Jack Cole

This article deals with the American artist and comic book artist. For the choreographer, see Jack Cole (choreographer) .

Jack Ralph Cole (born December 14, 1914 in New Castle , Pennsylvania - † August 13, 1958 ) was an American artist, cartoonist, comic book author and illustrator. Cole was best known as the creator of the superhero parody Plastic Man (1940), as well as the cartoonist of the men's magazine Playboy in the 1950s.

Life and work

Cole was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1914, the third of six children to a haberdashery and elementary school teacher. Cole, who was to stay in Pennsylvania into early adulthood, took an interest in graphic arts during high school and began self-schooling in the late 1920s, in the absence of professional drafting training.

His first published work, the self-illustrated factual story A Boy and His Bike , which appeared in Boys' Life magazine in 1935 , Cole based on an autobiographical experience: At seventeen, he was on an adventurous odyssey by bicycle from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles Angeles, California.

Over the next few years, Cole, who had meanwhile married his high school friend Dorothy Mahoney, hired himself out as a worker in an American Can factory in his hometown of New Castle, while he pursued his artistic advancement in his spare time - it had become his ambition, it to bring fame and commercial success as an artist - worked. In 1936, Cole and his wife moved to the New York bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, hoping to see his breakthrough as a cartoonist and graphic artist there.

In 1937 Cole began working for the studio of Harry A Chesler, who had comic material produced on his own, which he then sold to magazines to work. For Chesler, Cole drew stories for series such as TNT Todd of the FBI and Little Dynamite , which appeared in magazines such as Funny Pages and Keen Detective Funnies .

1940 Cole worked briefly at the publisher Lev Gleason Publications for which he worked on the Daredevil series published in the Silver Streak Comics (not identical to the later character of Marvel Comics). There was also work on the Archie Comics, in the Pep Comics series . appearing characters The Comet and The Hangman before Cole switched to Quality Comics. There he worked on the comic The Spirit , created by Will Eisner , whom he represented during his participation in World War II 1942-1944, and created his own satirical character, Midnight , which he featured in Smash Comics # 18 from January 1941.

For Quality Comics in 1941, Cole finally created the character with whom he is most often identified to this day: Plastic Man , who has the gift of being able to deform and distort his body at will. The basic idea behind Plastic Man was to pull the superhero genre, which was extremely popular at the time, in a good-natured way “through the cocoa” with an over-the-top-lovable variant of standard themes and characteristics of the heroes with “capes and pants”. Cole created - with interruptions - further Plastic Man stories until the late 1950s, which were first published in the Police Comics series , and later in an independent series of the same name by Quality Comics. Coles work on Plastic Man American US Comics is still regarded as a milestone in the history of: So says Art Spiegelman , a great admirer of Cole's work, opened up the "new dimensions" Cole this "visual vocabulary" of the medium by with the restriction of firmly framed, carefully separated images as the "field of events" in which the plot of a comic takes place in clearly separated steps and instead introduced the innovation of allowing one's figure to wildly reach beyond the edges of individual images and to meander back and forth through the various images on a page.

1954 Cole took over the job of Hauptcartoonisten for Hugh Hefner, a close friend Coles, founded men's magazine Playboy , for which he produced various erotic cartoons in the following years. The most common were full-page humorous pictures designed with watercolors ( toons of beautiful but dim girls and rich but equally dim old men ), of which, beginning with issue # 5 of the magazine, until Cole's death in 1958, at least one was in every issue of the Playboy appeared. The popularity of this work was expressed, among other things, in the fact that the second merchandising product that Playboy had licensed (after cufflinks with the magazine's famous rabbit head logo) was a cocktail apron with a picture imprinted with some "Females by Cole" as a motif .

In May 1958, Cole created the Betsy and Me newspaper strip , which featured the domestic adventures of the chronically unsuccessful Chester Tibbet, his wife Betsy, and their son Farley, a child genius. By the summer of 1958, the series had spread in fifty daily newspapers.

In August 1958, Cole died at Woodstock Hospital in Cary, northwest of Chicago, after getting a bullet in his car with a 22-gauge Marlin rifle near the intersection of State Highways 176 and 14 (State of Illinois) had fired in the head. Although Cole left two suicide notes - one to his wife and one to his friend Hefner - the motives for his suicide could not be clarified.

After-effects and reception

After being forgotten for a long time, Cole's life and work were brought back to a broad audience in 1999 through a cover story in the highly regarded magazine The New Yorker , which is dedicated to his vita and oeuvre. This was followed in 2003 by a biography written by Pulitzer Prize winners Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd , which traces Cole's life path.

For his contributions to the development and advancement of the comic medium, Cole was posthumously in the "Jack Kirby Hall of Fame", which is supposed to honor the "greatest American comic artists", and in 1999 in the " Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame ", a similar one Facility, added.

Remarks

1. ↑ Art Spiegelman: Jack Cole and Plastic Man stretch Comics to Its Limits.
2. ↑ Cole had already produced slippery cartoons (mostly one-panel work) for other magazines in the early 1950s, which he had printed under the pseudonym "Jake" as "good girl art".