Five Rare Original Jack Cole Playboy Cartoons Sell at Heritage Auction Galleries – Sixth Cartoon Remains Unsold and Available!

Last week, on Thursday, Feb. 25 and Friday, Feb. 26 the renowned collectibles auction house, Heritage Auction Galleries sold 5 extremely rare pieces of original Jack Cole art for a total of $13,984.50 before auction fees.

Of special interest to readers of this blog is the 6th Jack Cole piece, “Die Hard” (Playboy June, 1957) one of the famous FEMALES BY COLE series, which remains unsold and available for purchase as of this writing for $1,195.00.  Click here for details.

The pieces were part of a large collection of approximately 100 cartoons from the Playboy archives by various artists (the collection can be seen here). By far, the highest price realized in this collection was about $180,000, for a Vargas girl cartoon.

Readers of this blog will recall an earlier posting announcing the appearance of the above cartoon on Heritage’s auction block. This item got the most page views of all the recent Cole auctions, at 825, and sold for $4,182.50. A full study of this cartoon and a scan of the original art can be found in my article, A Moment Frozen In Time.

The prices realized on the Jack Cole cartoons were respectable, but remain a bargain. By contrast, color cartoons by Gahan Wilson sold for about 75% of the highest bids on the Cole cartoons, while Leroy Neiman black and white drawings featuring his black-stocking-clad Playboy girl sold for about 150% more.

The prices paid for Jack Cole’s cartoons do not reflect his status as Playboy’s signature cartoonist and a major figure in American comics history and popular culture, and consequently represent a great bargain for the lucky winners of these auctions.

Playboy Dec 1957
”I dreamed I was removing your Maidenform bra”
Sold at auction for $2,629.00

Many thanks to Heritage Auction Galleries for making large, high-quality scans of this wonderful original art available. Studied close-up, Cole’s watercolor technique is extremely impressive.

Playboy April 1956
FEMALES BY COLE: Indecisive
Sold at auction for $1,195.00

As well, scans such as the one above reveal how loose and free Cole’s brush work was in this series.

Playboy Oct 1957
Sold at auction: $1,792.00

In stunning clarity as well is Cole’s amazing wash technique, which he developed in his “Jake” Humorama digest cartoons of the 1940’s and early 1950’s. Note the use of white paint. It’s also neat to see the various notes on the boards, mostly instructions to the printer.

Playboy Jan 1958
“Well there’s history repeating itself.”
Sold at auction for $4,182.00

The auction included one of Cole’s greatest cartoons (above), a rare instance of Cole making a political statement in this format, but mainly just an inspired gag and a great painting. Look at this one close up and study the wild color palette!

The surfacing of six original pieces of Jack Cole art on the auction block is genuinely rare. In fact, out of over 40,000 lots of original cartoon and comic book art recorded on the Heritage Auction Galleries website, only 10 have been for Jack Cole items.

If only Quality’s publisher Everett “Busy” Arnold had preserved Cole’s original comic book pages! The story goes that he personally cut up every page and trashed it to prevent others from being able to publish the stories. Given that a few pages of original art from Quality comics have appeared in Heritage’s auctions, such as pages from editor Gill Fox, it seems a distant possibility that a few Jack Cole pages may have escaped Arnold’s scissors and been saved by a Quality editor or staffer and we may yet one day be able to study an original page by Jack Cole from a PLASTIC MAN story!

Until then, my dear readers, yours truly will continue to chip away down here in the Cole-mine and emerge, covered in musty pulp, from time to time with lost treasures.

Coming soon: some rare Cole one-pagers and a study of his connection with Quality editor Gill Fox!

Jack Cole’s Influences – Tex Avery (Females by Cole in Playboy Magazine)

Note: For more articles in my ongoing series on Jack Cole’s influences, including The Marx Brothers, the Landon School of Cartooning, and Bill Hollman (Smokey Stover), please see here.

There is little doubt in my mind that comic book master Jack Cole was heavily influenced by the master of another medium, Tex Avery.  An avid moviegoer, Cole would have seen Avery’s short animated films, such as the sexy Red Hot Riding Hood, probably more than once.  A handful of Avery’s cartoons featured the sexy singer in unforgettable sequences, usually animated by Preston Blair.

Sexy women populated the pages of 1940’s comics, but there is a special similarity between the way Avery and Cole ascribed potent, mythological status to their female sirens. Both artists mined a rich vein of humor in exaggerating the near-helplessness of men when confronted with the objects of their sexual fantasies.

There are many examples of men kneeling at the foot of feminine sexuality in Cole’s work, but perhaps his story from Police Comics #51 represents the most potent example. Here is the splash from that story:

 

Tex Avery’s cartoons are filled with astounding exaggerated reactions. Consider the distortions in this frame from Dumb-Hounded (1943).

