MIDNIGHT RETURNS! Atomic Dice and Exquisite Layouts – Episode 1 (second run)

 Story This Post:
Midnight - “Atomic Dice”
Story and art by Jack Cole
Smash Comics #68
Dec., 1946

 

Before he invented PLASTIC MAN, Jack Cole created and lavished attention on MIDNIGHT, his first feature series for Quality comics. When the rubbery madness of PLASTIC MAN’s world caught on, Cole left MIDNIGHT to devote most of his energy to his breakout creation, which was granted an unusually generous 15 pages per story in POLICE COMICS.

After a four-year stretch (if you’ll pardon the pun), Jack Cole returned to MIDNIGHT for a glorious run of 19 stories that have been unseen and uncommented upon for over 60 years. I’m pleased to excavate these from the Cole-mine for you over the next few months. (If you’d like to read the earlier MIDNIGHT stories, look here.)

Many of Jack Cole’s second-run MIDNIGHT stories feature eye-popping art and design, convoluted stories, and regular touches of brilliance.

In terms of character, not much changed in the four years that PAUL GUSTAVSON owned the series. GUSTAVSON added a new character, the Woozy-Winks-like Sniffer Snoop, which Cole embraced and wrote as if he were Woozy Winks.

Cole returned triumphantly to his series with, “Atomic Dice,” a three-ring circus of a story – there seems to be more than one thing happening in almost every panel. In the four years he had been away from MIDNIGHT, Cole had matured into a master graphic storyteller. Many of the innovations he piloted in the early MIDNIGHT stories return here with polished flourishes, like the act of a seasoned magician.

For example, just look at the splash page and study how Cole positions groups of figures in the background and foreground in a strong diagonal to emphasize the movement. And, for the flourish, just look at the graceful, swirling, speed lines of the dangerous dice…

For this story, Cole returned to his tried and true formula of crazy inventions. But, this time, there are no rays that melt the ground, or freeze people into flavorful popsicles. There’s not even a vacuum gun. The invention this time reflected reality, perhaps indicating the more serious turn Cole – and the country – would take at the end of of the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Just as PLASTIC MAN was a covert satire of American life, this MIDNIGHT story reflects the onset of the Atomic Age in the “real” world. About a year earlier, the United States had unleashed atomic explosives on two cities in Japan, ending World War II.

Three years earlier, in 1943, Cole used dice as a design element in the splash of his lead story in PLASTIC MAN #1.

Cole’s art on this story is amazing. Consider this panel from page four, which already has a stunning layout without this elaborately-rendered house:

There’s the graceful plume of smoke again, by the way. But what really excites me about panels like this is how Cole breaks up time and space. Cole has shifted the camera angle to allow us to see one man entering while another is leaving, throwing the plot into high gear.

There are wonderful touches in the art throughout, such as the way Cole indicates the buildings with a field of white defined by a dark sky and shadows on the windows.

By the way, there’s 7 characters in this panel, each with distinctive body language. In fact, this is a classic Jack Cole panel, with speed, comically distorted bodies (as though the scene had been filmed with a high-speed camera and then freeze-framed for this one panel), graphic brilliance, and great dialogue, expertly lettered.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that if you have a gun on the mantelpiece in act 1, it must be fired before the play ends. Thus, being a master storyteller, Cole knew that if he introduced a devastating explosive device on page 1, he would have to have a massive explosion on the last page. Here’s the explosion, with the surrounding art removed.

 

Cole literally splits the page in half with one of his biggest sound effects ever (note the patented Jack Cole pointed exclamation mark). Even the letters in KABOOM! are cracking from the force! The explosion rocks the panel and throws the characters to the ground. Cole draws them as anonymous shadows… did he have Hiroshima and Nagasaki on his mind?

The wiggly panel borders were another Cole invention, used most famously in the needle-in-the-eye panel from “Murder, Morphine, and Me” (True Crime Comics Vol.1 #2, May 1947).

The Pirate Prince – Cole’s first sexual politics story, and his 24-hour comic?

In January, 1940 Silver Streak Comics #7 hit the stands and featured a whopping 38 pages of story and art by Jack Cole. For good measure, Cole also did the cover for this issue, one of the great iconic covers of the early Golden Age of comics.

