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The Mystique
and Mysteries of Jack Cole No mystery about Jack Cole’s cartooning
genius. He was, without question or quibble, a virtuoso at the craft,
absolute master of the art. Cole wrote and drew his own material–pencilled,
scripted, and inked all of it, most of the time. He is then, the very
emblem of cartooning. And in his most remembered creation, Plastic Man,
we find, as Art Spiegelman put it in his New Yorker article (April
19, 1999)–an article of superlative insight and understanding–“the embodiment
of the comic book form: its exuberant energy, its flexibility, its
boyishness, and its only partially subliminated
sexuality.” Plastic Man was clearly a unique achievement as well as
a superior one.
One of the mysteries about Jack Cole is: How did he do it? What
are the ingredients that make his elastic superhero so remarkable? Can
we find the whole in the sum of its parts? Or is it the combination
of those ingredients that makes Plastic Man soar in our imaginations
while tickling our risibilities? And these
questions inevitably rear up every time that DC Comics brings forth
yet another of its many tries at reincarnating Cole’s masterwork.
The most recent of these, released in June 1999, is an unmitigated
travesty. To begin with, the drawing style adopted for Plastic Man
Special No. 1 is realistic, not bigfoot
cartoony, the style Cole deployed in the canonical Plastic
Man. The powers at DC make this mistake often. In reviving a vintage
funnybook hero from the Golden Age, they immediately discard
one of the most distinctive aspects of the character–its appearance.
Mistake. The same mistake is usually committed with Fawcett’s
Captain Marvel. The powers clearly believe that today’s comic book reader
will not accept superheroicism in any visual
mode but the realistic. Given the runaway success of the DC books rendered
in the simplified “Batman animation style,” it’s difficult to understand
the persistence of the obviously wrongheaded notion that superheroes
must be drawn in an illustrative manner.
The next problem with Plastic Man Special is that Ty
Templeton’s three stories are just silly. Not funny. Silly.
The villains are goofy without being at all amusing. And the clash of
the realistic drawings with the unrelenting goofiness of the villainy
strains at both ends of the credibility equation: looking like they
do, how can they be so slapstick? Slapstick as they are,
how can they look so real? One of the secrets in Cole’s successful formula
is that his bigfoot style is perfectly suited
to the manic humor of the action.
DC’s earlier attempts at reviving Cole’s elastic champion were
somewhat more acceptable. In the first, in 1966, the drawing was not
quite bigfoot, but it was close; it certainly
wasn’t realistic. But the stories lacked the Cole comic touch–sight
gags. The next attempt, which was launched ten years later, was an improvement
in the visuals at least. Ramona Fradon captured
exactly the look of Plastic Man. Still, it wasn’t
Jack Cole: not much in the way of visual comedy. These two revivals
of Plas, except for Fradon’s evocative
art in the second reincarnation, were calamities. No mystery about the
cause of these failures. Jack Cole is dead. But there wasn’t even a
discernible gesture at imitating his storytelling technique. At
the heart of which, as I’ve strenuously intimated, was the humble sight
gag. The incidental funny picture. A
little bit of visual hilarity tucked into this panel and that. As Ron
Goulart once observed (in Fantagraphics’
Focus Book, Jack Cole), “Cole’s forte lay in his ability to create
a sight gag in virtually every panel without disrupting the telling
of the story.”
And Plas’s modus operandi was
built on the same kind of visual imagination that foments sight gags.
Plas often caught up with the baddies by disguising
himself, molding his body into another shape. Sometimes he impersonated
a human being, reshaping his visage to resemble that person. But frequently,
he took the shape of a piece of furniture or an
conveniently positioned object d’art. The fun was in discovering which
piece of red furniture in the bad guy’s hideout had black-and-yellow
stripes with a yellow diamond–a tell-tale design that duplicated the
belt on Plas’s costume.
