The Origin (of sorts) of Sadly-Sadly in Jack Cole’s last SPIRIT story

Jack Cole’s final SPIRIT section story, Sad Sam’s Last Laugh (Spirit Section June 25, 1944), was an early version of Sadly-Sadly (Plastic Man #20, November 1949), one of his best stories, and once again presents us with his patented mix of gruesome death and funny cartooning.

Cole ghosted THE SPIRIT for about a six-month period, writing and penciling (by my count) 17 stories. “Sad Sam’s Last Laugh” was also Jack Cole’s last Spirit. His Spirit stories, while carefully modeled after the patterns and look creator Will Eisner and first assistant Lou Fine had established, put more emphasis on both physical slapstick humor and death. This last story is remarkable enough to warrant a post of its own, for several reasons, which I’ll cover after you read this wild story, shown here in its 1946 reprint version from THE SPIRIT #5 (Quality Comics):
 

“Let US seriously contemplate suicide, too!” – chilling words to read, considering that Jack Cole took his own about 14 years after writing and drawing this story.

Suicide turns up over and over in Cole’s “comic” book stories. Although he often plays it up for laughs, there is nearly always an undercurrent of sadness. In this story, Sad Eyes Sam rather small-mindedly robs himself of his last day of life merely to cheat his fellow crooks. He accomplishes this by stabbing himself with a surgeon’s scalpel. Cole’s stories are filled with gruesome death and disfigurement, often creatively executed in bizarre fashion.

This story is also one of the earliest instances of what could be called Cole’s Grotesques. The faces of the criminal gang in this story are both comic and bizarre (page 3, panel 2 for example), in the best tradition of cartoonists such as Goya, Daumier, and Hogarth. It is not known that Cole drew upon any of the works of these artists for his own inspiration. We do know that Cole cited Chester Gould’s comic strip, DICK TRACY, as a major influence… and he may have gotten the idea of grotesque criminals from Gould.

In any case, this story features some excellent cartooning, even if the unknown inker did rob Cole’s lines of much of their life and spontaneity.

While Cole, like any great artist, returned to his themes and story settings  over and over, this story is thus far the only instance documented in which he recycles a story concept. The character of Sad Eyes Sam would be reborn about 5 years later as Sadly-Sadly, in one of Jack Cole’s masterpieces, often reprinted, and shown here from it’s original appearance in PLASTIC MAN #20 (November, 1949).


It is interesting to compare the two stories to see how far Cole developed in just five years. The Sadly-Sadly story is nothing short of breathtakingly brilliant. Keep in mind, though, that Cole was ghosting on the Spirit story, and was obviously holding back to keep the stories looking and feeling similar to the “house” look well established for the wildly successful series.

The Grand Comics Database, a terrific resource and one which I’ve used heavily in developing this work on Jack Cole, lists Joe Millard as the writer for the Sadly-Sadly story. I found this hard to believe when I first read it. Having found this earlier version of the story by Cole, I have even stronger doubts that this classic story was written by anyone other than Cole. It’s too bad no records of who did what at Quality seem to exist.

From December 19, 1943 to June 25, 1944, Jack Cole ghosted 17 Spirit stories, by my count. After careful study of the Spirit Sections, here is my current, annotated, list of stories that Jack Cole wrote and penciled (they were inked by other hands, including Robin King):

12/19/43 – Death After Death
12/26/43 – Cloak and Coffin
1/2/44 – Killer Ketch (shapeshifting story)
1/16/44 – Ebony’s Inheritance (similar character shows up in other Cole stories, including Midnight Episode 18 , First Run)
1/23/44 – Murder By Magic
1/30/44 – Circumstantial Evidence (suicide, panel in story used as basis for Plastic Man splash)
2/6/44 – Radio Burglars
2/13/44 – Man O’ War
2/20/44 – In The Moorish Section of Central City
3/5/44 – The Charity Ball
3/12/44 – Double Eagle (Aztec Indian later used in Police Comics #75 story, “Case of the Ancient Clues”)
3/19/44 – Skelter and Crabb
3/26/44 – Torchy Tyler
4/23/44 – Rogoff (statue used in “Granite Lady” splash from Plastic Man, also lightning shock bolts used in later work)
4/30/4 – The Voodoo of Dr. Peroo
5/21/44 – Black Marx
6/25/44 – Sad Eye Sam’s Last Laugh (suicide, early version of “Sadly-Sadly” Plastic Man story)

Most of these stories can be found in the 8th volume of the SPIRIT ARCHIVES. This list is presented as a starting point, but it may change as I look at the stories with more attention.

Not Dark Yet, But It’s Gettin’ There: Plastic Man #20

Before Jack Cole’s last noir period of the Plastic Man stories, he created a brief, but glorious series of stories in which he pushed the cartoony aspect of his work to the limits. These stories pre-figure – and even on occasion surpass -- the famous stories by Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Wally Wood in the first 20 issues or so of MAD, with dense, crowded panels and numerous extra jokes in the background.

Plastic Man #20 featured the famous Sadly Sadly story. This story has been reprinted several times, but the other two stories in this issue have never before been reprinted.

In this issue, we see Cole heading full speed into his last comic phase. The pages are dense with gags and infused with a manic energy. The brilliant Woozy Winks story in this issue has strikingly similar visual solutions that Wally Wood would develop for his MAD stories.

Lamp that opening panel with 20 different great dogs all drawn by Cole. Each and every dog is infused with a manic obsession. Funny, scary stuff.

