Jack Cole Places TWO Cartoons in a Single Issue of Collier's! (1939)

THE 12 DAYS of COLE-MISS: 
  DAY 10  

 12 days of NEW Jack Cole finds! 
 Posted every day until Dec. 25th 

Today's Cole in your stocking consists of two rare "lost" Jack Cole cartoons from Collier's Weekly. Both cartoons are paper scans from my own copy of the September 2, 1939 issue which I acquired through several misadventures involving a verbose fat man, a fey killer, and a sexy but deceitful woman named Bridget O'Shaughnessy. 

It must have been exciting for Jack and Dorothy (Dot) Cole, a struggling young married couple relocated to New York City from New Castle, Pennsylvania to have two cartoons appear in one issue of a major national magazine. By the time these sales saw print, though, Cole was already working at the Harry Chesler shop. For some examples of Jack Cole's 1939 comics, mostly published in Centaur titles, see this article.

Just by way of an interesting "bonus" tidbit, here's a record of Jack and Dot's marriage that appeared in a Greenville newspaper on July 21, 1939:

This is a bit of a mystery because, by all accounts, Jack and Dot were married years earlier. In fact, they kept it secret from their parents, at first, continuing to live at home. I wonder if they were getting married a second time, to allow the families to be involved. Or perhaps the stories about their earlier marriage are not quite right. I truly wish I knew. If I ever come into a windfall, I'd love to go to New Castle and talk to some folks there to find out the story behind this news item and flesh out the story of Jack Cole's early years.

In any case, in my imagination I can see Cole riding the subway in Manhattan, watching someone read a magazine with this cover:

Or maybe he walked by newstands on busy New York streets in September 1939 that sported copies of the issue in which he had not one, but two cartoons. Newstands that looked something like this:

Looking at this photo, it's easy to imagine that maybe there was a comic on the stands as well that featured work by Jack Cole.

As previously documented in this blog, Cole had some earlier sales to Collier's in 1938.

The first cartoon of Cole's in the September 2, 1939 issue of Collier's appears on page 31, next to a bizarre Fisk tire ad that, for some reason, shows a man wrestling an alligator.

Collier's Weekly, September 2, 1939 - page 31 (Collection Paul Tumey)

The cartoon makes a reference to the famous baseball star, Joe DiMaggio... a rare topical reference in Cole's work. Here's the cartoon itself, in a larger size:

Collier's Weekly, September 2, 1939  (Collection Paul Tumey)

I like how Jack's signature appears to be a part of the floor under DiMaggio's feet. We also see in this cartoon Jack's interest in showing agitated human movement -- not quite successful here, but still a good effort. By keeping Joe's back to the reader, Jack spares himself from having to draw a caricature of the celebrity, but also keeps us from tipping to the gag until we read the caption.

The second Cole cartoon, which features an even higher level of physical chaos, appears on page 50:

Collier's Weekly, September 2, 1939 - page 50 (Collection Paul Tumey)

It's worthwhile to show you the entire page, as well as the individual cartoon, so you can get a sense of how much space the editors gave Cole's cartoon, and also to see how boldly his wash cartoons stand off the page. Part of Cole's greatness lies in his thoughtful design. We can see, just by looking at these two full pages, that his designs, with their strong lines and rich washes were very effective for catching the eye and adding visual appeal to the magazine's pages. 

Here's a 1940 Boy's Life page in which Cole's plush, bold cartoon is a visual delight:

Boy's Life, October 1940

Cole would return to this lush visual formula in his Playboy and Jake cartoons of 1955-58, with great success. His 1955 cartoons benefit from the thousands of drawings he had made in the intervening years between 1939 and 1955, and therefore are considerably more successful and accomplished. However, the same basic design approach applies to both eras in Cole's career as a magazine cartoonist. 

