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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The life of Jack Cole, creator of the tongue-in-cheek comic-book crime fighter Plastic Man, is as entertaining as his comic-book stories. A resourceful smalltown boy wonder (in 1932, he cycled 7,00o miles across the U.S. and wrote about it for Boys Life), Cole became a professional cartoonist in 1936, in the early days of the comic book industry, after taking a mail-order illustration course. Graphically inventive and prone to wild flights of surreal visual hilarity, Cole anticipated the wit and frenetic comic intensity of Mad magazine in the 1950s and was instrumental in creating the irresistibly lurid crime and horror comic books that provoked the anti-comics hysteria of the same decade. Around the same time, he transformed himself artistically to become the premier gag panel cartoonist at Hugh Hefner's then newly launched Playboy. But Plastic Man, a comic strip about a petty criminal transformed by a chemical accident into a stretchable comic superhero, is his real legacy. Cole's work is characterized by relentless sight gags. Plastic Man is usually doing two or three things at once, his elongated arms and legs snaking after weird criminals like Sadly Sadly, a man with a face so forlorn people weep uncontrollably at the sight of him. Noted book designer Kidd has made the reprinted stories look like old, yellowed, newsprint pages. There is a generous selection of full-color reproductions of Cole's work, and Spiegelman's essay briskly maps his life and his career. In 1958, without warning and at the height of his popularity, Cole shot himself, and no one seems to understand why. This is an excellent memorial to an innovative American cartoonist.
From The New Yorker
Jack Cole's manic Plastic Man—a rubbery superhero of the forties and fifties, capable of stretching and bending into virtually anything—was a true comic-book innovation. Cole killed himself in 1958; here Spiegelman's analysis and Kidd's layout set the joy of vintage episodes against the despair of their creator.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
See all Editorial Reviews
The life of Jack Cole, creator of the tongue-in-cheek comic-book crime fighter Plastic Man, is as entertaining as his comic-book stories. A resourceful smalltown boy wonder (in 1932, he cycled 7,00o miles across the U.S. and wrote about it for Boys Life), Cole became a professional cartoonist in 1936, in the early days of the comic book industry, after taking a mail-order illustration course. Graphically inventive and prone to wild flights of surreal visual hilarity, Cole anticipated the wit and frenetic comic intensity of Mad magazine in the 1950s and was instrumental in creating the irresistibly lurid crime and horror comic books that provoked the anti-comics hysteria of the same decade. Around the same time, he transformed himself artistically to become the premier gag panel cartoonist at Hugh Hefner's then newly launched Playboy. But Plastic Man, a comic strip about a petty criminal transformed by a chemical accident into a stretchable comic superhero, is his real legacy. Cole's work is characterized by relentless sight gags. Plastic Man is usually doing two or three things at once, his elongated arms and legs snaking after weird criminals like Sadly Sadly, a man with a face so forlorn people weep uncontrollably at the sight of him. Noted book designer Kidd has made the reprinted stories look like old, yellowed, newsprint pages. There is a generous selection of full-color reproductions of Cole's work, and Spiegelman's essay briskly maps his life and his career. In 1958, without warning and at the height of his popularity, Cole shot himself, and no one seems to understand why. This is an excellent memorial to an innovative American cartoonist.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
Jack Cole's manic Plastic Man—a rubbery superhero of the forties and fifties, capable of stretching and bending into virtually anything—was a true comic-book innovation. Cole killed himself in 1958; here Spiegelman's analysis and Kidd's layout set the joy of vintage episodes against the despair of their creator.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
See all Editorial Reviews
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Inside This Book Citations: This book cites 4 books | 4 books that cite this book Explore: Citations | Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Key Phrases - SIPs: crime comics Key Phrases - CAPs: Plastic Man, Police Comics, Jack Cole, New Castle, Will Eisner (more) Browse Sample Pages: Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me! |
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