Karswell Posts Key Cole Story - The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1954)

Read the complete story here!


The master of all things comic book and horrorific, Steve Karswell, has posted "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" from Web of Evil #10 (January, 1954) at his always-fun blog, The Horrors Of It All. 


This is a key Jack Cole story. It was one of his very last comic book stories, and was published as his second-to-last story (for his final published comic book story, see my post on "I Was The Monster They Couldn't Kill" here). 


You can read "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" at Karswell's blog by clicking here. 


Firstly, there may be a question in some readers' minds as to whether this story actually is by Jack Cole. The Grand Comics Database currently lists the story as being by John Forte (they credit another story in Web of Evil #10 to Cole, "Death's Highway," which is not his work. Karswell has published that story on extensive blog as well, and you can read it by clicking here.)


I feel certain this story was written and penciled by Jack Cole. It is very much "of a piece" with the rest of his Web of Evil work. The title alone is similar to Cole's story from Web of Evil #1, "The Corpse That Wouldn't Die."


There are a number of "Cole-isms" in this story that indicate Cole's work, as well. These include Cole's characteristic sound effects lettering, as we see in this panel from the story (which, by the way, could also serve as a panel from any of his lurid True Crime stories):

Then there's the pervasive scenes of dread and anxiety. I think Cole was channeling Cold War nuclear fear. He went very, very dark at the end of his career. Even in Plastic Man. See my post on "Dark Plas" by clicking here. 

Lastly, there is the sense of movement in several of the panels. Check out this psycho-sexual portrait of speed and obsession:

The writing is by whoever else wrote the bulk of the Web of Evil stories Cole drew -- whether it's him or someone else. This story has the same dynamic between the twisted, broken individual who is at odds with society as several of the others, such as "Monster of the Mist," and "Killer From Saturn." 


The 16 Web of Evil stories that Jack Cole drew fall into two types: Unexplained Supernatural Events and Psychological Breakdowns.  It seems to me that Jack Cole may have written wrote the stories that fall into the latter category, if not all of them.

In the Unexplained Supernatural Events, characters come against bizarre circumstances, such as severed hands that still seem alive, or magic spells that somehow reanimate the dead . The characters inevitably fall victim to these terrifying phenomena, but no explanation is ever provided for the existence of these mysterious situations. They simply happen. These scripts are sloppy and tedious, and often even Cole’s extraordinary drawings cannot make them more than barely entertaining.

The second category of stories, which I think Cole wrote, and which I call Psychological Breakdowns are better written and have more clever and surprising plot twists.

These stories include:

The Killer From Saturn (Web of Evil #3)
The Man Who Died Twice (Web of Evil #5)
Orgy of Death (Web of Evil #6)
The Spectre’s Face (Web of Evil #6)
Death Prowls the Streets (Web of Evil #8)
A Pact With The Devil (Web of Evil #9)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Web of Evil #10)
I Was The Monster They Couldn’t Kill (Web of Evil #11)

In these stories the resulting horrific events are always shown to be result of a character’s mental breakdown. For example, in “The Killer From Saturn,” (which Art Spiegleman asserts is purely Cole’s work), it appears that a wildly frightening alien from outer space has landed in an American city and is murdering its inhabitants without cause or discernable reason. In the end, we learn the monster is actually a slight, timid man who has gone mad, dressing up in a monster costume and killing in a twisted form of revenge and ego gone wild.

In the case of this new find, "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," we learn at the end that Dr. Renard and "the brain" are communicating via thought-waves... maybe. The story puts the reader on a barbed-wire fence. On one side we have the possibility that Dr. Renard's invention is real, and on the other the possibility that he is mad. 

Cole gives us clues to this twist with visual foreshadowing. Look at how he visually combines Dr. Renard and the brain in this panel from page 4:

What gives "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" depth beyond the standard comic book horror story is the way Cole's imagery encourages us to consider the story as a metaphor for the self. It raises Phil Dickian questions about reality and what it means to be human. Is a brain in a jar a human being?

Jack Cole’s Web of Evil stories pulled the title out of a standard horror realm, and stretched the series into crime and science fiction as well. Instead of a horror story, Cole would write a crime story as if it were a horror story, playing with reader expectations.

