Midnight Episode 7 (second run) – Jack Cole subverts the boxing story

 

  Story this post:

“Masked Mayhem” (my title)
Story and art by Jack Cole

Smash Comics #74
(Quality Comics Group
Dec, 1947)

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

 

 

For such a seemingly mild-mannered guy, Jack Cole was pretty subversive in his creative expression. He not only pushed the form of comics into new directions, he also pushed the content of comic books in the 1940’s.

His greatest creation, PLASTIC MAN, was itself a parody of the super-hero genre that defied the story-forms conventions and moral standards. Plastic Man started out as a crook and, for his first dozen or so adventures, kept functioning as a crook – breaking the law with a jester’s playfulness while he also saved the day as Plastic Man. When you think about it, these stories turned the hero concept inside out, which may be part of the unique appeal of the series.

In his seventh MIDNIGHT story in his second run on the series, Cole subverts the classic boxing/fight story-form. The boxing movie has been a Hollywood staple for over 50 years, with films like Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, and most recently The Fighter.  In 1947, the year Cole wrote and drew this story,one of the big hit movies was Body and Soul, starring John Garfield (pictured left). In the film, Garfield becomes involved with fight promoters who are crooked and corrupt. Ernest Hemmingway wrote about rigged fights in his great 1927 short story, “The Killers,” which has been adapted into a movie four different times (so far).

By 1947, the story-form of the rigged fight was predictable enough that Cole could parody it in his Midnight story. No doubt, Cole was inspired by the great work E.C. Segar did in Popeye with his numerous parodies of boxing matches and fights. He starts the story with a comic reversal, showing a man with a massive, rugged fighter’s body and the sensitivity of a child…

Cole ends the story on a subversive note, with our hero, Midnight, actually holding up the crooks at gunpoint!

It is also of passing interest to note that this story is also yet another in a long series of Jack Cole stories that play with the concept of shapeshifting…. in this story, Midnight is almost interchangeable for Plastic Man in his ability to change his appearance.

Sadly, like many of the later Midnight stories, there seems to be something lacking in the energy of the story. Still, the art is terrific and the storytelling is masterful. Check out this lovely panel from page six that features a classic Jack Cole city scene:

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The Complete Midnight! by Jack Cole - Volume One: 1941
A handsomely designed 102- page ebook in .cbr format featuring the first 12 Midnight stories, exhaustive notes by Cole scholar Paul Tumey, and 3 BONUS Jack Cole stories!

 

 

As a way to support this blog and distribute this great work, I am offering for a limited time a nice little ebook I’ve made called The Complete Midnight by Jack Cole: Volume 1 – 1941 for $2.99. This is a great way to support this blog.

The book includes Cole’s first 12 MIDNIGHT stories, pages of notes and analysis written by me – Paul Tumey, and additional bonus material, including his wonderful single Quicksilver story from 1941. I have carefully restored the pages and put it all into an attractive unified format with archival notation and quality. I think that this is probably the best digital representation of this classic work available at this time.

Please note: Orders filled within 24 hours. Because this file is large, it is necessary for me to email you the file myself in order to avoid costly storage and data transfer charges. This keeps the price very low for you, but please be patient as I will need to check email and fill orders manually. Thanks a million for supporting this blog!

This is a great way to support this blog and get some great reading for cheap!

Midnight Episode 6 (second run) – The Comedy of Locomotion

Story this post:

“Bull Market” (my title)
Story and art by Jack Cole

Smash Comics #73
(Quality Comics Group
Oct, 1947)

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

In his great 2003 essay on Jack Cole (Comics Journal #255), Jeet Heer observes that Cole’s stories in his 1946-47 period are more light-hearted than his earlier stories which feature grisly violence. Heer writes about Cole’s PLASTIC MAN stories, but his insight works just as well for Cole’s Midnight stories:

“The plots for the stories in this (period)… are very simple.  They usually involve simply throwing Plastic Man and Woozy Winks into an odd environment (an old-folks home, the artic, a futuristic city) where they have to fight a gang of crooks, who often seem reassuringly incompetent.”

In the case of the story in this posting, the setting is the New Central Stock Exchange on Wall Street, a place Cole probably visited or walked by in the years he lived in Manhattan. This story can be seen as a partner of sorts to Cole’s previous MIDNIGHT story (read it here), which features a cow and a county fair. Cole changes the cow into a bull and moves the setting from rural America to the country’s most sophisticated city and the world of high finance. Jeet Heer goes on to write:

“What keeps this basic formula interesting is Cole's antic visual humor, which can be seen in the attention he paid to gait and body movement. The characters rarely walk from one spot to the next: they are always bouncing about, prancing, leaping or ricocheting. Because of his focus on the comedy of locomotion, Cole was always focused on getting his characters from one panel to the next, or moving from the top left to the bottom right of the page.”

I love Heer’s phrase: “the comedy of locomotion.” This story is a great example of Cole’s focus on depicting comic movement throughout his story. In virtually every panel, characters are captured in mid-movement. The drawings sometimes are as distorted and unlikely as the image you see when you press the pause button on your DVD player during a vintage Bob Clampett DAFFY DUCK cartoon.

 

Cole’s art in this period is quite spectacular. His splash page in this story makes creative use of stock market ticker tape in a composition that rivals the best of Will Eisner’s famous SPIRIT splashes.

