LITTLE DYNAMITE – Jack Cole’s First Heroic Adventure Comic Book Story (1939)

Story this post: “Little Dynamite”
Story, art, and lettering by Jack Cole
Fantoman #2 (August, 1940 – Centaur)

First off, a heartfelt thank you to all those great folks who have scanned their precious delicate paper copies of these rare comic books and shared them with the rest of the world. Without your efforts, this blog would not be possible!
Speaking of scanners, one of the more entertaining comic book scan blogs I’ve run across is The Panelogical Pantheon, hosted by Mr. Mason Moray, who has just recovered from the gout. This blog has to be seen to be believed! 

Apparently, Mr. Moray, an older mid-west insurance man, owns a utility shed in his back yard stuffed with valuable old Golden Age comic books. This blog is so bizarre that it’s entertaining, in part because Mr. Moray’s taste is – to put it politely – different than the mainstream.

Being an older comics fan, Mr. Moray has some firsthand knowledge of some of the great comics masters. He’s published published an rather strange early interview with Will Eisner here… which, as far as I can tell, is mostly about Eisner’s minor character, YARKO THE GREAT. That’s a little like interviewing Einstein and only discussing his hairstyle!
The blog’s real meat, though, is in reading the rich details of Mr. Moray’s life. He seems to be oblivious of how absurdly comical many of the events of his life are… but then, perhaps the same can be said for myself and many of my fellow “panelologists!”

Jack Cole’s first published adventure story was “Little Dynamite,” published in Keen Detective Funnies #6 (Feb. 1939). The story represents a major change in direction for Cole, and also prefigures PLATIC MAN and Cole’s obsession with shape-shifting.

At the time, Cole was working in the Harry “A” Chesler studio, alongside other fledgling graphic storytellers that would also have successful careers in comic books, including Fred Guardineer, Paul Gustavson, Charles Biro, and Gill Fox, to name just a few. While the first comic books were reprints of newspaper strips, Chelser was the first, I think, to reprint comic book stories. It was a good business practice, and he reprinted a lot of Cole’s first stories – an indication of how they stood from the pack, even then.
“Little Dynamite” was reprinted about a year later, in another Chesler publication, Fantoman #2 (August, 1940). It may have been recolored, but otherwise I can detect no changes from the black and white version available in Ron Goulart’s book, Focus on Jack Cole. The lavishly colored pages below are from that reprinting:

This was the longest sustained story, and the first adventure story Cole published (unless you count his 1935 Boy’s Life article about his amazing cross-country solo bicycle trip, which was mostly text).

Prior to LITTLE DYNAMITE, Cole had created a series of short comic fillers, such as KING COLE’S KOURT and INSURANCE IKE. After a year or so at Chesler’s studio, Cole thought he had found his big break. A well-heeled entrepreneur hired him to contribute a feature, PEEWEE THROTTLE In FUZZYLAND to Circus The Comic Riot (Globe Syndicate). (If anyone has a scan of these stories, please share!)

Cole wrote home to his parents in New Castle, Pennsylvania that he had made it, and graciously thanked everyone that helped him. Other top talent had been hired to the project as well, including Basil Wolverton and Will Eisner. The book consisted of original short 1-4 page humor pieces. I found an informative article about Circus here.

Unfortunately, Circus bottomed out, only lasting three issues (June-August, 1938), and Cole was back at Chesler’s for a while.

By this time, Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster’s SUPERMAN and Bob Kane’s BATMAN (Kane also had stories in the failed Circus) had begin to take off and comic books were increasingly populated less by comic fillers and more by longer adventure stories featuring costumed crimefighters. If an artist could turn in a 5-10 page adventure story, he could make a great deal more income than possible with the short 1-2 page humorous gag pages.

So it was to Cole’s economic advantage to learn to create adventure strips. LITTLE DYNAMITE was the first effort of a creator who master and innovate the medium of graphic storytelling.

As crude as the story is, it is obvious that Cole dug down deep for this one. He has put so much effort into the artwork that it has a beautiful decorative woodcut quality. Never again would Cole fill his panels with quite so much darkness and shadow.

Jack Cole is already acquiring the rich and unique vernacular of telling a dramatic story in a comic book and making it his own. He jags the edges of the speech balloon in panel two on the first page of the story, indicating the words are said not only loudly, but emphatically. He mixes narration and dialogue to move the story forward.

Also of interest is the way Cole employs extreme points of view, placing the “camera” on the floor, or high up in air at times, to heighten the drama of the story.

Most impressive though, is the story itself. The man who published more of Cole’s stories than anyone else, Everett “Busy” Arnold (Quality) said that Cole was the rare comic book artist who could also write a good story.

In LITTLE DYNAMITE, Cole as a writer really explodes on the scene. The story is a genre story, slotting perfectly into the  crime drama format that flooded the pulpy pages of popular magazines and the roaring airwaves of radio.

The title alone,”Little Dynamite,” is poetic. The “mite” part of the word “dynamite” resonates with “little.”
The story, about a diminutive policeman who uses his size as an advantage against hardened criminals, prefigures Cole’s most famous creation, PLASTIC MAN.

It is to career criminal Eel O’Brian’s everlasting credit that, upon discovering he has the ability to stretch his body at will, he imagines what a force it would be in fighting crime and redeeming himself. In this famous story, the origin story of PLASTIC MAN, Cole again has a character using a deformity as an advantage.

Cole returned to deformity, or shape-shifting, over and over throughout his 16 year career in comics. His very last published comic book story, “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill” (Web of Evil #11, Feb. 1954) deals with deforming the human body. In his PLASTIC MAN stories, evil men often become powerful through deformity. And, of course, Plastic Man himself is all about changing shape and identity.

The story also speaks to the idealism and nobility of purpose that Jack Cole embraced in his early life. Far from being cardboard characters, the policemen in this story are highly motivated by a sense of good, which shows in how they treat each other with decency and support, and in the brave act of heroism the diminutive policeman demonstrates when he goes against the car-stealing gang.

Next posting, we’ll look at Jack Cole’s last published comic book story, mentioned above, to see if there are some insights about the arc of his career and personal development.

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