The most recent of the previous attempts at bringing back Plastic
Man was a four-issue mini-series in 1988. Plotted by Phil Foglio
and Hilary Barta with an assist from Kevin
Nowlan and then scripted by Foglio
and drawn by Barta (with inks by John Nyberg),
it was the most successful in capturing the Cole spirit. Barta’s
drawings are a joy. And he sprinkles sight gags profusely across every
page. Foglio’s breakdowns (or Barta’s?)
time the comedy for best effect (something too few writers seem capable
of–but Foglio is also a cartoonist), and the plots themselves are
quite acceptable, the villains goofy and goofily rendered. But Barta’s Plastic Man is constantly mugging, reacting to every
event like a fugitive from Tex Avery’s funny farm–jaw dropping, eyeballs
bulging, and so on. A minuscule quibble, I admit. But Fradon
did it better: she knew Cole’s Plastic Man seldom registered any emotion
but concern and dedication. He was perfectly straight-faced as the hero
of his adventures. He was just about the only straight-faced character
around, in fact.
Everyone says Plastic Man was wacky. And that was the secret
to Cole’s success. But Cole’s Plastic Man wasn’t just wacky. In fact,
he wasn’t wacky at all. Not ever. Not even in the dim recesses of his
beginnings in Police Comics No. 1 (August 1941). And the proof
is in DC’s Archive Plastic Man. DC’s Archive Edition volumes
are extremely valuable historical documents. For the price. The actual comic books are even more valuable,
but who can afford (in the case of the first Plastic Man volume) all
the first twenty issues of Police Comics? The Archives project
is clearly a gift from DC to the humble comics
historian.
Their historical value is wholly evidentiary. In these books,
we have actual evidence on the premises. We can therefore witness in
person the histories of certain comic book features as they unfold before
us in the Archives. We can watch the development of these features for
ourselves, not having to rely on the testimony of others, who, wealthier
than we, own the actual comic books whose content is reproduced in this
series. Without the Archives books, the more
impoverished of us musty scholars would have no access to the evidence
we need to construct accurate history. Sure, we can rely upon the testimony
of others, but who knows what their biases are? Or how well or badly
they perceive the evidence? It’s better to see it for ourselves. And
the Archives permit this personal engagement.
In the tome at hand, we can see, for instance, that the evidence
contradicts most of the popular belief about Plastic Man. Cole’s Plastic
Man is actually quite sane–very nearly the only sane person in a wacky
world, as I said earlier. The stories, though–they’re zany. But that’s
because most of the other characters are off-the-wall nutso.
But the zaniness wasn’t there at the beginning. And that’s what the
evidence now conveniently at hand demonstrates beyond question. The
earliest Plastic Man stories were decidedly not exercises in screwball
bigfoot comedy.
With the evidence in front of us, we can see that for at least
the first four stories, Cole was telling superhero adventures more-or-less
seriously. Some of the characters are a little extreme, but the panels
are not festooned with Cole’s telltale sight gags. And the villains,
although exaggerated personalities, are not outright bigfoot
looney as they eventually became. In fact, it isn’t until
Police Comics No. 10, the tenth Plastic Man story, that we find
anything approaching the high-flying comedy that Cole is now remembered
for. The earlier issues, to be sure, are somewhat humorous, but the
humor arises from characters’ reactions to a “rubber man” who can change
his facial features to resemble anyone he wishes. This is humor integral
to the plot, not gratuitous comedy for the sheer sake of provoking laughter,
which is what sight gags and comical appearances aim to do.
That being the case, what can we make
of Will Eisner’s Foreword in which he implies that Plastic Man was concocted
as a humorous alternative to the Spirit? Jack Cole had come to see him in mid-1941, Eisner
says, at the behest of Busy Arnold. Arnold was Eisner’s partner in several
comic book properties and in a unique Sunday newspaper supplement, a
mini-comic book for which Eisner had created the Spirit in the spring
of 1940. World War II was sure to beckon Eisner away from the drawingboard
sooner or later, and Arnold wanted to protect his investment in the
Sunday supplement. Since Eisner owned the Spirit and might, if inducted
into military service, discontinue it, leaving Arnold without a lead
feature for the publication, Arnold wanted a back-up feature, something
he owned that he could bring in to take the Spirit’s place. He had,
Eisner tells us, directed Jack Cole to create this simulacrum, and he
had further instructed him to go see Eisner to pick up “some pointers”
about how to do the character.
Cole, however, was an ethical fellow and was loathe to copy Eisner.
