plastic Man in this panel, Cole's soul and emotional health may not have been up to its normal resiliency. The field he had worked so hard in for 15 years was rapidly changing and edging him out. Even though he was artistically successful (perhaps more than anyone realized until recently), his shift from humor to horror wasn't doing the trick. Like Plas, he knew he had to do something fast. A few months later, he submitted some gag cartoons to a new men's magazine, called Playboy, and made another virtuoso shift in artistic approach, from horror comics to sexy cartoons. This time, his work was noticed and celebrated -- but sadly, it seemed to make little difference to a man who must have still had the darkness we see in his last comic book stories locked up inside.

Happy Halloween 2012,

Paul Tumey

WANT MORE DARK PLAS? SEE MY 2011 HALLOWEEN POST HERE!

All text copyright 2012 by Paul Tumey

Three Strange Early Jack Cole Cartoons - 15 Years before Playboy!

Here's a NEW Jack Cole find -- three very early bizarre, death-crime-and-punishment oriented gag cartoons from the pages of Lev Gleason's Picture Scoop Volume 1, #4 (April, 1943). 

The magazine was one of several mainstream "slick" style publications published by Lev Gleason, the publisher of Charles' Biro's comic book Crime Does Not Pay. Gleason also hired Jack Cole in late 1939 to edit his comic book,Silver Streak (named after his new car), where Cole created The Claw, Sliver Streak, Daredevil, The Pirate Prince, and Dickie Dean - Boy Inventor.

By the time of Picture Scoop's publication, Jack Cole had left Lev Gleason, worked briefly for MLJ (Archie) and then moved over to Quality Comics in 1941. In an earlier article (which you can read here), we looked at some original anti-Hitler cartoons from issue one of Picture Scoop. 

The cover of Picture Scoop #4 (April, 1943)

Many thanks to Darwination   please be sure to visit his Darwination Scans Blog  for many scans of amazing old magazines and ephemera) for scanning this magazine and making finds such as this possible.

The Cole cartoons all bear his late 30's magazine gag cartoon signature that we see in the 1936-40 Boy's Life cartoons (you can read over 20 of the cartoons and my article here -- check it out folks, this is one of the best achievements of this blog!)

The subject matter of these is too grim for the Boy's Life scouting market, so they must have been done for some other market. I'm thinking Cole may have targeted a crime or police stories magazine, since these feature cops, albeit doing pretty morbid acts!

By 1943, Cole's style was very different, and it had been three long years since he had worked for Gleason... so I am thinking he pulled these out of a drawer of his rejects and sold them to his former boss. I suspect these cartoons were done in the late 1930's, probably 1937 or 1938.

In any event, here's the cartoons, in order from strange...

... stranger... (note: colored blue to make it more readable):

... and downright dark!

It seems that even in the first years of his career, Cole was fascinated with death. It's this mordant, elemental bent that raises Cole's cartoons up as noteworthy.

The cartoons appear in a spread in the magazine, and one wonders if the red tinting of the two "off-color" gags is to decrease their impact:

Three early Jack Cole cartoons share space with others in Picture Scoop #4

I don't know who the other cartoonists are in this spread, but this gives you a good look at how distinctively screwball Cole's style was, even in the early years.

And speaking of Screwball Comics, here's a FREE SNEAK PREVIEW of the latest exciting development at my other blog, The Masters of Screwball Comics. This is the stuff that influenced Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, and other major American cartoonists. 

Here's page one of the special "GONE TO THE DOGS" issue of my faux newspaper Screwball Sunday Comics Supplement. If you like what you see there's lots more -- just click here and get ready to guffaw!

Screwily Yours,

Paul Tumey

Two Rare Jack Cole Cartoons for Stamp Wholesaler Mag (circa 1954)

In the mid-1950s, Jack Cole was starting over, at the bottom. After 16 years of hard work and success, creating comics such as Plastic Man that were read by millions, he changed careers. As the comic industry collapsed, Cole -- like several other comic book guys -- decided to see if a living could be made selling gag cartoons to magazines.

As we've seen in earlier postings, Cole was no stranger to the magazine market. His first professional sales were to a national magazine, Boy's Life, in 1936 (you can read my article and see over 20 rare Cole cartoons here). He continued to place cartoons in magazines through at least the early 1940s. Then, he became so successful and busy with his comic book stories that he stopped pursuing the magazine markets for about a decade. So it was that Jack Cole returned to selling cartoons to magazines around 1953 or so, with rusty chops and an outdated style.

