Jack Cole’s Influences – Tex Avery (Females by Cole in Playboy Magazine)

Note: For more articles in my ongoing series on Jack Cole’s influences, including The Marx Brothers, the Landon School of Cartooning, and Bill Hollman (Smokey Stover), please see here.

There is little doubt in my mind that comic book master Jack Cole was heavily influenced by the master of another medium, Tex Avery.  An avid moviegoer, Cole would have seen Avery’s short animated films, such as the sexy Red Hot Riding Hood, probably more than once.  A handful of Avery’s cartoons featured the sexy singer in unforgettable sequences, usually animated by Preston Blair.

Sexy women populated the pages of 1940’s comics, but there is a special similarity between the way Avery and Cole ascribed potent, mythological status to their female sirens. Both artists mined a rich vein of humor in exaggerating the near-helplessness of men when confronted with the objects of their sexual fantasies.

There are many examples of men kneeling at the foot of feminine sexuality in Cole’s work, but perhaps his story from Police Comics #51 represents the most potent example. Here is the splash from that story:

 

Tex Avery’s cartoons are filled with astounding exaggerated reactions. Consider the distortions in this frame from Dumb-Hounded (1943).

Look familiar? It should. Here’s an image from the first PLASTIC MAN story, one of the first of perhaps thousands of such images Cole made:

Both Avery and Cole’s work feature some of the most outrageous and comic distortions of the human shape that can be found in popular culture.

It’s my own theory that Jack Cole had the idea to translate the aesthetic and effects of animated cartoons into comic books. I think it’s quite likely he created Plastic Man in the spirit of the cartoons he loved, including Tex Avery’s mini-masterpieces of madness.

Here’s another classic Tex Avery take, the “crack-up",” which he used in numerous cartoons. After being hit by something, a character would develop a network of cracks and then fall to pieces with the sound of glass breaking. Amazingly, I ran across a similar effect in one of Jack Cole’s WINDY BREEZE 1-pagers:

 

Jack Cole has put his own spin on this visual gag, making Windy a human jigsaw puzzle, an image that works on several different levels.

Years later, in July, 1958, Playboy magazine published a cartoon by Jack Cole entitled Enigma. It used the same concept. Here’s a scan of the original art:

The cartoon was one of a famous, well-received series called Females by Cole. In this cartoon, Cole combines the humorous Avery-style take with the Avery/Cole/Playboy sexpot to achieve an image that is both titillating and humorous. Here is an earlier draft of the cartoon, with a light-haired lass:

The cartoon evokes the sense that yes, women are puzzles for men to figure out. But it also works against the grain of that gag, suggesting the fragility of women. Cole deliberately drew some of the pieces on the ground, suggesting we are looking at a freeze-frame image of a person about to totally fall apart into a heap of fragments. Here is a second earlier draft, with a different, but equally exquisite face:

The issue of Playboy (July, 1958) that had Enigma in it was on the stands the day Jack Cole fell apart and took his own life. In this context, Enigma is not only a universal statement, it is also a highly personal message. But for all this, in the end, it is a good cartoon by a master of the form. Like Tex Avery, Jack Cole was always from the first to the last, an entertainer. 

Cole's Influences - The Marx Brothers - IKE AN' DOOITT - Inspired War Years Madcap Comedy!

Story presented in this post:
Ike an' Dooitt (2 pages, story and art by Jack Cole)
Crack Comics #31 (Oct. 1943)

You might think I'm obsessive, but I actually counted the jokes in Jack Cole's remarkable 2-page story from 1943, IKE AN' DOOIT, and came up with the astonishing number of 28!

In this inspired bit of war years lunacy, Cole managed to work in puns, a jingle, bondage, murder, a crazy invention (electric backscratcher), nudity, a couple of mind-boggling meta-jokes (in which the characters show they are perfectly aware they are in a comic strip), and even a bubbly burp.

Here's the strip... thus far only available as a cleaned-up microfiche scan, but so remarkable that it's worth reading, even in the muddy fiche version:






Pretty amazing stuff, huh? Cole's characters appear to be amalgamations of the then popular comedy team, The Marx Brothers. Specifically, Cole has combined features of Groucho and Harpo, the two middle figures in this publicity photo.


The Marx Brothers made films from 1929 to 1949, and very likely were a major influence on the development of Jack Cole's comic sensibilities, with their rapid-fire surreal nonsense, and set pieces for comic improvisation. In this cartoon portrait of the team by Al Hirshfeld (done many years after Cole's work), you can see the natural visual impact of the character designs that Cole played with:


Though we have here a comedian working in the medium of graphic storytelling and inspired by film... the Marx Brothers actually derived their names from a comic strip! From 1904-22, Gus Mager ran a series of newspaper comic stories in which he parodied detective stories and Sherlock Holmes. He put an "o" after the character's names: Knocko the Monk, Sherlocko the Monk, Watso (for Watson) and so on. The Mark Brothers borrowed this idea, naming themselves: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo.

There is wonderful website called Barnacle Press that reprints many great old comic strips, including a series of Gus Mager's strips. Here's one I enjoyed:


Mager's characters were vaguely simian, hence the name "Monk." It's interesting to note that a currently popular (and one of my favorite) comic detective TV shows is called MONK.

Cole would return to the idea of two guys who would do any job that needed doing about 3 years later, with his ODD JOBS story in All Humor #1 (click here to read). Even the splash page of ODD JOBS resembles the opening panel of IKE AN' DOOITT.



Sadly, just as his IKE story was a one-time deal, so ODD JOBS only lasted for one story. Sigh.

Cole had used the astonishingly effective device of a character zooming out of the panel and across the page about a year earlier, in a MIDNIGHT story that appeared in Smash Comics #37 (Nov. 1942), available for reading here.