Instead of picking Eisner’s brain for “pointers,” he just said he wouldn’t
imitate the Spirit. At dinner that evening, the two of them talked “into
the night,” and eventually Cole came up with Plastic Man, Eisner reports,
“a hilariously funny satirical combination of a superhero and a detective
... a masterpiece of innovation.”
They met often during 1941, Eisner recalls, and “always giggled
at the trick Jack pulled on Busy by producing a weirdly funny Plastic
Man instead of the Eisner-type detective Arnold wanted.”
But, as I said, the evidence contradicts Eisner’s recollection.
Plastic Man wasn’t funny at all at first and didn’t get very funny until
his tenth appearance, which was almost a year after his August 1941
debut. Besides which, Eisner makes no mention of Midnight. A crime-fighter
in a blue suit with a snap-brim hat and a mask, Midnight is clearly
the imitation Spirit which Cole had created for Arnold’s Smash Comics.
And Midnight debuted in No. 18, dated January-February 1941–six
months before the meeting in “mid-1941" that Eisner recounts in
his Foreword. Clearly, Eisner’s memory has gone fishing here–as human
memory is wont to do. None of us can remember many of the details of
our lives in a truly chronological fashion. As I approach my own dotage,
for instance, I often forget even the way to get back home. And Eisner
is a little older than I am. He’s also a little wiser about the waywardness
of memory.
When I spoke with him about Cole and the creation of Midnight
and Plastic Man, Will said: “I learned about memory when I was doing
Heart of the Storm [his autobiographical graphic novel about
anti-Semitic prejudice]. Your life is a seamless thing, and you try
to remember it by recollecting incidents along the way. And sometimes,
those incidents don’t quite fit in.”
I’d become interested in Midnight a couple years ago and started
buying copies of vintage Smash Comics. In them, I could see that
Midnight was at first as straight-faced a crime fighter as the Spirit
was. By July 1942, however, sight gags had begun to slip into the panels
in Smash Comics No. 34. Curiously enough, Smash Comics
No. 34 appeared on the newsstands at the same time as Police Comics
No. 10, which saw the first real demonstration of crackbrained comedy
in Plastic Man.
So now we have a coincidence. And it is too much of a coincidence
to be accidental. Clearly, something happened in Cole’s head in the
winter of 1941-42 that inspired him to invest his creations with a comedic
element that would eventually achieve a manic frenzy of sight gags in
both features. What happened, I finally decided, was that Will Eisner
got drafted.
Eisner got his draft notice in late 1941, probably December.
His draft board told him he would be inducted in May 1942, about six
months hence. He had just launched the daily comic strip version of
the Spirit on October 13. His impending stint with the military therefore
threatened not only the continuation of the Spirit Sunday supplement
but the syndicated strip, too–not to mention several comic book titles
that he and Arnold were partners in. Eisner scrambled in the early months
of 1942 to arrange for the continuation of all these projects. And to
do the Spirit comic strip, he called on Lou Fine–and Jack Cole.
Cole’s tenure on the comic strip began with the strips released
on May 18, 1942, and ended with the August 8 release. Comic strips are
produced 4-6 weeks in advance of their publication dates, so Cole probably
started work on the strip in early- to mid-April. And that was right
about the time that he would have been doing the more humorous Midnight
and Plastic Man stories that would be published in the July issues of
their respective comic books. Comic books, as we all realize, have cover
dates that are a month or more later than their scheduled newsstand
appearances, so presumably, both Smash Comics No. 34 and Police
Comics No. 10 were on the stands in late May. Assuming that the
artwork for comic books in those days had to be completed at least two
months prior to publication, that would have
Cole doing his stories in March, finishing them by the end of the month.
Which was just before he presumably began working on the Spirit comic
strip. But when Cole produced these comic book stories is less the object
of this digression than when he had a meeting with Eisner.
My guess is that sometime between Eisner’s receiving his draft
notice in December and before Cole did the stories for the July issues
of Smash and Police–before mid-March, say–Eisner and Cole
had a meeting to discuss the Spirit and how Cole would continue it while
Eisner was in the military. And I think this was the meeting and the
conversation over dinner that Eisner recalls.
