
Jack Cole (artist)

Jack Ralph Cole (December 14, 1914 – August 13, 1958) was an American cartoonist best known for creating the comedic superhero Plastic Man, and his cartoons for "Playboy" magazine.
He was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999.
Early life.
Born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Cole—the third of six children of a dry goods-store owner and amateur-entertainer father and a former elementary school-teacher mother—was untrained in art except for the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course. At age 17, he bicycled solo cross-country to Los Angeles, California and back. Cole recounted this adventure in an early self-illustrated professional sale "A Boy and His Bike" (which has often been cited as appearing in "Boys' Life" magazine, but in fact the source of this article is unknown, but speculated to have likely appeared in Cole's hometown newspaper). Back home, Cole took a job at American Can and continued to draw at night.
Career.
Early work.
In 1936, having married childhood sweetheart Dorothy Mahoney soon after graduating high school, Cole moved with his wife to New York City's Greenwich Village. After spending a year attempting to break in as a magazine/newspaper illustrator, Cole began drawing for the studio of the Harry "A" Chesler, one of the first comic-book "packagers" who supplied outsourced stories to publishers entering the new medium. There, Cole drew such features as "TNT Todd of the FBI" and "Little Dynamite" for Centaur Publications comics such as "Funny Pages" and "Keen Detective Funnies". He produced such additional features as "King Kole's Kourt" (under the pseudonym Geo. Nagle), "Officer Clancy", "Ima Slooth", "Peewee Throttle", and "Burp the Twerp: The Super So-An'-So" (the latter two under the pseudonym Ralph Johns).
Golden Age of Comic Books.
Lev Gleason Publications hired Cole in 1939 to edit "Silver Streak Comics", where one of his first tasks was to revamp the newly created superhero Daredevil. Other characters created or worked on by the prolific tyro include MLJ's The Comet in "Pep Comics"—who in short order became the first superhero to be killed—and his replacement, the Hangman.
After becoming an editor at Lev Gleason and revamping Jack Binder's original Golden Age Daredevil in 1940, Cole was hired at Quality Comics. He worked with Will Eisner, assisting on the writer-artist's signature hero The Spirit—a masked crime-fighter created for a weekly syndicated newspaper Sunday supplement and reprinted in Quality Comics. At the behest of Quality publisher Everett "Busy" Arnold, Cole later created his own satiric, Spirit-style hero, Midnight, for "Smash Comics" No. 18 (Jan. 1941). Midnight, the alter ego of radio announcer Dave Clark, wore a similar fedora hat and domino mask, and partnered with a talking monkey—questionably in place of the Spirit's young African-American sidekick, Ebony White. During Eisner's World War II military service, Cole and Lou Fine were the primary "Spirit" ghost artists; their stories were reprinted in DC Comics' hardcover collections "The Spirit Archives" Vols. 5 to 9 (2001–2003), spanning July 1942 – Dec. 1944. In addition, Cole continued to draw one and two-page filler pieces, sometimes under the pseudonym Ralph Johns, and a memorable autobiographical appearance in "Inki," which appeared in "Crack Comics" #34.
Plastic Man.
Cole created Plastic Man for a backup feature in Quality's "Police Comics" #1 (Aug. 1941). While Timely Comics' quickly forgotten Flexo the Rubber Man had preceded "Plas" as comics' first stretching hero, Cole's character became an immediate hit, and "Police Comics" lead feature with issue #5. As well, Cole's offbeat humor, combined with Plastic Man's ability to take any shape, gave the cartoonist opportunities to experiment with text and graphics in groundbreaking manner—helping to define the medium's visual vocabulary, and making the idiosyncratic character one of the few to endure from the Golden Age to modern times. Plastic Man gained his own title in 1943.
By the decade's end, however, Cole's feature was being created entirely by anonymous ghost writers and artists—including Alex Kotzky and John Spranger—despite Cole's name being bannered. One last stint by Cole himself in 1949 and 1950 could not save the title. "Plastic Man" was cancelled in 1956 after several years of reprinting the Cole material, and new stories by others.
Additionally, Cole and writer Joe Millard created the lighthearted feature "The Barker", starring carnival barker Carnie Callhan. Introduced in "National Comics" #42 (May, 1944), the feature spun off into a 15-issue comic of its own (Autumn 1946 - Dec. 1949)
"Playboy".
Cole's career by that time had taken on another dimension. In 1954, after having drawn slightly risqué, single-panel "good girl art" cartoons for magazines, using the pen name "Jake", Cole became a cartoon illustrator for "Playboy". Under his own name, he produced full-page, watercolored gag cartoons of beautiful but dim girls and rich but equally dim old men. Cole's art first appeared in the fifth issue; he would have at least one piece published in "Playboy" each month for the rest of his life., So popular was his work that the second item of merchandise ever licensed by Playboy (after cufflinks with the famous rabbit-head logo) was a cocktail-napkin set, "Females by Cole", featuring his cartoons. Cole biographer Art Spiegelman said, "Cole's goddesses were estrogen soufflés who mesmerized the ineffectual saps who lusted after them."
"Betsy and Me".
In 1958, Cole created his own daily newspaper comic strip, "Betsy and Me", which he sold to the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate. The strip began on May 26 and chronicled the domestic adventures of nebbishy Chester Tibbet as narrator, his wife Betsy, and their 5-year-old genius son, Farley. For it, Cole utilized "a simplified style," historian Ron Goulart wrote, "reminiscent of the drawing in the UPA animated cartoons." "Betsy and Me" ran for two-and-a-half months before Cole's self-inflicted death; his last daily was published on September 6 and his last Sunday on September 14. In the final Cole daily, Betsy and Chester are seen signing up for a brand-new tract house in Sunken Hills. The syndicate hire advertising artist Dwight Parks, who had been trying to sell his own strip about a philosophical hobo. 
Death.
On August 13, 1958, Cole got in his Chevy station wagon, purchased a rifle, and fatally shot himself in the head. On the day he died, Cole mailed a suicide note explaining the reasons for his suicide to his wife Dorothy. The coroner deemed that letter too personal and did not enter it as evidence at the ensuing inquest. The only explanation Dorothy Cole publicly gave was "We had had an argument before." She subsequently remarried, and disappeared from public view. Cole also wrote a suicide note to his editor and father figure, Hugh Hefner, which was printed in Art Spiegelman's biography of Cole, "Jack Cole & Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits". The note reads:
Gravett notes that while Cole owed Hefner money, his estate would cover this debt. Cole did not participate in the "Playboy" lifestyle, though the evening before his suicide, he did drink a substantial amount at a "Playboy" office party.
The reason why the 43-year-old Cole killed himself remains one of the greatest mysteries in 20th Century American cartooning, according to journalist Paul Gravett. Cole was in the prime of a celebrated cartooning career, complete with praise for his sophisticated gag cartoons in "Playboy", and gaining increasing visibility for his newspaper strip "Betsy and Me", R. C. Harvey described the suicide as "one of the most baffling events in the history of cartooning".
Legacy.
Cole was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999.
Cole's story "Murder, Morphine and Me", which he illustrated and possibly wrote for publisher Magazine Village's "True Crime Comics" No. 2 (May 1947), became a centerpiece of psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham's crusade against violent comic books. Wertham, author of the influential study "Seduction of the Innocent", cited a particular panel of the story's dope-dealing narrator about to be stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle as an example of the "injury-to-the-eye" motif.
In 2003, writer-artist Art Spiegelman and artist Chip Kidd collaborated on a Cole biography, "Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits," a portion of which had been published in "The New Yorker" magazine in 1999.