Although he had a few promising sales to the higher markets, such as The Saturday Evening Post in 1954, and Look in 1955, Cole discovered that, if he wanted to pay the bills, he had to set his sites lower. And so he did. Most famously, Cole published sexy girlie cartoons in the Martin Goodman "Humorama" line of cheap digests. His mid-50s cartoons turn up in the darnedest places, In a March, 1955 issue of Mirth, we find a stunning 12 great gag cartoons (you can read them here). He had a sexy, and genuinely funny color comic strip in a Military newspaper (read that one here).

One of the "low" markets Cole submitted cartoons to was a brand new, obscure magazine called Playboy. In short order, his star rose again, even higher than with Plastic Man, as he became the signature star Playboy cartoonist and smack dab in the middle of a major cultural phenomenon. You can read Cole's Playboy cartoons here.

While recently in New York, I was lucky enough to visit a noted Cole scholar and discovered, with delight, the original art for two Jack Cole gag cartoons hanging on his wall! Both cartoons were previously unknown to me. I was fascinated to see that both cartoons had a "Stamp Wholesaler" slug pasted on them. These are clearly part of Cole's mid-50's climb to establish himself as a magazine cartoonist.

There's an entire secret history of cartoons and comics in America that can be found in specialist trade and hobby magazines such as the Stamp Wholesaler. Plumbers, electricians, and even hardware retailers all had trade magazines with cartoons. So why not stamp collectors?

Here's the first Cole cartoon. I apologize for the fuzziness. This is a camera photo taken in low light, but still clear enough to read and appreciate:

"Oh, all right, if it'll make you feel better, I'll burn Russia and her satellites."

The cartoon is a clever reference to the anti-communist movement in America led by Joseph McCarthy. The composition is exquisite, with the wife's body forming almost an arrow pointing out the window. We naturally see her figure first, and then trace back to the husband and his stamp album.

I did a little research and discovered that the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at Ohio State University has a collection of over one thousand original cartoons published in The Stamp Wholesaler. Cole's name is not listed, but the collection is not extensively cataloged. Here's some information about the Stamp Wholesaler found on the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library blog:

The magazine, published by Lucius Jackson until the late ’70s, was (from what we can gather) much beloved in the philatelic community and ran articles on stamp collecting, as well as cartoons, among their ads for dealers. Contributing cartoonists included Bill Bobb, Joseph Serrano, Bert Gore, John Dunnett, Roy O. Carling, John Dawson, Cairo Sturgill, Lowell E. Hoppes, Bill Newcombe, Brad Anderson, C. K. Weil, Joe Bresch, Jim M’Guinness, Tony Saltzman, George L. Stewart, Bob Rieker, Doug Baker, and H.B. Harn.

I also discovered, on the Comics DC blog, the existence of a 1951 collection of cartoons from The Stamp Wholesaler. There's very likely no Jack Cole cartoons in this collection, since he was submitting cartoons to niche markets like this mostly from about 1953-56.

Amazon currently has a copy for sale for a mere $40, if anyone wants to check it out, just to be sure. . Here's a scan of the center spread:

These cartoons are decent enough, but Cole's work is far superior to these. I have no idea if the cartoons I saw were ever actually published in the Stamp Wholesaler, but they'd have been crazy NOT to take these gems!

Here's the second Jack Cole stamp collecting cartoon:

"But how can you make a living at it if you won't let anything go?"

I imagine that many collectors (stamps, comics, or you name it) out there can relate to this scenario. I can't tell you how many times I found a treasure in a dusty, dank corner of a comics shop and when I asked about the price, the owner furtively said, "Oh this -- it's not for sale."

Cole was letting go of a lot... and his cartoon draws on his experience. These two cartoons both are drenched with anxiety, as with his last comic book stories and his comic strip, Betsy and Me, from a few years later.

Again, we have a masterful composition, with the anxious stamp dealer backed into a corner. The perspective focuses the eye on the dealer, and then, as with the anxious wife in the cartoon above, we trace back to the customer. Perfectly done. 

I also love the organic shapes of the blacks, and the thin, perfectly controlled brush line. It was a treat to find these gems. Many thanks to the art's owner, who generously allowed me to share these with ya!

Always unhinged,
Paul Tumey