Smash Comics #73 (Oct. 1947)

Sadly, these Midnight stories of Cole’s second run are woefully weak on plot. As wonderful as the art is in this story, it is awfully hard to follow. Cole is said to have created his stories by starting at the first panel and spinning the story out from there. Given this, it’s easy to see why he would lose track of the overall shape of his story, and become engrossed in the visual dynamics. Jeet Heer puts it very well:

“With his focus on panel and page design, Cole's characteristic unit of attention was much smaller than those cartoonists who labored to produce well-crafted and shapely stories (notably Will Eisner, Carl Barks and Harvey Kurtzman). Unlike these other pioneering comic book creators, Cole cared little for the pace and structure of his stories. Plastic Man's adventures tend to ramble haphazardly, starting with a strong momentum that usually dissipates with an abrupt ending.”

Everything about the storytelling in this episode is forced, and as result, the story is not much fun to read. As if sensing this, Cole would make a mid-career course correction in 1948 and enter into what could be called the baroque period of his work, with better-realized stories and a much greater profusion of background gags.

Midnight Episode 5 (second run) – Cole’s Americana

 Story this post:

The Beautiful Bovine
Story and art by Jack Cole (signed)
Smash Comics #72
August, 1947
Quality Comics

Left: Cover by Jack Cole

 

Cole set several of his stories in traveling carnivals and county fairs. He even co-created a series, The Barker, that featured the exotic members of a travelling carnival sideshow. Rural America is reflected beautifully in this lovingly drawn madcap MIDNIGHT adventure set in a country fair. Cole dresses this story up with an almost literary level of details, including a hog show, a daredevil motorcycle attraction, a lecture on animal husbandry, and hootchie kootchie dancers.

In the splash page, note that Cole has signed this story “J. Cole,” in plain block letters, with no attempt at flourish or style. Unlike many artists, Cole did not create a stylized signature and “brand” his work with it. Here’s Cole’s signature from the pages of Plastic Man #1 (1943).

He almost always signed his stories (when he did sign them, which was sporadically) with his full first and last name. So, it’s interesting that in this story, Cole signed with his first initial: “J. Cole.”

Of course, in his other, parallel career as a magazine gag cartoonist, Jack Cole was required to develop a more stylized signature, as was the custom. Nonetheless, his signature was very simple and unadorned. Here’s his “Jake” pen-name signature from the mid-1940’s:

In a similar plain brush-lettered style, here’s a signature from a 1957 Playboy cartoon:

I am also struck by the tombstone shape into which Cole has inserted his signature on the splash page. It’s possible to read too much into such things, but it is interesting to read the text in this headstone shape and discover that it discusses death in connection with devoted love.

I bring this up not to psychoanalyze a man over 50 years after his death, but to suggest that many of these second-run Midnight stories are not as fun as they should be, and that perhaps this is because the shadows in Jack Cole’s psyche had begun to grow.

However, it’s time to moo-ve on, so without further ado, here’s another remarkable, if flawed, forgotten story by a creative genius.

So what does it all mean? I wish I could say. I’ve read this story a dozen times, and it feels as wispy and hard to grasp as a dream. On the surface, it appears to be a standard Quality-style yarn, but what is one to make of the oddly human, but mute cow? Or the appearance of not just any stolen gem, but the world’s biggest star sapphire? Or the perky, sexy girl who has zero interest in the clean-cut hero and instead remains devoted to the low-life thug? The usual story elements are present, but they somehow they are subverted.

Like many masters of comic book storytelling, Cole mined his sub-conscious for stories and details. In the late 1940’s, as we see here, there is a curious development where his art and mastery of visual storytelling techniques reach a peak seldom passed by other comic book creators of any era, but his storytelling seems to collapse under the weight of some unseen, inner pressure.

Midnight Episode 4 (second run): Slipping Out of the Superhero Genre

 

Story this post:

The Old Lighthouse Keeper
Story and art by Jack Cole
(Possible assist by Alex Kotzky)

Smash Comics #71
June, 1947
Quality Comics

Left: cover by Jack Cole

 

The first Midnight stories in 1941-42 by Jack Cole were imbued with the trappings of the super-hero genre. Much like Batman (and unlike The Spirit, his intended template), Midnight swung from building to building, used fantastic weapons, and seemed to have at least above average punching power.

In Jack Cole’s second run on the series, starting in 1947, his Midnight was less a super-hero than a quasi private detective. The vacuum gun and other great weapons went the way of the dodo.

In “The Old Lighthouse Keeper,” we see Cole putting considerable effort into a densely plotted, Agatha Christie style murder story set in a lighthouse. Much like the twisted stairs leading to the blazing lamp at the top of the lighthouse, Cole’s story takes many turns as Midnight eventually shines the light of truth on the mystery.

This story foreshadows the turn hero comics would take into genre stories. Cole himself would be delivering moody, atmospheric horror-mysteries very similar to this 1947 story in 1952-54. This story’s biggest flaw is that it is too tame… too restrained. In 1949-52, Cole would take a huge leap by creating stories in this form that embrace the Dark Weird as only Cole could.

Page 7 deserves particular attention, with a Herriman-like page layout and unique use of sound effects as art elements.