Look familiar? It should. Here’s an image from the first PLASTIC MAN story, one of the first of perhaps thousands of such images Cole made:

Both Avery and Cole’s work feature some of the most outrageous and comic distortions of the human shape that can be found in popular culture.

It’s my own theory that Jack Cole had the idea to translate the aesthetic and effects of animated cartoons into comic books. I think it’s quite likely he created Plastic Man in the spirit of the cartoons he loved, including Tex Avery’s mini-masterpieces of madness.

Here’s another classic Tex Avery take, the “crack-up",” which he used in numerous cartoons. After being hit by something, a character would develop a network of cracks and then fall to pieces with the sound of glass breaking. Amazingly, I ran across a similar effect in one of Jack Cole’s WINDY BREEZE 1-pagers:

 

Jack Cole has put his own spin on this visual gag, making Windy a human jigsaw puzzle, an image that works on several different levels.

Years later, in July, 1958, Playboy magazine published a cartoon by Jack Cole entitled Enigma. It used the same concept. Here’s a scan of the original art:

The cartoon was one of a famous, well-received series called Females by Cole. In this cartoon, Cole combines the humorous Avery-style take with the Avery/Cole/Playboy sexpot to achieve an image that is both titillating and humorous. Here is an earlier draft of the cartoon, with a light-haired lass:

The cartoon evokes the sense that yes, women are puzzles for men to figure out. But it also works against the grain of that gag, suggesting the fragility of women. Cole deliberately drew some of the pieces on the ground, suggesting we are looking at a freeze-frame image of a person about to totally fall apart into a heap of fragments. Here is a second earlier draft, with a different, but equally exquisite face:

The issue of Playboy (July, 1958) that had Enigma in it was on the stands the day Jack Cole fell apart and took his own life. In this context, Enigma is not only a universal statement, it is also a highly personal message. But for all this, in the end, it is a good cartoon by a master of the form. Like Tex Avery, Jack Cole was always from the first to the last, an entertainer. 

The Playboy Years (1954-58)

Jack Cole's first cartoon for Playboy appeared in the 5th issue in 1954. After that, Cole had at least one cartoon or illustration (sometimes several) in every issue of Playboy until his death in 1958.


Just as so many of Jack Cole's comic book characters, including PLASTIC MAN are shapeshifters, so too was the artist in Jack Cole. Few people have ever gone so sucessfully from the medium of telling stories in the specific graphic form known as comic books to working as a painter of vivid, gorgeous single image gag cartoons.

When Cole was first accepted into the Playboy fold, publisher Hugh Hefner did not make the connection with his work as the creator of PLASTIC MAN, a comic book that Hefner -- a cartoonist himself -- had enjoyed and admired.


Cole's Playboy cartoons set the standard look and feel for the thousands of cartoons the magazine would subsequently publish. In the cartoon (reprinted below) in which a majorette owns up to marching in a parade minus her panties, we see the embryonic sexual innocent that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder would create a few years later, in their Playboy LITTLE ANNIE FANNY stories, also elaborately painted.



Cole's work in his men's magazine cartoons extended his own artistic discussion of what Elvis Costello once called "The Mystery Dance," or the magic, mystery, and misery of sex. It is this investigation into sex as the fulcrum of innocence and corruption, virility and impotence that connects Jack Cole's comic book work and his adult magazine work. Some of the cartoons even wistfully present us with lost virility, a theme that arose in his late 40's work, and discussed elsewhere in this blog, here. One cannot help but wonder just how happy Jack Cole was with his own life, considering that he chose to end it after a short career of creating these images.

His Playboy cartoons are thus both beautiful to look at, and difficult to process. There is often a good, strong "gag" joke, but there is also more subtly present an E.C.-style "choke, gasp, good Lord," reaction as well.

In several of the Playboy cartoons, one can easily recognize the "Cole woman" from his comic book stories. His women are both sexy and intimidating. They possess idealized soft, curvy, fertile bodies. And yet they either have a disarming innocence, or a shrewd, world-weary glint from behind their mascara-coated eyelashes. You cannot miss the Cole woman's face. It's mysteriously appealing and repelling at the same time. Here is yet another thing about Jack Cole's work that lifts it into greatness.

Original art, published in Playboy August 1957

Sold for $5,975.00 at a 2003 Christie's auction

Caption: Your wife? And all the while I thought it was TV!

Lastly, in some of Cole's Playboy cartoons, he includes the artist, as well. In one memorable cartoon, a stunning, erotic nude model giggles when the artist presses his brush into her painted image. Without reading too much into it, it seems Cole was interested in what his role as an artist was in the midst of this unfolding of sexual liberation.

Below are 18 cartoons by Cole from a feature on Jack Cole's Playboy cartoons that ran in an unknown issue of Playboy.