Places like Stamp Wholesaler and Army Laughs.
Even more obscurely gleaned is the fact that Cole also sold stacks of gag cartoons to the low-paying markets, as well. Some of the less well-known revelations that emerge include the fact that, in addition to his comic book career, Jack Cole cultivated a shadow career as a magazine cartoonist, selling numerous gag cartoons to top-paying, nationally distributed magazines, such as Boy’s Life, Judge, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. In recent years, the availability of golden age comic book scans, digital newspaper archives, and old photos and records via the Internet has made it worthwhile to do some further “Cole mining.” These include, among others, James Steranko, Ron Goulart, Art Spiegelman, and R. Over the years, several comics historians and artists have produced valuable works on Cole. These are the fairly well-known, if sketchy details of the life and career of Jack Cole. Mere months after reaching this pinnacle, Cole tragically took his own life on Augat age 44. With apparent meteoric speed characteristic of his comic book stories, Cole swiftly skyrocketed to the top of his new profession as Playboy’s premier cartoonist, creating jaw-dropping, libido-stoking cartoons that were “loose and juicy,” as fellow Playboy cartoonist Al Stine once described them.Īs if that ascent weren’t enough, Jack Cole reshaped himself yet again, transforming overnight and out of the blue into a syndicated newspaper comic strip artist - the coveted achievement for a cartoonist of Jack Cole’s generation. It’s also well-known that Cole miraculously re-invented himself as a gag cartoonist for sex-drenched men’s magazines when the comics industry collapsed in the early 1950s. Left: Splash from Police Comics 22 (September 1943), Right: Playboy (December 1955)Ĭole is famous for his numerous Plastic Man stories - a bulging, jam-packed inventory of screwball humor, breakneck storytelling, visual innovation, underground eroticism, and dark obsessions that stretches from the birth of the American superhero comic through World War Two and into the first days of Cold War dread in America. Jack Cole's greatest creations are Plastic Man and his Playboy cartoons. The general arc of the life and work of Jack Cole, who was born Decemand died August 13, 1958, is fairly well documented. Over half a century after Jack Cole’s life abruptly ended, we are still discovering his secrets. Cole eventually saved up enough quarters and dimes to buy correspondence courses from the Landon School of Cartooning - courses that his father, a small business owner, had refused to subsidize.Ī career born from such stubborn resourcefulness and playful secrecy is bound to hold some surprises. Smuggling a sandwich to school allowed Cole to secretly save his lunch money to invest in his passion: cartooning. Much like his 1940-41 comic book character, Dickie Dean, a boy inventor (who lived in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Cole's hometown), the young Jack Cole was endlessly resourceful. One of these compartments held electronic gear Cole had assembled that allowed him to eavesdrop without detection on his family’s telephone calls.
His boyhood room contained cabinets Cole – a sort of small town Buster Keaton - built, complete with hidden compartments. Back in his room, he would hide the sandwich inside a hollowed out book. When he was in high school, Cole would quietly sneak into his family’s kitchen in the middle of the night where he would assemble and wrap a sandwich for his school lunch the next day. Features The Lost Comics of Jack Cole – Part 1 (1931-1937)
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