Here's the cartoon, in a larger size:

Collier's Weekly, September 2, 1939 (Collection Paul Tumey)

It's a great gag, and it lets Cole do what he does best -- show screwball energy on paper. There's something about the leaping-off-the-page energy of this page that reminds of this classic page from a 1942 Midnight story (shown here as a retouched page from my ebook, The Complete Jack Cole Midnight, Volume 2 -- available for purchase at the right-hand side of this blog):

Even though he had a very promising start as a nationally published magazine cartoonist with top late 1930s markets like Judge and Collier's, Cole needed to make more money -- and that's why he veered into comic books, and began to devote himself to creating longer, sustained sequential graphic stories. At Chesler's walk-up studio, housed in a dank lower Manhattan warehouse, Cole at least drew a regular paycheck. In short order, Cole began to master this burgeoning new form. Just as his magazine cartoons show smart design, so do his comic book stories -- but that's a story for another day!

Check back tomorrow and the next day for the last two postings of my 12 Days of Cole-Miss event -- lotsa good stuff to come!

In the meanwhile, here's what we've done, so far:

The 12 Days of Cole-Miss Postings to Date:

Days 1 and 2: Jack Cole's Sexy Playboy Style Humorama Cartoon Covers (1950-60s)

Day3: A Rare Jack Cole Playboy Style Cutie Pie Cover (1956)

Day 4: Teasing Blonde Triplets and Mad Japanese Spies (Private Dogtag 1944)

Day 5: Stretching to Playboy: Two Rare Jack Cole Judge Cartoons (1936, 1946)

Day 6: Jack Cole Sells Silk to the Burlap Market (1955 gag cartoon)

Day 7: Two More "Lost" Jack Cole Cartoons (1955)

Day 8:  More 1955 Jack Cole Cartoons

Day 9: The Second Death Patrol story in a new paper scan!

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

Foreshadowing Playboy: Jack Cole’s Boy’s Life Cartoons (1936-40)

 

From 1936 to 1940, Boy’s Life magazine regularly published one-panel gag cartoons by Jack Cole. These previously unknown cartoons trace his development from a rank beginner to a distinctive stylist. In these cartoons, Cole develops the layered ink/watercolor/wash visual style he would return to 14 years later as Playboy magazine’s signature cartoonist. I have spent days searching through back issues of Boy’s Life to cull out two dozen wonderful Jack Cole cartoons that, as far as I know, have never seen the light of day since their original publications, nearly 75 years ago! Reading these cartoons in chronological order reveals Jack Cole’s amazing growth as an artist and humorist in his early years. You saw it here, first folks!

It is believed that Jack Cole began his cartooning career with a 1935 sale to Boy’s Life magazine. In a wonderful, but somewhat slanted autobiographical piece that Cole published in a 1956 issue of the Freelancer magazine (Issue #2), he recounted this momentous event:

“…I had taken a job with the American Can Company and was well on my way to the normal life when one of my idle-hour etchings made a sale to “Boy’s Life” magazine in 1935.”

Here’s the whole wonderful article (thanks to  Harry Green, who recently published the page  (courtesy of David Miller, who provided the scans) on his wonderful comic blog, Hairy Green Eyeball 2, and to loyal reader and supporter of this blog, Daniel McKiernan, who made me aware of the post.

  

Just a few thoughts about this new find. Notice how Cole glosses over the major effort of his life, his 16-year career in comic books. Also, the “minor class magazines” that Cole mentions are the Humorama line (Joker, etc.). A nice collection of these cartoons were collected in The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, by Alex Chun. A few of these cartoons can be viewed at this link.

In Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s top-notch book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, they reprint the first page of an article that Cole wrote and illustrated about his epic 1932 cross-country solo bike ride (which I transcribed and commented on, in this earlier post). The caption for the page reads:

“Cole’s first professional sale, to Boy’s Life in 1935, recounts his 1932 adventure bicycling all across America and back.” (p. 10)

I am a huge fan of Art Spiegelman’s work, but recent scholarship on my part suggests this is incorrect; very likely a mistaken assumption. The first sale to Boy’s Life was not this article, but very likely a one-panel gag cartoon.

Spiegelman was recently kind enough share with me that he got the reproduction of the article’s first page from Cole’s brother, Dick Cole, who had no date information. I think it was a reasonable assumption to make that this article was Jack Cole’s first professional sale. Boy’s Life published articles of this ilk, and in the early 1950’s, I even found a very similar (if much less well written) article in which a teenager tells the story of his west-to-east journey across America by bike, even hitting some of the same out-of-the-way towns as Cole!