These stories of people cracking under stress poignantly foreshadow the final outcome of Jack Cole’s life. After completing these stories, Cole not only left a dying industry for good, but also referred to his brilliant and accomplished career in demeaning terms. It seems likely there were hard feelings for Cole under the surface. In one story, which may or no be true, Cole is said to have taken his portfolio to DC (National) and was rejected. 

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die" as most readers will know, is the title of a very similar movie released in 1962. One wonders if Cole's horrific brain-in-a-jar imagery in this story inspired them.




Another interesting aspect to this story is that it is about a crazy inventor. From his 1939 "Dickie Dean" stories onward, Jack Cole populated his comic book work with brilliant, and often cracked, inventors. It's an archetype that Cole -- an inventor himself -- identified with, I think.

It's also worth noting that the inventor character in "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," Dr. Renard, is a Cold War version of Cole's longest-running inventor character, Doc Wackey, from his 40 or so Midnight stories published in Smash Comics. Physically, they are dead-ringers for each other:

The story ends perfectly, with the wildly protesting "talking" brain casually dropped into an incinerator to be destroyed. Is this how Jack Cole, after beating his brains out for 16 years in comic books felt?

The surname of the main character in "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," Renard, is a French-German name that means "strong decision." Perhaps Cole's choice of  the name, "Renard," was, consciously or not, an indication that he was making his own strong decision to leave comic books, Plastic Man, and Woozy behind.

By the time this story was published, Cole had left Quality Comics. After that, the only work in comics he found was touching up stories for post-code publication as an assistant to Marc Swayze at Charlton Comics in Derby Connecticut.  That's a little like hiring Ernest Hemmingway to write supermarket signs. No wonder Cole left after three weeks, never to work in the comic book industry again.

I am totally psyched to see this story appear here. Thanks, Karswell!


Note: The Grand Comics Database, which I love, has a few errors around Cole's work, which is understandable since a clear understanding of the different phases of his work is only just now coming into focus. I am working as an indexer/error tracker at that site to correct the errors, but it is a slow process. I'll add this correction to my list!


All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey

I Was The Monster They Couldn’t Kill – So I Had To: Jack Cole’s Final Comic Book Story

Story in this post: “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill”
Story and Pencils by Jack Cole, inker unknown
Web of Evil #11 (Feb., 1954 – Quality Comics Publications)

Jack Cole’s dark and disturbing last published comic book story haunts me. I first read it about 6 months ago, and have read it about a dozen times since. I cannot escape the growing sense that Cole was sending out a personal message in this story: a comment on his 16 year career in comic books, and perhaps a bitter statement about the way the industry had changed. I think Cole drew back the curtain and exposed his own inner psyche in this story. Knowing that he would take his own life in despair just a few years later, this story haunts me.

It’s my own theory that Jack Cole wrote at least 8 of the 16 stories he penciled that appeared in Web of Evil #1-11 (I haven’t seen the first story he did, in Web #1). It seems to me that these stories are all better written and revolve around a character’s psychological breakdown instead of an unexplained supernatural event. A more complete explanation of this theory is available in an earlier posting, here.

In “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill,” Cole creates the character of a scientist who has a serious lapse in judgment and makes himself the test subject of an experiment involving atomic energy. Cole begins the story brilliantly AFTER the experiment, our first indication that this is – either deliberately or unconsciously – a story reflecting BACK on his career in comics. It seems certain that Cole created this story knowing full well it would be his last, since it was his decision to go work for Hugh Hefner at PLAYBOY.

Even though he was dismissive of his comic book work, there can be no doubt for anyone that has read Jack Cole’s stories that he poured his heart and soul into these stories, and realized on some level that they represented an enormous effort on his part. This was a guy that clearly LOVED comics. “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill,” then, is a window into Cole’s feelings as he closed this chapter of his life.

The scientist-monster has no voice in this story. Not until the end do we even know for sure that anything of his mind and humanity remain.

Once again, we have Cole’s favorite theme of crazy inventions, which he used over and over in his graphic stories, starting with some of his earliest work on the DICKIE DEAN, BOY INVENTOR stories (1940).