 

 

For all the crazy comedy, Cole is also layering on more shadows, and some of the distortions which should be funny, actually come off as grotesque, like gargoyles instead of clowns. The weird black eyes of the villain Ali Badda, in the Oriental quarter story, are disturbing instead of funny. Even Plastic Man’s expressions are distorted in unsettling ways, as though he cannot contain his inner darkness.

Plastic Man Fights His Greatest Enemies: Grannies and Boy Scouts!

Story this post:
”Say It Ain’t So, Plas!”

Writing, Pencils, Inks by Jack Cole
Inks/Finishes possibly by Alex Kotzky

Plastic Man 16
March 1949- Quality Comics
Left: Cover by Jack Cole

As we come up on marking our first year, this blog just exceeded 50,000 page impressions. It’s great to see such interest in the work of Jack Cole. Thanks, everyone!

Item: Thanks to the great guys over at Golden Age Comics, I’ve been able to locate the third CUTHBERT 1-pager. If you’d like to read these demented, wicked funny 1-pagers by Cole, see my earlier posting here, which includes the newly found example from The Spirit #5. For those of you who don’t wish to click away, here’th the new CUTHBERT, ish a good ‘un!

In this post, I continue with a selection and analysis of the best of the later Jack Cole PLASTIC MAN stories.

In my post on the great Concrete story from Plastic Man 14, we saw that Jack Cole was re-investing in both comic books and in his star character, PLASTIC MAN. The late 40’s were a spotty period for Cole as he was developing a shadow career as a magazine gag cartoonist, and no doubt struggled with the involvement of other writers and artists stretching his vision of PLASTIC MAN from a beautiful satire to a mediocre, unfunny and dull series of stories. In 1949, Cole rallied and returned to form, delivering a series of delightful, brilliant stories.

The second story in Plastic Man 16 is one such delight.

In typical Cole fashion, three criminals plot out how to murder PLASTIC MAN. Look what happens at the bottom tier of page 3:

This pre-Kurtzman sequence comically demonstrates “no honor among thieves,” as they pick each other’s pockets. All the while, involved in an intense discussion… almost stealing by reflex. This tier would be funny enough, but turn the page and here’s what you get:

Is this great, or what? Leave us not mention the crook with a crazy hairdo, or the other crook inexplicably attired in a fez… Wiggles and Goofy. It’s DICK TRACY on acid!

These panels are smaller, the first two of the top tier of three on page 4. Smaller panels mean shorter time… Cole has set the gag up with larger (more time) panels, and then delivered the punch line with smaller, faster units… comic timing in sequential graphic narrative: a textbook example, and super fun to read!

Without further ado, here’s the story, starting with a terrific splash page in which Cole delivers a cinematic crane shot of blissful comedic chaos:

 

There are several interesting aspects to this story. First, is the great cartooning. More than ever before, Cole is evolving from a master at depicting speed on paper into a wizard of time itself.

Consider pages two and three, the car chase sequence. The sequence consists of 12 panels, six to a page. The first 9 panels are hyper-kinetic cartooning, as forms are pulled, stretched, elongated, compressed, and blurred in a high-speed, high-stakes chase. These panels are smaller, and have less detail… so they go by faster.

Then, in panel 10, time seems to slow down… right when the car crashes into it’s own sound effect. Plastic Man’s body is frozen in time, suspended in the air. The last two panels, such as the one shown above,  are the largest in the sequence, filled with detail. These are almost painterly in their studied composition and density of detail. They are moments, frozen in time. This freeze-frame effect would, in 5 years, become a key part of Jack Cole’s Playboy cartoons (see my post “A Moment Frozen In Time”).

Another interesting aspect to this story is the matter-of-fact inclusion of the possibility of death at almost every turn in the plot. We start with a sequence in which it seems that Plastic Man might perish, then move into a sequence where criminals plot his murder, and finally, Plas himself stages a mock-suicide. Considering that Cole took his own life less than a decade after he created this story, such signals are hard to to take as just random plot elements. Cole’s comic book stories became darker and stranger as time went on.

Even with the specter of Death hovering, this story is extremely satirical and funny. Cole writes a great reversal of the hero myth by making Plastic Man’s greatest enemies not the criminals in the story, but self-righteous old ladies and boy scouts. This story is very similar to the great, often reprinted, “Plastic Man Products” story that would appear in the next issue, Plastic Man 17. Plastic Man has to fight a crazed mob in that story, as well.

In fact, the last great period of Cole’s comic book stories seems to rest largely on the depiction of the individual against the mob. This new theme occurs over and over, right through his last Web of Evil stories.

Lastly, this story can be seen as a pre-cursor to the Harvey Kurtzman Mad comic book stories. Whether or not there was a direct influence, it’s hard to say. But perhaps it was just something in the air at the time. As post-WWII America slid into the conformity and quiet desperation of the early 1950’s, American pop artists such as Jack Cole and Harvey Kurtzman responded by poking holes in revered institutions and suggesting we take a closer look and think for ourselves.

Aside from the satire, this story also prefigures Mad in the amazing amount of “chicken fat” cartooning… that is, little bits of business that have little or nothing to do with moving the plot forward, but add a delightful dimension to the story, such as the pickpocket sequence described at the beginning of this article.

This forgotten story appeared quietly on the scene, and was muffled by the pages of lesser stories that Cole may have had his hand in, but in which his brilliance was considerably watered-down. I’m happy to pluck this brilliant gem out and share it. Enjoy!

Announcement: I have started a new blog, TUMEYLAND, in which I’m sharing some of my writings, songs, art and comics.