Buried among the famous Claw, Daredevil, and Silver Streak stories was a little treasure – a  battle-of-the-sexes story disguised as a pirate yarn. Due to the large amount of pages that Cole created in this issue (which he also edited, by the way… which suggests why Cole was never an editor at Quality – because he probably would have written and drawn most of the books he edited!), the story is clearly tossed off, possibly in a single day.

If so, this would make The Pirate Prince perhaps Cole’s only 24-hour comic book story. Like 24-hour comics, this story (even sloppily signed by Cole in a signature that looks very similar to the signature he would use almost 15 years later in his Playboy cartoons)  is loose, revealing, and has an immediacy in both the art and storytelling.

 

 

Given how largely women would figure in Cole’s later work, this story is significant in that Cole has clearly tossed aside the tropes of pirate stories to unreel his own battle-of-the-sexes.

True to form, even in this rush job, Cole packs in a wealth if ideas, including the wonderful concept of a pirate that preys on pirates, setting free slaves…. Robin Hood on the seas.

Cole was fond of creating new series that he then left to others (Daredevil, Silver Streak, The Barker, Death Patrol, Midnight, etc.).  He only made one episode of The Pirate Prince before turning it over to  another great writer-artist, Dick Briefer, who would continue the series for several years.

Here’s Briefer’s first entry in the series, which appeared in Silver Streak #8:

 

Note Briefer has seized on Cole’s “good pirate” concept and totally abandoned the sexual tension Cole set up. The stories didn’t amount to much, but they were entertaining for the liveliness of Briefer’s line and compositions. Here’s one from a few issues later, in Silver Streak #12:

 

Briefer’s art soon coalesced into a wonderful, tight cartoony style. Check this post at the fun Mippyville blog for a nice later-period Briefer Pirate Prince story.

BURP THE TWERP – Jack Cole’s Other Comic Book Superhero Satire – The first 20 episodes

Sometime in 1941, Jack Cole had the brilliant and visionary idea to make fun of comic book superheroes, a genre not even 5 years old at the time.

All at once, three mind-blowing series exploring this idea of this idea sprang from Cole’s mind into existence, beginning an arc of invention that would peak about 10 years later with Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD parodies. The three series were PLASTIC MAN, DEATH PATROL, and the almost unknown BURP THE TWERP.

Here’s the amazing first appearance of BURP THE TWERP:

Episode 1 - Police Comics #2 (Sept. 1941)

 

There’s more entertainment in this single page than in most of the 5-7 page Quality filler stories. I count no less than 13 jokes in this one page alone. As if the creation of a new anti-hero and a bushel of jokes wasn’t enough, Cole also throws in one of his many self-portraits – this time as “Ralph Johns,” a pen name he frequently used for his one-page stories. (Cole’s middle name was Ralph, and Jack is a version of the name “John”)

As a kind of carry-over from the earliest comic books, which were collections of 1- and 2-page shorts, Quality’s comics usually included a couple of one pagers. During the 1940’s Cole wrote and drew hundreds of these (see my earlier postings on WINDY BREEZE).

Except for a handful of episodes, Burp’s one-page stories all appeared in the back pages of Police Comics. He functioned as a kind of counter-weight to the PLASTIC MAN stories that appeared in the front of the book.

While Plastic Man could shape his body into any object or person, Burp had an infinite number of wacky super-powers. Sporting the same red/black/yellow costume colors as Plastic Man, Burp’s physique was anything but heroic: bulging stomach, spindly legs, gray mustache, and bald head.

At a time when the comic book superhero was almost a religious icon, Cole’s parody was outrageous.

Cole filled the early E.C.Segar inspired BURP pages with loose, crazy drawings, wild puns, surreal/stream-of-consciousness gags (another connection to MAD and Will Elder), and satirical wackiness surpassed only by his PLASTIC MAN stories.

From September, 1941 to April, 1949 Cole published a total of 59 one-page BURP THE TWERP episodes. Each one was touched with brilliance. Here’s a run-down of the BURP pages:

September, 1941 – July, 1946: 
Police Comics #2-55 (Episodes 1-54)

Winter, 1946:
The Barker #2 (Episode 55)

Winter, 1946:
Blackhawk #13 (Episode 56)

Autumn 1947:
Blackhawk #16 (Episode 57)

April, 1948:
National Comics #65 (Episode 58)

April, 1949:
Blackhawk #24 (Episode 59)

June, 1949:
Blackhawk #25 (reprint of episode 55 from The Barker #2)

The last 3 BURP episodes were re-published earlier in this blog here, to celebrate the publication of THE TOON TREASURY a massive, hallucinogenic tome of comic book work, compiled and beautifully shaped by Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly, which reprints 3 BURP pages.