In this story, the focus is not on the invention at all, but the terrible consequence it has had on it’s inventor, and the people around him. We know that Cole himself was an inventor, so if we switch out the scientist with Cole in this scenario, a chilling personal statement about how he may have regarded himself comes into focus.

It’s almost as if Cole is revealing some deep inner part of himself. A grim-faced scientist pulls aside a curtain on page two and we see what this great inventor has become: a giant idiot, barely recognizable as a human. He wears goggles with slits in them, presumably eye protection from when he irradiated himself.

The goggles and his deformed face and body give him a preternatural look, like something out of a Goya painting. I was struck by the similarity between the post-atomic Dr. Fry and Jack Kirby’s Mole Man villain from his FANTASTIC FOUR stories (which was derived from his 1950’s monster stories):

Cole was a tall man, with thin fingers, and it seems to me he put something of himself into both Plastic Man and Dr. Fry.

The psychological overtones are rampant in this story. I also wonder if Cole was thinking about the comic industry, which had grown so rapidly and which had seemingly morphed into a world where he was no longer welcome. The industry had grown at a maniac pace. It’s no subtle clue that Cole names the super-computer in the story “Maniac.”

Dr. Fry is a sort of post-atomic age version of Plastic Man, in that his body is deformed by a brand new technology. Going all the way back to Jack Cole’s first adventure story, Little Dynamite, so many of Jack Cole’s stories are about the power – and chaos - that is unleashed when the human body is stretched, deformed, pulled, stunted, or gigantized.

Like Plastic Man, Dr. Fry is a hero, but for different reasons. Dr. Fry’s growth is out of control. Maniac informs us that he will eventually be larger than the earth. In short order, he’s too large for humans to control. He bursts out of a railroad freight car as if it were made of tissue paper. He tears a building down as if it were made of Legos.

But none of this destruction is mindless, as it turns out. Dr. Fry is well aware that he has become the monster they can’t kill… therefore the only solution left in this desperate situation is… suicide. In the last panel of the last story Jack Cole published, the “monster” is praised for taking his own life and sparing those around him. Suicide as heroism.

Jack Cole took his own life on August 13, 1958, just about four years after he wrote and drew “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill.”  He wrote two suicide notes, bought a hand gun, and drove to a road outside of town and shot himself in the head. Sadly, two children on bikes found him, still alive. He died later that day in a hospital.

It has never been clear why this enormously talented and powerful creator ended his life so early, in the prime of his life. His last comic book story, perhaps, holds a clue.

Copyright 2009, Paul C. Tumey

Orgy of Death – A Feverish Golden Age Comic Book Nightmare about Pagan Rituals, Human Sacrifice, and a Lost City!

Story in this post: ”Orgy of Death”
Story and pencils by Jack Cole , Inker unknown
Web of Evil #6 (Quality – Sept. 1953)





Starting with one of the penultimate titles for Jack Cole, “Orgy of Death” merges two of his obsessive themes. From stories like the Death Patrol series to his work in Playboy, Cole’s work has much to say on the subject of sex and death.

This story, despite it’s promising title, is mostly about obsession itself. This story falls cleanly into the Psychological Breakdowns category of Cole’s Web of Evil stories (for more on this, see my earlier posting here).

The story is colorfully set in a forgotten city, sort of like Shangri-La, or Carl Barks’ Tra-la-la. However, instead of a hidden utopia, we have a barbaric society from the past fixated on human sacrifice.

As the story rolls on, we learn the kindly uncle has schemed all along to throw his niece and the pilot at the blood-thirsty Pagans while he steals their gold. The obsessed archeologist Uncle reminds me very much of the corrupted French tomb raider in the first Indiana Jones movie, in that his passion has overcome his judgment and ultimately, his humanity.

The story ends with a great panel of an erupting volcano, a story element one often finds in Cole’s stories.

The art is very clean, and I suspect Cole must have done very detailed pencils for this one, although the inked finishes were done by someone else, perhaps Alex Kotzky, but my guess is someone else less talented.

The images of the giant fiery statue of Moloch resonate with Cole's CLAW stories from over a decade earlier.
All in all, a very satisfying story.

This concludes our brief look at Cole’s strange, dark last comic book stories for the Web of Evil series. Up next: one of Cole’s earliest adventure stories featuring a tight script and a dense, woodcut style of art that he may have only used once.