I phoned Will and tested the theory on him. Always a gentleman–ever
candid as well as courteous–he realized at once that his memory was
probably faulty (citing his experience with Heart of the Storm
as an example). And the more we talked, the more it seemed that my timetable
would embrace all the known facts without inherent contradictions.
“I have no way of denying what you just laid out,” Will said.
(On another occasion when confronted by an apparent contradiction in
two versions of history, Will said: “One of the reasons I’ve survived
in this business is that I don’t deny anything–I just smile and nod.”
He smiled and nodded. It’s nice to have a living legend around who is
both canny and gracious.)
“What I remember best about my dinner with Jack Cole,” he continued,
“was that he was very straight and honest and ethical and that he didn’t
want to produce a copy of the Spirit. He felt badly about that.”
I supposed that during the dinner, Cole may have mentioned that
he was more comfortable doing humorous material. Cole may, at that point,
have realized that he could make Midnight different from the Spirit
by infusing it with manic comedy. Eisner may have encouraged him in
this notion (although Will says he doesn’t remember anything along these
lines). In any case, I don’t think there’s any doubt that these two
cartooning geniuses talked about their present work as well as the future
Spirit comic strip assignment. And that means Cole probably talked about
Plastic Man as well as Midnight.
This sequence accommodates the evidence we have. It permits Midnight
and Plastic Man their serious inaugural appearances, and it locates
the Eisner-Cole conversation in a time frame that would explain the
simultaneous shift in both features from serious crime-fighting to crime-fighting
with tongue-in-cheek. And it offers a reason for the meeting: not for
Cole to pick up “some pointers” for Midnight, but for him to get some
pointers about the Spirit comic strip that he and Lou Fine would continue
while Will was away.
Moreover, this sequence explains why Eisner confused the two
humorous Cole creations. Clearly, if Cole was doing both characters
at the time he visited Eisner, their conversation would involve both
of them. And if the solution to Cole’s uneasiness about the Midnight
rip-off was to make Midnight funny and since both Midnight and Plastic
Man subsequently turned out funny and since Cole became famous for Plastic
Man–Eisner’s memory would, quite logically (quite humanly), lump all
these facts together and assert that it was the comical Plastic Man
that emerged from their dinner conversation.
The lesson here, if there is one, is that human memory is more
fallible than we usually suppose. Whatever we remember we should confirm
with actual evidence of the physical sort. Evidence
such as the archival volumes from DC supply. In the Archive
Plastic Man, Volume 1, we have a handsomely bound 224-page book
that includes the first twenty Plastic Man stories, starting with Police
Comics No. 1. In these tales, we find Plas disguising himself more frequently, it seems, than he
did later in his career. He often molds his face to resemble other personages.
And the disguise he most frequently adopts is that of his real self,
the one-time hoodlum named Eel O’Brian. It was as Eel O’Brian that the
character achieved his plasticity: Eel and his gang were robbing a chemical
plant when a vat of acid fell on Eel, and when he wakes up, he finds
that he can stretch himself in any direction and to virtually any length.
He then decides (alas, without much credible motivation) to use this
new power to fight rather than to commit crime. Henceforth, he allies
himself with the city’s police department, and to obtain “inside information”
that helps him bring crooks to justice, Plastic Man poses as his former
self, Eel O’Brian. And Cole deployed this dodge through most of the
first twenty tales.
Story-by-story, we watch Cole’s style evolve from fairly unabashed
straight illustration of the sort he employed when doing Silver Streak
and the Claw and Daredevil for Lev Gleason (c. 1939-41) to a more bigfoot
manner. As his famous style of drawing emerged, so did a tendency to
vary the page layouts, often abandoning conventional grids altogether.
And his splash pages were as unconventional and imaginative as Eisner’s
in The Spirit–symbolic always, and sometimes mood-setting, too.
Issue-by-issue of Police Comics, we watch the popularity
of the character grow. The evidence is in the number of pages allotted
to Plastic Man. At first, he got six pages--at the back of the book.
But by No. 9, Plas takes up 9 pages--now in
front; and in No. 14, he’s up to 13 pages. In No. 19, he gets 15 pages.