However, after searching through Boy’s Life magazine back issues for 1935, I can find no trace of anything by Jack Cole. Not the bike trip article, nor a cartoon or illustration. Nothing. I looked through every page of every issue five times.

In fact, I looked through every page of every issue of Boy’s Life from 1933 to 1941, and I did not find Cole’s “A Boy and His Bike” article. So where was this article published, and when? It’s a mystery, as of this date. My friend and fellow comics curator, Frank Young (see Stanley Stories, his superb and groundbreaking blog on John Stanley) suggests that perhaps the article appeared in his hometown newspaper, the New Castle News (which, unfortunately has no archive for these years). Frank says that the article looks to him like the typical layout of Sunday newspaper rotogravure magazines of the time. Indeed, the layout of this page doesn’t look anything like the layouts Boy’s Life used, although the fonts are similar.

In any case, although Jim Steranko, Ron Goulart, and Art Speigelman, as well as Jack Cole himself all state that Cole’s first professional sale was to Boy’s Life in 1935, I can find no trace of a cartoon in those pages. The first Jack Cole cartoon I have located appears in 1936, not 1935. Could it be that Cole simply mis-remembered? Heaven knows that if you asked me the date of my first fiction sale (“Toy Chest River,” in a hardcover anthology called Christmas Forever), I would very likely get the date a year or two off – and that was a major event for me.

The first issue of Boy’s Life in which Cole’s work appears in is the October issue of 1936. Cole had two cartoons in that issue. It’s possible these represent his first professional sales (I am not sure where the “circa 1934” cartoon shown caption-less in the above Freelancer article comes from. That could be the first sale, or it may even be a rejected cartoon Cole dug out for this piece.)

Boy’s Life (October, 1936)

From the start, Cole is displaying technical prowess with wash and watercolor. 14 years later, his Humorama and Playboy cartoons would in part be so successful because of Cole’s mastery of watercolor.

If I haven’t missed anything in my search, Cole did not place another cartoon in Boy’s Life for 11 months. During this time, he borrowed 500 dollars from his hometown merchants and moved to New York City with his wife Dorothy. By the time his next Boy’s Life cartoon appeared, Cole had begun his comic book career, finding a salaried job at the Harry “A” Chesler studio, the first packager of original comic book material. Talk about being in the right place at the right time -- Cole got in at the ground floor of the development of a whole new art form and branch of publishing!

Boy’s Life (September, 1937)

A typically wacky Jack Cole invention. Cole’s work is filled with surreal inventions such as this one. Compare to the story of the invisible “Flit” spray in Plastic Man #1

Cole had a second cartoon in this issue, as well…

Cole was particularly creative in his next cartoon, creating an irregularly-shaped cartoon cleverly designed to slot into the magazine’s 3-column layout:

Boy’s Life (October, 1937)

Cole’s inspired design supports the subject of the gag very well…

 

Boy’s Life (November, 1937) 

More surrealism. The sort of play with reality that we see a lot of  in Cole’s Burp the Twerp one-pagers….

Boy’s Life (December, 1937)

Here we see similar motion and energy that Cole invested in his Plastic Man stories.

Boy’s Life (January, 1938)

Cole’s first published hillbilly cartoon (and a funny one, at that). Hillbilly humor and rural settings are a staple of Cole’s work. See The Highgrass Twins (1940) for starters

Cole had a second cartoon in the Jan 1938 issue… delightfully  surreal and again with the invention theme…

Boy’s Life (February, 1938)

Note the use of pure wash effects with no defining border lines… a characteristic of Cole’s stunning 1950’s Playboy cartoons.

Boy’s Life (May, 1938)

Funny drawings…

Note in the above cartoon that Cole’s signature has begun to evolve from the ornate, labored anchor-shaped icon/logo he designed in the earliest cartoons to a more simpler and assured signature. A study of the development of Cole’s signature in his 1936-40 Boy’s Life gag cartoons reveals a march toward simplicity and grace.

The last signatures in this progression are very close to the signature Cole used for his famous Playboy cartoons, some 14 years later.

Boy’s Life (July, 1938)

Impotence was a theme Cole explored in both is comic book, gag cartoons, and in his syndicated comic strip, Betsy and Me.

Boy’s Life (August, 1938)

 

Boy’s Life (September, 1938)

Only Cole could think of an impossible gag like this… and make it work.