Machines of Death and Betrayal: A Nightmarish Comic Book World of Lies and No Redemption

Story presented this post:
The Man Who Died Twice
Story and pencils by Jack Cole
Inker unknown
Web of Evil #5 (July, 1953 – Quality Comics)

Note: For more on Jack Cole’s Web of Evil stories, his dark and strange last comic book stories, see my previous posting here.

This clever and disturbing story reads like an inky black film noir story turned inside out.

Or, perhaps more accurately, like a particularly morbid Alfred Hitchcock film. This is a story that David Mamet, the modern-day Hitchcock, could have written and directed. Cole devilishly plays with our expectations. Inserted into a comic book series filled with supernatural horror stories, and appearing on the stands among numerous other comic books that laid out straight horror stories, Cole tricks us into believing that we are reading a supernatural, back-from-the-death horror story.

Starting with Cole’s memorable cover, in which a man grotesquely laughs while strapped into an electric chair, we are both drawn in and duped.

Cole’s story, which as the lead spot in this issue, begins with a ludicrous – but nonetheless compelling -- splash page that in no way reflects the reality of the narrative, as the condemned prisoner, Les Paley, appears to be springing from the electric chair, revitalized by the surges of energy through his body. In the narrative (also false), Paley appears to be executed without incident – certainly there is no bounding up from the chair. Thus, before the plot begins, Cole has primed us for a set of events that actually never transpire. By the time we realize this, he has pulled off the virtuoso feat of delivering something even more engrossing than a man openly defying execution.

Cole’s writing is particularly vivid in this story, as in the narration for the scene of Paley’s execution:

“A human body strains as the lightning of legal vengeance smashes through its tissues.”

Cole is not merely being prosaic; his intensity helps to convince us that an execution is actually happening.

In literature and cinema, we find the concept of the unreliable narrator. That is, the person telling the story is lying, for their own purposes. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film, STAGE FRIGHT (which Cole may well have seen), the story famously begins with a long flashback sequence in which a woman appears to have committed murder, and a man appears to be seduced into covering up the killing to protect her. It is not until the final minutes of the film that we learn the shocking truth that what we thought was the story turns out to be a deception aimed at both characters within the story, and the viewers. Here, in “The Man Who Died Twice,” Jack Cole reaches new heights of sophistication by seamlessly integrating an unreliable narrator into a linear graphic narrative.

It is not until the last two pages of the 9-page story that we learn the execution was staged to fool both the people watching AND the man being executed. Up until this point, the story plays like a supernatural horror story. Part of the genius of this story lies in that Cole’s ability to convince us a man could actually believe he had died and came back to life.

After Paley’s “resurrection,” rays of heavenly light (also present in his trail scene) stream down on him, suggesting both an unearthly presence, and Paley’s own interior state of mind. His head, shorn for the metal helmet of the electric chair, makes him look saintly, as one who has renounced the pleasures of the physical world.

The rays come from the funeral director LeMort’s machine which supposedly brought Paley back from the dead and is keeping him alive. Thus, LeMort assumes godlike proportions, with the power to bestow life and to take it away with the flip of a switch. Of course, the resurrection machine is phoney, one of the rare instances in Jack Cole’s work when a crazy invention is a deception instead of the real thing – a sure sign that Cole was undergoing a personal transition tinged with disillusionment.

But Paley’s spiritual redemption is short-lived. “You… you did this for me?” Paley says to Cora, the woman who professes to love him. After a scant few panels, Cora has convinced Paley he must do as the funeral director, Le Mort (translates as “The Dead”) bids him: murder three people.

As he stumbles out to perform his terrible task, fate intervenes, and Paley runs into the path of a speeding car, which hits him and then speeds away (wheels within wheels: we get a momentary glimpse of the drama of the people in the car as the driver is commanded by a passenger to leave the accident since no one saw… another incident of a person being victimized and torn down by their involvement with someone less moral).