Other evidence of the increasing popularity of the character includes
the cover (by No. 5, Plastic Man displaces the Firebrand as the character
featured on the cover, a position Plas will
enjoy for the rest of the run of the book) and some of the editorial
content itself. No. 6 presents us with a splash page graph that charts
Plastic Man’s growing fame: “Up, up, up goes Plastic Man’s popularity,”
it trumpets. And at the end of this issue’s story, Plastic Man asks
readers if they’d like his stories to be increased from six pages to
nine. Three issues later, as we’ve seen, the readers have evidently
voted for more pages.
In this archival tome, we also meet Plas’
incorrigible companion, Woozy Winks. Short, tubby, and with a funny
haircut and a bulbous schnoze, Woozy bows on stage in No. 13 as a petty criminal.
He is reformed under the influence of Plastic Man, and he then fulfills
the role of sidekick for the rest of Plas’s
career. Woozy is probably the catalyst that completes the feature’s
transition from serious to comic. Cole was already easing into his manic
mode, but with Woozy as a cast member, he now has a regular character
who lends himself to slapstick comedy. Woozy’s presence in a panel is almost always the occasion
for a sight gag: he’ll be making a funny face, or fiddling with a prop,
or stumbling, or falling over. All humorous pictures, all sight gags.
Plastic Man’s plasticity is vital in virtually every tale. In
the earliest ones, Cole explores various ways that his hero might be
injured or killed, and we discover, as a consequence, that Plastic Man
is more-or-less invulnerable. Plas’s singular ability lends itself easily to humorous treatments:
the criminals he captures, for instance, are usually astonished (in
comical exaggeration) at the outrageousness of his flexibility stunts.
By No. 4, the crooks are often cartoony types–exaggerated
caricatures of human visages and forms. From this kind of sight gag,
others surely developed. By No. 10, as I’ve said, Cole was beginning
to indulge himself in the kind of visual comedy for which he was celebrated
among his peers.
But, to return to our topic–Jack Cole’s masterful performance–sight
gags are only a minor key manifestation of Cole’s cartooning genius.
His claim to that nimbus rests more firmly upon his having
created masterworks in three of cartooning’s
modes. In comic books, Cole created Plastic Man, a hilarious yoking
of super-power to comedy, sight gags to crime-fighting. And Cole repeated
this accomplishment in Midnight, whose stories, like Plastic Man’s,
are brimming with sight gags and other kinds of madcap lunacy. (Here,
the comedy probably got a boost from Midnight’s adopting a pet monkey
who talks. And he picked up other silly sidekicks as time went by. Over
at Cole’s alma mater, Gleason, Crimebuster
also had a pet monkey, Squeeks, beginning
in April 1942, at least six months after Midnight’s Gabby showed up.
Evidently Gleason’s editor/writer Charles Biro was taking a leaf from
Cole’s book.)
But Cole worked in straight, serious illustration in comic books,
too. His first superhero effort was the Comet in Pep Comics No.
1 (January 1940). But he also did a supervillain,
The Claw, for Silver Streak Comics No. 1 (December 1939), which
he also edited until 1941. And he did the second story starring Gleason’s
new costumed hero, Daredevil, in Silver Streak No. 7 (January
1941). Cole had a hand in horror comics, too. He produced the scandalous
“Murder, Morphine and Me” for True Crime Comics No. 2 (May 1947),
which included a panel reproduced in Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent as an illustration
of the “injury to the eye” motif that Wertham
found so prevalent in comic books. Finally, in the early 1950s, before
leaving comic books for good, Cole did Angles O’Day,
a light-hearted albeit realistically rendered detective feature, in
Ken Shannon Nos. 1-9 (October 1951- c. March 1953). Plastic Man
alone would have been enough to earn Cole the laurels he wears in the
history of comics. But Cole didn’t stop with comic books.
In the mid-1950s as the comic book industry began its slide into
the doldrums, Cole started doing single-panel gag cartoons for magazines--men’s
magazines mostly, and mostly those little digest-sized productions from
Humorama. Then he was discovered by Hugh Hefner.
Cole submitted rough sketches of cartoons to Hefner even before
the first issue of Playboy. “There had been some publicity about
the magazine,” Hefner told writer Hal Higdon. Presumably, Cole read
these advance notices about Stag Party (as Playboy was
called in the planning stages) and saw another market for cartoon sales.
