tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024420441109756132.post2750248222765049069..comments2024-03-23T11:45:42.089-07:00Comments on Cole's Comics: MIDNIGHT Episode 18 – Jack Cole Goes to Hell!Paul C.Tumeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05398929835829679477noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024420441109756132.post-5672551169357550002010-03-15T17:18:43.066-07:002010-03-15T17:18:43.066-07:00Constantine,
Thank you for your thoughtful and ob...Constantine,<br /><br />Thank you for your thoughtful and observant comment. <br /><br />In 1941-2, Cole was growing rapidly as an artist and experimented a lot with his layouts. Of course, you can see this experiementation happening in his pre-Quality work too... such as in the great Crime on The Run splash pages, or in the THE COMET stories, which we have yet to explore in this blog! Cole's first Quality stories were pretty dense in their layouts. This coudl be due to the fact that he had so few pages in which to tell his wild, action-packed yarns. As his page count per story number expanded (eventually Plastic Man got 15 pages, which was more than Superman or Batman at the time!), his layouts tended to settle down. <br /><br />I also think Cole must have been influenced by Eisner's comics of the time, which also had 4- and 5-panel tiers. <br /><br />After the mid-1940's Cole's layouts begin to adapt themselves to the needs of the story... using narrow panels to denote fast movement and small units of time, and larger panels to show larger units of time. <br /><br />One layout he used throughotu his career, and which seemingly only Cole could make work, was the narrow, full-height panel on the left. You can see this in some of the 1939 COMET splashes and then used in a 1949 Burp the Twerp reprinted here in this blog. <br />I think Cole innovated a couple of layout devices that were picked up by several of the Quality artists... including the tilted panel, and the circular panel. Check out the Bob and Swab stories I reprinted in this blog to see an example of how Cole as a designer and layout artist influenced others. Cole was a considerably gifted designer and there is much to learn by studying his layouts.<br /><br />Thanks again fior writing.Paul C.Tumeyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05398929835829679477noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024420441109756132.post-56313908690084697092010-03-13T17:40:42.657-08:002010-03-13T17:40:42.657-08:00Seeing these page thumbnails side by side, I'm...Seeing these page thumbnails side by side, I'm struck by how crowded most of the page layouts are.<br /><br />The panels in the four-panel tiers are narrow enough that after the word balloon is included there are a lot of head-and-shoulder shots and little in the way of backgrounds.<br /><br />This is a lot different than the Plastic Man story you feature in your next post, in which you can really study a single panel and spend a lot of time savoring the details (the MAD-like "chicken fat").<br /><br />The previous Midnight story (the one with the movie starlets) was similar in its use of four-panel tiers, but the one before that (the swamp story) had really wild layouts with comparatively huge panels.<br /><br />Is there a pattern or trend to Cole's comic book page layouts?Constantinenoreply@blogger.com