After being hit, in a spectacular panel in which his body is contorted like Plastic Man’s, Paley wonders if he is dead or alive. He rushes to the home of the doctor he was planning to kill minutes earlier, but now to ask for help. In an instant, the situation has changed, and just as quickly, it evolves again into something else when the doctor cowers at the sight of Paley and confesses his involvement in faking Paley’s death. The story is staggering and whirling like Paley’s body when it was grazed by the hit-and-run driver. It is a tribute to Cole’s mastery as a graphic storyteller that we are never lost in this convoluted narrative.

Now Paley knows the truth: he is alive, and his beloved Cora is only using him. Driven by cold rage, he exacts his revenge despite being shot nine times by LeMort.

The story, which began as a horror story, seemingly ends as one when the authorities in the last panel are stunned to realize that somehow Paley managed to kill Cora and Le Mort 24 hours after he was executed. While some of the characters in the story continue to be fooled by the brilliant deception, we the reader have come through the mirror, and know the truth. This is a story on a spit; it turns and turns on itself until finally the depths the characters sink to are far more disturbing than hoary supernatural phenomena.

Cole did not call this “The Man Who Came Back From The Dead.” Even though we were fooled, Cole gave us the ending from the start with the fatalistic noir title: “The Man Who Died Twice.” The title works on several levels, since Paley loses all faith and hope when he learns of his betrayal by the woman he loves and his spirit does truly die.

Was this a prefiguring of events that were, or would transpire in Cole’s life? It has been speculated, but never established, that infidelity may have been part of Cole’s reason for taking his own life. © 2009 Paul Tumey

Happy All Hallows Eve – The Strange Dark Last Comic Book Stories of Jack Cole – Web of Evil 6 (1953)

The last comic book stories of Jack Cole are not what you’d expect. They are not fun; they are dark and disturbing.

They are an aborted new direction, truncated before it was barely begun. They are the end of a brilliant career. They are the last graphic stories by a master of the form who moved into new art forms and never looked back. These stories are deeply flawed, mostly failed efforts, and represent the mind of a great artist cracking. They are burn out, brilliance, and a bizarre foreshadowing of death.

After PLASTIC MAN ended, Cole created a comical private detective and a rich William Saroyan-like cast of characters. He called the series ANGLES O’DAY (you can read the stories and my essay on them here) and it appeared in the pages of Ken Shannon 1-8, an otherwise bland private eye comic published by his primary employer, Quality Comics. The ANGLES stories represent Jack Coles last lighthearted humor stories.

The very last ANGLES O’DAY story dropped most of the comedy and instead shifted into a grim, horrific world in which frightening supernatural events were the order of the day. Cole’s art even changed. His line became heavier, his panels were filled with menacing shadows.

In November, 1952 Quality stepped into the horror comic market with a new book: Web of Evil. It was clearly designed to be a new home for the work of Jack Cole, their premier talent who found himself adrift when his main superhero series had lost traction and faded away.

It seems a safe guess that Cole himself had a hand in the book’s creation and choice of his own direction. It strikes me as a little odd that he would swing so fully into the horror market, since the best selling comics of the period were romance and girlie comics (such as Quality’s TORCHY). Cole could draw sexy women so well that he would soon create the quintessential Playboy magazine cartoons. His stories through the 1940’s were populated with alluring examples of womanhood. Perhaps Cole could not stomach the inane conventions of the romance, girlie comic genre. Perhaps his stuff was too adult for the intended market. Or, perhaps Cole , who had a flowering career as a magazine cartoonist in men’s magazines, simply wanted to try a new direction and see what he could do with it.

Cole stayed on the title for about a year and half, until issue 11. He had the lead story spot in issues 1-9 and 11 (issue 10 had no Cole stories). He drew most of the covers, and many issues of Web of Evil contained two Jack Cole stories.

To say the Web of Evil stories are “Jack Cole stories,” may be a bit misleading. While it’s clear that Cole penciled all of these stories, his writing and inking contributions are harder to determine. In Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, Art Spiegleman writes: “… these horror comics, often scripted and barbarically inked by others look as if they were done for the money.” Cole’s other two biographers to date, Jim Steranko and Ron Goulart, offer no commentary at all on Cole’s last stories.

With the greatest of respect for Art Spiegelman, I see a lot of effort put into Jack Cole’s last comic book stories. These stories contain some of the most visually complex panels and images Cole ever created. His signature figure distortion has been re-purposed from comedy to creepiness, but it is just as brilliant.