“There was nothing in the original batch of roughs that seemed
appropriate,” Hefner recalled, “but I liked his style even in the pencil
sketches. I also remembered his work from Plastic Man.”
Hefner returned the cartoons with an encouraging note, and when
Cole submitted another batch of roughs a few weeks later, Hefner bought
several. Cole debuted in Playboy with the fifth issue, and before
long, his work set the standard. For Playboy, Cole produced gorgeous
full-page watercolor cartoons in glowing color, deploying a masterful
painterly technique that soon defined what a Playboy cartoon
should look like. This was no small achievement. Cole had worked almost
exclusively with the linear drawing methods of comic books: solid, unbroken
line drawings. But for his full-page cartoons at Playboy, he
abandoned lines altogether, painting his pictures with no outlines at
all. And he was quickly a master of the technique. Not that he gave
up line. For the same magazine, he created a series of satirical psychological
portraits called “Females by Cole,” and these were done in a sketchy
style with a slap-dash brush stroke. Here, and in his watercolors, he
deployed an authentic representation of the female form–the pear-shape.
Real women are pear-shaped: they’re broad towards the bottom. And Cole
was possibly the first girlie cartoonist to recognize this in his rendering
of sexy women.
His work for Playboy would have been enough–by itself–to qualify
him for a place in the pantheon of the ink-fingered fraternity. But
Cole wasn’t finished yet.
He, like many cartoonists of his generation, had always apparently
had his heart set on doing a syndicated comic strip. That’s where the
big money was in cartooning, and Cole and all his colleagues of the
day knew it. So while doing Playboy cartoons, he conjured up
a candidate for a comic strip and successfully sold it into syndication
early in 1958; it began May 26. Once again, Cole proved himself an innovator.
And once again, he changed his drawing style dramatically.
Betsy and Me, the strip in question, was drawn in the
ultra-modern abstract style made popular earlier in the decade by UPA
animated cartoons (Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing-boing, etc.).
More significantly, the storytelling manner Cole employed was a complete
departure from the usual funny paper fashion. The comedy arose from
the pictures’ contradicting the content of the prose. Cole’s fatuous
hero would be telling us one thing in the narrative captions of the
strips, but the pictures of the guy’s actions would show us just the
opposite, revealing him as a trifle pretentious and wholly delusional.
But harmless withal. A visual-verbal
tour de force.
The strip ran for only two-and-a-half months before Cole killed
himself.
Jack Cole’s suicide has been one of the inexplicable events in
the history of cartooning. Why
would a cartoonist who had achieved what most cartoonists most long
for–national syndication of a comic strip–suddenly and suicidally
gave it up. It’s still a mystery, although there have been various conjectures
about it.
Spiegelman opines that Cole “died of growing up.” When Cole
“traded in Plastic Man’s silly putty for Playboy’s silicone,
he also traded away the innocent and omnidirectional
sexuality of infancy for the mere heterosexuality of adolescence.” The
next step in Cole’s maturation was Betsy and Me, which was about
marriage and family and making a living–grown-up stuff. “Me” was Chet
Tibbit, the one with delusions; Betsy was
his dutiful and loving wife. And they had a five-year-old son, Farley,
who was an unabashed genius. Here, we must point out that Cole and his
wife, Dorothy, were childless after 24 years of marriage. But Cole loved
children. Noting this, Spiegelman remarks
that “Cole’s heartbreaking ‘fantasy’ about a loving couple doting on
their brilliant little boy ... reads like a suicide note delivered in
daily installments!” This is not as much of a leap of logic as might
be supposed. In the first strip in which Chet Tibbit
appears, he stutters–exactly as the “Jack Cole” character does in the
Woozy Winks origin tale in Police Comics No. 13. Cole himself
did not stutter, but his alter egos did. Spiegelman
continues: “As he climbed his ladder of success, up from the primal
mulch of the comic books, he finally arrived at air that was too thin
to breathe: Jack Cole, a comics genius, died
of growing up.” Or, to put it a little more prosaically, Cole killed
himself because he could not live up to the expectations he had for
himself as an adult.
