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Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits
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Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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An all American boy
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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.
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