The stories are all unsigned and uncredited. As far as anyone has been able to determine, no records of who worked on this title exist. It seems a safe bet to assume that in some cases the stories were inked by Cole’s protégé Alex Kotzky. A few years earlier, in 1947, Cole and Kotzky created the intense two issues of TRUE CRIME, and some of the art in the Web of Evil stories looks very similar to this work, reaching similar levels of atomic-powered intensity.

While I am unsure of which stories, if any Cole inked, I feel fairly certain about which stories Cole wrote. Cole’s 16 Web of Evil stories fall into two types: Unexplained Supernatural Events and Psychological Breakdowns. It seems pretty obvious to me that Cole wrote the stories that fall into the latter category.

In the Unexplained Supernatural Events, characters come against bizarre circumstances, such as severed hands that still seem alive, or magic spells that somehow reanimate the dead . The characters inevitably fall victim to these terrifying phenomena, but no explanation is ever provided for the existence of these mysterious situations. They simply happen. These scripts are sloppy and tedious, and often even Cole’s extraordinary drawings cannot make them more than barely entertaining.

In the second category of stories, which I think Cole wrote, and which I call Psychological Breakdowns are better written and have clever, surprising plot twists.

These stories include:

The Killer From Saturn (Web of Evil #3)
The Man Who Died Twice (Web of Evil #5)
Orgy of Death (Web of Evil #6)
The Spectre’s Face (Web of Evil #6)
Death Prowls the Streets (Web of Evil #8)
A Pact With The Devil (Web of Evil #9)
The Monster They Couldn’t Kill (Web of Evil #11)

In these stories the resulting horrific events are always shown to be result of a character’s mental breakdown. For example, in “The Killer From Saturn,” (which Art Spiegleman asserts is purely Cole’s work), it appears that a wildly frightening alien from outer space has landed in an American city and is murdering its inhabitants without cause or discernable reason. In the end, we learn the monster is actually a slight, timid man who has gone mad, dressing up in a monster costume and killing in a twisted form of revenge and ego gone wild.

Further evidence that Jack Cole wrote these lies in the fact that the stories all play with the theme, coming at from different angles, which is very typical of Cole’s restless, inventive mind. In the story below, from Web of Evil #6 (Sept. 1953), a contract killer appears to have stepped into the Twilight Zone:

Cole’s stories pulled the title out of a standard horror realm, and stretched the series into crime and science fiction as well. Instead of a horror story, Cole would write a crime story as if it were a horror story, playing with reader expectations.

These stories of people cracking under stress poignantly foreshadow the remainder of Jack Cole’s life. After completing these stories, Cole not only left a dying industry for good, but also referred to his brilliant and accomplished career in demeaning terms. There can be no doubt there were hard feelings for Cole under the surface. In one story, which may or no be true, Cole is said to have taken his portfolio to DC (National) and was rejected.

It may be that Cole was burned out in comics. He wouldn’t have been the first. Another Quality comics staffer killed his own wife and went to prison. Quality Comics artist and editor Gill Fox said later that the grind of the 1940’s in comics got to many people. It’s rarely acknowledged that these “funnybooks” of the forties about colorful heroes, goofy characters, and sexy girls were created by people working long, grueling hours in a seemingly never-ending cycle to support their families.

Four years after he left comics, Cole took his own life in a fit of despair. His last stories, filled with darkness, images of suffering, and turning on mental breakdowns can be understood in the shadows of this disturbing event. As readers familiar with Cole’s work know, there were traces of darkness all along. In “The Eyes Have It” (Police Comics #22, Sept. 1943), Cole deals with child abuse and exacts retribution on the abuser by severing his head from his body with a bear trap. Many of his “funny” stories throughout the 1940’s involve the characters attempting or actually committing suicide.

It is often said that comedians are the most depressed people. Perhaps it is the ability to see the truth and use this perception to create laughter that also burdens them with melancholy. It seems that in his last comic book stories, Jack Cole, one of comic’s true masters of comedy was trying to come to grips, through his art, with his darker side.

Next post, we’ll look at another Cole-scripted Web of Evil story, one which bears all the hallmarks of his obsessions!