But this interpretation, however accurate it may be in poetic
parlance, lacks the analytical precision of thorough explanation. It
seems clear, though, that Cole’s suicide was somehow related to his
relationship with his wife. And perhaps, to their childlessness. Spiegelman
agrees, saying “impotence ... was the key to Cole.”
Clay Geerdes, reporter and photographer
of the underground until his death a couple years ago, explored the
question thoroughly, obtaining a copy of the coroner’s report (as did
Spiegelman) and, even, maps of the area around
Cary, Illinois, where Cole killed himself. The proximity to Playboy
(headquartered in Chicago, 40 miles away) was a factor in Cole’s fatal
decision, Geerdes believed. The Coles had
been persuaded to move from Connecticut to Illinois by Hefner after
they’d lost most of their household possessions in a flood in 1955.
“I convinced him to move to Chicago,” Hefner told Higdon, “so that we
could work more closely together. Jack had been born in New Castle,
Pennsylvania, and the joke was that we had brought Cole from New Castle.”
“This move,” Geerdes wrote, “meant
that Dorothy had to leave all her family and friends behind, that she
would be living among strangers in a small town, that she would get
lonely and resentful, particularly after she began to hear about the
lifestyle at the Playboy Mansion [which had just recently opened] where
Cole and the other cartoonists were invited without their wives.”
Cole didn’t quite fit into this crowd, Hefner recalled: “Jack
was this sweet, conservative guy, who was very devoted to his wife--and
yet he created these incredible women [in his Playboy cartoons]! And
when he created his comic strip, it revolved around a typically suburban
couple, who had a supersmart child. He hardly
fit the Playboy pattern.”
Or, as he told Spiegelman, Cole “was
no Shel Silverstein.”
Geerdes concurred, but he gives the circumstance a telling
spin: “Though there is no evidence to indicate Cole was a womanizer,
it is not difficult to surmise the type of arguments that went on between
[husband and wife] as a result of Jack being around Hefner’s bunnies.
Dottie was middle-aged and childless and, while Jack was getting a lot
of ego-boosting from his cronies, she was feeling like anything but
a success.”
Before he shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber Marlin
rifle on August 13, 1958, Cole wrote three suicide notes. He mailed
two of them: one to Hefner, one to his wife. The third was scrawled
on a tablet that was found on the front seat of his car next to his
body when he was discovered on a gravel country road near Crystal Lake.
The note on the car seat was addressed to whoever found Cole and asked
that a neighbor be informed of his death first so his wife would have
someone to be with her when she received the news. It concludes with
an aside to Dottie: “Please forgive me, hon.” In the note to Hefner,
Cole tells his editor not to blame himself for what Cole is doing. “I
cannot go on living with myself and hurting those dear to me,” he added.
Curiously, the note to his wife has never been made public. At the coroner’s
inquest, Dorothy testified that in the letter her husband explained
why he was taking his own life, but when a juror asked if the letter
would be admitted as evidence, the coroner responded: “The letter was
a very personal letter. I read it myself. We just wanted to bring it
out that far.”
The letter, in other words, would not be made part of the record.
So what was in the letter? We’ll never know, of course, but Dorothy
testified that she and Jack had argued just before he left the house
that afternoon, saying he was going to pick up the mail but actually
buying the rifle that he used to kill himself.
In one of our conversations on the subject, Geerdes
speculated that the argument may have been one that the couple had often.
He supposed that Dorothy may have taunted Cole frequently about his
Playboy connections–the bunnies, the palpable embonpoint of his
cartoon women, the sexual ambiance of the Mansion–saying, in effect,
You think you’re a big deal with women, but you can’t even get me pregnant.
In short, she raised doubts about his manhood.
Wrote Geerdes: “We have to question
who Cole thought he was killing when he fired that shot. Why would he
shoot a successful cartoonist who had finally made the jump from comic
book trash to a syndicated strip? No, Cole was killing the husband of
Dorothy, the man who had given her no children. Pills or poison would
not have made the statement Cole wanted to make with his death. He killed
himself in a masculine way.” Thus, the manner of his dying would affirm
his manhood.
The last daily Betsy and Me by Cole was published September
6; the last Cole Sunday, September 14. (Higdon was among the cartoonists
who tried out to continue the strip; he didn’t make it. But neither
did whoever was selected: the strip expired shortly after the death
of its creator.)