Before we end this posting, I wanted to call your attention to the new donation button at the top right corner. A few folks have asked me how they could support this work, and so I've put up a donation button. Don't feel obligated, but if you're flush and of a mind to help a starving writer out, click away! Speaking of clicks, another good (and free) way to help any blogger is to click on the advertising links they have up. I'm just sayin'... cough, cough...

In page two, panel two of IKE AN' DOOITT, there's a reference to "Typsy Hose Lee." Jack Cole is referring to perhaps the most famous stripper of all time, Gypsy Rose Lee. Just for a fun way to end this post, here's a photo of the lovely Miss Lee. That dooitt!

Cole's Influences - The Landon School of Cartooning

Jack Cole first learned cartooning through a correspondence course mailed out of Cleveland, Ohio called the Landon School of Cartooning. When he was 15, he saw an ad in a magazine for the course. It probably looked something like this ad, from an early 1920's issue of Popular Science:

According to Jim Steranko's History of Comics 2 (an excellent book, worth searching for), Cole asked his father, who was in the dry good business, to pay for the course. When his Dad refused, the endlessly inventive (and stubborn) Cole hollowed out one of his text books, smuggled sandwiches to school, and saved saved his lunch money until he could pay for the course himself.

The Landon School of Cartooning can be said not only to be a major influence on Jack Cole, but also on American comics in general. Artists known to have taken the course include Roy Crane, Milt Caniff, V.T. Hamlin, Ethel Hays, Bill Holman (see our post on Holman's influence on Cole here), E.C. Segar, Chic Young, and Carl Barks (who only completed four classes, but nonetheless acknowledged its influence on his development as a cartoonist).

In 2008, a facsimile edition of this seminal body of knowledge was published, but has since gone out of print. You can find some of the text on the first few pages of this reprint edition here.

Cole's early published comic book artwork owes a great deal to his lessons in the Landon School of Cartooning. You can see a similarity in style between the pages below, a selection of humorous fillers from 1939, and the drawngs in the ads for the Landon School, above.

With the next 2-3 years, Cole would grow out of this pie-eyed style of cartooning, sometimes known as the "bigfoot" style, but a flavor of this style would stay with his work for the rest of his career.

Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (Nov. 1939, MLJ/Archie)

Inside front cover

Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (Nov. 1939, MLJ/Archie)
FOXY GRANDPA

A typical characteristic of Cole's early funny comics is the white "pie-slice" in the eyes of his characters. The point of the slice is always in the same direction the characters are looking. Carl Barks used this effective technique throughout his work.

Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (Nov. 1939, MLJ/Archie)
KING KOLE'S KOURT

Here, Jack Cole uses the George Nagle pen name. Another KING KOLE'S KOURT was published in this blog here.

Top-Notch Comics #1 (Dec. 1939, MLJ/Archie)

Take a look at the great faces on this page!

In 1937, probably with more time on his hands and less money than he desired, Cole himself created his own quickie cartooning course, modeled on the Landon School (and reprinted in Steranko's History of Comics 2). In his course, Cole condenses a vast amount of information and advice into a single sheet of paper. My guess is it was an attempt at generating income. It was also a marvelous summing up of what he had learned about the basics of cartooning.

In his advice on drawing faces, Jack Cole writes: "Another ideal way of learning expressions is to make faces in the mirror. I used to stand in front of my dresser for hours, laughing, pouting, frowning, sighing, etc. all the while recording on paper the characteristic wrinkles."

Nice penguins, too!

Jack Cole's Influences - Bill Holman

Story presented in this posting:

Blue Ribbon Comics #2 (December 1939, Archie) - Knight Off (1 page) Story and art by Jack Cole

Every so often in our extended study of Jack Cole, it will prove insightful to consider what his influences might have been.

The greatest screwball comedy strip of all time, SMOKEY STOVER by Bill Holman, began appearing in newspapers in 1935. That was the year Jack Cole left his home town in Pennsylvania for the urban canyons of Manhattan to seek fortune and fame as a comic strip artist. Much like Cole's early work, the Smokey Stover dailies and sundays were jam-packed with gags. Some of the gags were visual puns, some were verbal, and some were just pulled out of the ether, such as the repeated use of the word "foo." Holman, shown below, was a true master of the form and it seems very likely Cole was influenced by his work.

It may be that Holman, who was 11 years older than Cole, blazed a path into fast-paced screwy satire on which Cole followed, paved, painted, and installed street signs.



Smokey Stover was a fireman, and often the strips involved the characters frantically running to put out a fire, exchanging vaudeville-style jokes as they zipped along. You got your money's worth with Smokey Stover, since Holman often stuffed his pages with jokes. I count 13 jokes in this 6-panel sunday strip, taken from Four Color #64 (Dell, no date on the issue), one of several Four Color issues devoted entirely to reprints of Holman's work.


Compare to Jack Cole's zany one-pager below, from Blue Ribbon Comics #2 (Dec 1939, Archie). Cole contributed 17 pages to the first issue of Blue Ribbon, and 6 pages in the third issue, before moving on to bigger and better things. He only had one page in Blue Ribbon #2, but what a page! Aside from what must surely be one of the strangest panel layouts of 1939, what strikes me is the strong similarities with Smokey Stover. Our characters are running with Holman hoses to put out a fire, the knight inexplicably has a weather vane on his head, and there's a flash fire of jokes.

If you'd like to see more of Bill Holman's brilliant work, be sure to visit http://www.smokey-stover.com/, created by his nephew, Victor Paul, and loaded with great Holman comics. Here now a little gem by Jack Cole, no doubt inspired by the wacky work of comics master Bill Holman.