Boy’s Life (January, 1939)

Cole’s visual style is evolving from the “puppet” figure shapes to more organic and flowing forms. You can feel the fluidity of Plastic Man in this image…

Interestingly, a cartoon by Fred Schwab appears in this issue, as well. Schwab worked with Cole at the Chesler studio, and I get the sense they were chums. When asked about the Cole-Schwab connection, Art Spiegelman kindly shared the following information: “Cole really got along well with Fred Schwab since they shared an affinity for screwball Smokey Stover cartooning. I interviewed him for the book (he worked in production at the NYT, but turned out to be an affable man with almost no specific memories.” I suspect that Cole probably helped Schwab get this sale to Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (January, 1939)

 

Boy’s Life (February, 1939)

Ah, an “Eat at Joe’s” cartoon by Jack Cole. That’s like finding a “Kilroy was here” cartoon by Harvey Kurtzman. Notice how effectively Cole has begun to use patterns to create a more richer visual experience. His comic book stories are filled with patterns, such as Woozy Wink’s polka-dotted blouse.

Boy’s Life (May, 1939)

Fred Schwab placed two more cartoons in this issue. These are the last of the Schwab cartoons in Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (April, 1939)

To borrow Jeet Heer’s great phrase, the comedy of locomotion…

Boy’s Life (June, 1939)

Cole is becoming more confident and accomplished visually. It is interesting to compare this evolving painterly technique to his still-crude pen-and-ink line work in his 1939-40 comic book stories…

Boy’s Life (September, 1939)

Wow.. look at the motion and the sense of a moment captured in time. Cole has found the underlying mechanism of the visual expression of time and space, and has invented a way to stuff a captured moment with the implied events that occur just before and after the moment, adding enormous depth and profundity to his work. Compare this to the similar waterfall gag of October, 1937 and you will see how much Cole has grown in a very short time. The legendary bluesman Robert Johnson is rumored to have made a deal with the devil to suddenly transform into a master of the guitar. Did Cole make a similar deal in 1939 to acquire the ability to manipulate time and motion in comic book images like no other artist before or since? His growth in this period is uncanny and unexplainable. By the way, this was the largest cartoon I saw in 10 years of Boy’s Life.

Boy’s Life (November, 1939)

 

Boy’s Life (December, 1939)

Another impressive motion-on-paper moment, and a funny gag, too… almost iconic… just when you think you’re bad off…. there’s a cactus that’s waiting to break your fall….

 

Boy’s Life (January, 1940)

This gag reminds me of Death Patrol… look at those gorgeous speed lines… Cole has clearly become fascinated with showing motion on paper…

 

 

Boy’s Life (June, 1939)

Motion, motion, motion – funny, funny, funny. Cole is now by far the most distinctive stylist of the cartoonists in this run of Boy’s Life. His cartoons leap off the page.

 

 

Boy’s Life (October, 1940)

And then, it ends… sadly, here is the last of Cole’s marvelous cartoons for Boy’s Life. In New York City, Cole had taken on the job of editor for Lev Gleason, and devoted himself wholly to comic books for the next 14 years. Look at how this lovely cartoon leaps off the page…

 

Tuba or not tuba, that is the question…This is the only cartoon in the Boy’s Life panoply that has no caption. Cole has graduated to a “pure” form of gag cartooning with this last entry.

Overall, Cole’s heretofore unseen and unknown Boy’s Life cartoons are a revelation. We can see, more clearly than in his comic book work of the same period, his meteoric growth as a cartoonist.

Somewhere out there, a 4-CD bootleg of Bob Dylan’s unreleased 1962 songs exists, Dylan 1962. Listening to this CD, one can hear in a few tracks the “wild, thin mercury sound” of Dylan’s famous albums of a few years later. The tracks totally undermine the story of Dylan’s artistic development as an acoustic folksinger into an artist who suddenly picked up an electric guitar in 1965. He had the electric sound in 1962, and brought out this new style when it best suited his career.

Similarly, Cole had developed his wash/watercolor gag, compressed-time gag cartoon approach some 15 years prior to his landmark work for Playboy magazine, starting in 1954.

All text is copyright 2011 Paul Tumey