We can make too much of the so-called “evidence” of a cartoonist’s
state of mind that might be found in his work. Spiegelman
notes that many of Cole’s Playboy cartoons dealt, in one way
or another, with impotence. And in Smash Comics No. 36 (October
1942), Midnight goes to hell, where he meets the Devil, who confesses,
“Contrary to popular belief, the real evil force is my wife! I merely
carry out her wishes.” We can make too much of such things, as I said.
But it would be naive to ignore these matters altogether.
Still, the mystery of Cole’s suicide remains. An
inexplicable tragedy.
But the mystery of Cole’s artistry as a cartooning genius, while
elusive, is not as difficult to uncover. As Larry Herdon
once wrote (in Amazing World of DC Comics No. 16), Cole mixed
comedy with drama, pathos, and headlong action and added a dash of parody.
He successfully blended humor and drama by making Plastic Man the only
sane person in an otherwise insane universe.
Almost but not quite.
The key to Cole’s achievement is bigfoot
cartoon style. And that’s what made Plas’s
world seem so wacky. Everyone but Plas in
the strip wasn’t crazy. Many were, but many were quite as sane
as anyone with a criminal mind can be. It was the bigfoot
art and manner that made them seem comic. Zany as many of the
people looked, most of them took themselves seriously, and the crooks
plotted their crimes as cannily as criminals in any other comic book.
They were not–in themselves as individual personalities–comic characters.
Woozy alone filled that bill. (But even he was capable of an occasional
serious and productive action.)
The parody in Cole’s Plastic Man stories was not the parody of
superheroics or crime fighting. It was the
criminal mind that was parodied. If his villains’ actions seemed slightly
loony, it was because the criminals’ personalities were wholly defined
by their law-breaking purposes. Obsessive.
To the normal reader, obsessiveness quickly
escalates to insanity. Hence, wacky. The personalities
of most comic book villains are similarly obsessive. Doctor Doom, Luther,
the Joker. They don’t appear as daffy lunatics, though, because they’re
realistically rendered. Cole underscored his message–indeed, made his
parody’s moral point–by making many of his criminals insanely comic
in appearance. Hence, only madmen seem to seek a life of crime.
But even this does not lay Cole’s Plastic Man secret bare. In
the second revival of the title in 1976 (Ramona Fradon’s),
the writers have obviously bought into Herndon’s analysis. And because
he came close to nailing down Cole’s secret, this version of Plas
was the best rejuvenation to-date. But there the pursuit of pure zaniness
produced crooks whose criminal intent itself is laughable. Thus, we
have comedy without parody, the icing without the cake. Many of the
ingredients are there, all right. But the uniqueness of Cole’s achievement
came not so much from the ingredients as from
the mixture itself. And the secret of the proper proportions cannot
be so readily discovered as both Herndon and I pretend.
The mystique of Cole’s Plastic Man is still mostly veiled in
shadow. But we can reasonably speculate that the mystique had its roots
in Cole’s graphic imagination and moral vision–and found its ideal expression
in his ability to make visual and narrative capital out of a bigfoot cartoon style and his hero’s pliable propensities.
In short, secret is quite simply that Cole was a cartoonist. Not a writer.
Not an artist. But a cartoonist, who, in my view, is a storyteller who
conjures up his visions in a perfect blend of words and pictures, effecting by creative instinct a mutual dependency in which
neither the words nor the pictures makes as much sense alone without
the other as they do together. That’s probably why the Foglio-Barta
reincarnation is the most successful: both principal members of the
creative team are cartoonists.
That’s why committees of writers, artists and editors don’t usually
produce works of genius: they don’t think like a single creative intelligence
brimming with talent. That’s what made Jack Cole a virtuoso genius in
the medium. And that’s why we so seldom see the equal of his oeuvre.
Jack Cole, no matter how much we may wish it, cannot be replaced by
committee. He’s dead, and that’s why we can’t seem to get Plastic Man
right anymore.
Now, here’s a short gallery of Cole’s oeuvre: a page of Plastic
Man, a Playboy cartoon, and a couple Betsy and Me strips.
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