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An all American boy
In his short life, Jack Cole, a hick from New Castle, Pa., managed to find himself at the center of three of the premiere cultural events of the 20th century.
As a youngster just before World War II, he developed the goofy, idiosyncratic Plastic Man comic character, which remains among the most admired strips of the Golden Age of pulp, though Cole drew his last Plas in 1950.
About then, too, a single panel of Cole's in another comic, True Crime, became the prime exhibit in one of the McCarthyite Congress's more ridiculous crusades, the one that said comix were sending our youth to hell. This brought the Golden Age of comix and the Linoleum Age of Congress to an end.
After that, Cole -- now using a completely different medium (water color) and style -- became the signature artist of the new Playboy magazine.
And not long after that, he shot himself, for reasons none of his friends could quite guess.
Art Spiegelman, who brought comix to their highest peak of respectability (at least in the eyes of people who never read comix) with his "Maus" comix about the Holocaust, wrote a sensitive and complex appreciation of Cole and Plas in The New Yorker in 1999, and that text is reprinted here, along with a generous selection of Cole's output.
This includes several adventures of Plas and his sidekick Woozy Winks, which rival Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley strips, if not quite George Herriman's Krazy Kat, in wackiness; as well as Congress' favorite panel (a hypodermic needle aimed at a woman's eye) and the rest of that whole episode, "Murder, Morphine and Me."
"Murder, Morphine and Me" is no raunchier than the TV ads placed by the National Institutes of Mental Health ("This is your brain on drugs") nowadays, but Cole was always before his time.
Cole represented that nose-thumbing, razzberry-blowing strain of sez-who? Americanism that has just about been stamped out today, when we need it badly. If not the greatest, he was perhaps the most characteristic American limner of his generation.
This collection was designed by Chip Kidd, in a sort of paper version of MTV film editing. Plas, always frenetic, holds up very well to this kind of contemporary treatment.
A hero for the ages.
Jack Cole the real Plastic Man
Biographies of comic creators are few and far apart. This by a short reach is the best of the lot. It contains all the stories we have heard about Cole (his bike trip across America, his Playboy years, his mysterous suicide).Interlaced through are reprints of some of his best works. What I liked was that the comics within seem to be reproduced from the originals, yellowing and all. If anything it added to my pleasure instead of took away from it. For fans of comic history or tragic artists this is the one book that must be on your shelf. See Jack Cole stretch his mind as far as Plastic Man stretched his body.
Cole Mine
Jack Cole is better served by this fairly strange book than many other great cartoonists of the golden age of the medium have been in print. Spiegelman's somewhat sparse text is full of useful information and valid critique, but he wisely lets the material speak for itself, and that's the main attraction here, though those words and the book's design seem to have distracted some readers. This is not an anthology of "Plastic Man"- that can be found elsewhere, fortunately- nor is it an in-depth biography of Jack Cole. It's more like a large catalogue for an exhibition, covering all aspects of his varied career. Material seems to be reproduced from original art in a few cases- mainly his Playboy stuff- but the comic book stories are shot from original issues, with four-color separation and page-yellowing quite evident- and speaking as a sometimes-comic artist, that's close to the way I think they should be seen (I HATE modern re-coloring, and especially airbrushes!). And as for the book's unconventional design.....I like it. (Would've preferred a hardcover, though!)
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