Here are the rest of the first 20 episodes of BURP THE TWERP, with occasional notes.

Episode 2 - Police Comics #3 (Oct. 1941)

It was (and is) common practice to draw the title art of a series once and then paste in photostats of it in each new story. Cole drew the titles of this and all his other stories fresh and different every time!

Episode 3 - Police Comics #4 (Nov. 1941)

First known “photograph” of an instinct! To my eye, it resembles E.C. Segar’s Jeep, from POPEYE. How interesting that Cole said “photograph,” and not “drawing.” In his mind, these were little films more than static drawings…

 

Episode 4 - Police Comics #5 (Dec. 1941)

Comedic prizefighting, another Segar/POPEYE staple.

 

Episode 5 - Police Comics #6 (Jan. 1942)

Cole echoes American tall tales such as Paul Bunyan here.

 

Episode 6 - Police Comics #7 (Feb. 1942)

The ridiculous fight between two super strong men… yet another common set up from Segar’s POPEYE.

 

Episode 7 - Police Comics #8 (March, 1942)

Jack Cole presents a lexicon of men/women relationships here. The short man’s name, “Digest,” cracked me up.

 

Episode 8 - Police Comics #9 (April, 1942)

When he flies, Superman kind of dive swims through the air in graceful arcs. Burp flies by way of an ungainly propeller that comes out of his head.

 

Episode 9 - Police Comics #10 (May, 1942)

 

Episode 10 - Police Comics #11 (June, 1942)

Gruesome comedy. Think I’ll eat vegan today.

 

Episode 11 - Police Comics #12 (July, 1942)

None of Cole’s characters fought in WWII, which Cole also sat out. In the early 1950’s, in one of his last stories, Cole brought Plastic Man and Woozy to the Korean War.

 

Episode 12 - Police Comics #13 (August, 1942)

Cole’s depiction of people from Japan in his comics was virulently racist and, sadly, typical. This time, Burp’s propeller comes out of his butt,which also has a target painted on it.

 

Episode 13 - Police Comics #14 (Sept, 1942)

The character in panel 7 looks a lot like one of the characters in Harvey Kurtzman’s HEY LOOK 1-pagers. Was Kurtzman influenced by Cole’s BURP pages?

 

Episode 14 - Police Comics #15 (Oct, 1942)

Five-letter word for Jack Cole: genius.

 

Episode 15 - Police Comics #16 (Nov, 1942)

In BURP’s world, realty twists itself to conform to puns. Burp is also, in a way, Cole’s ultimate creator of crazy inventions, although they seem to be less inventions and more organic extensions of himself (such as super ear wax!).

 

Episode 16 - Police Comics #17 (Dec, 1942)

Bizarre and unsuccessful. Also, have you noticed how loose the drawing has become? COLE’s PLASTIC MAN had become a huge success by time, and must have been making larger and larger demands on his time.

 

Episode 17 - Police Comics #18 (Jan, 1943)

Cole re-shapes his character… literally! A terrifically inventive way to draw a gag out of a change in direction.

 

Episode 18 - Police Comics #19 (Feb, 1943)

Cole loved volcanoes. See Coleism #3 in my article on some of Cole’s recurring story devices here.

 

Episode 19 - Police Comics #20 (March, 1943)

Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite; Burp the Twerp is vulnerable to… tickling! A throwback to the earlier character design… probably published out of sequence.

Episode 20 - Police Comics #21 (April, 1943)

Cole draws FDR and Churchill. For some reason, they are at the North Pole. Cole appears to have been anti-war, and this strip certainly shows the absurdity of war in no uncertain terms. See also his anti-war story, “A Machine to End War,” (Dickie Dean in Silver Streak #4, May 1940)

Want more? Leave a comment or drop me a line if you’d like me to share the remaining 39 Burp the Twerp episodes!

Text copyright 2010 Paul Tumey