MIDNIGHT 4 (1941) - A Jack Cole Classic

Story presented in this post:
"Midnight - Gabby, The Talking Monkey" (Story and art by Jack Cole)
Smash Comics #21 (April 1944 - Quality Comics Publications)

In his fourth Midnight story, Jack Cole found a new mastery of the recently born graphic storytelling form, and created one of the best stories of his career.

The month that Smash Comics #21 came out, Silver Streak Comics #9 (Lev Gleason) also sold off the stands, with 18 pages by Cole. The 10th issue of Silver Streak would contain his last work on that title and for Lev Gleason. These were stories Cole had created months earlier. By April, 1941, he had moved on to greener pastures, having been recruited to Quality Comics a few months earlier.

Smash Comics #21 (April 1941) Not by Cole.

Cole must have been excited and uplifted by this step up. His first stories for Quality were a series of beautiful, tightly plotted and superbly realized 5-page MIDNIGHT adventures. Not only had Cole discovered a newfound confidence in his writing and art, but he also had begin to combine screwball comedy, crime stories, and superhero comics into a new, highly entertaining mixture.

In an earlier post, we looked at the first three MIDNIGHT episodes. With an analysis to follow, here is the landmark fourth adventure of Midnight, an early masterpiece by Jack Cole:





The closing sentence, with it's weird mix of sincerity and satire, in some ways, sums up what the magic of Jack Cole's pre-war stories were all about: "And with a talking monkey, Midnight brings a new weapon into action against the forces of evil."

There are several ways this story represents a stand-out in Cole's work. First, the artwork is particularly graceful and well-realized. Panels such as this Will Eisner-esque sewer scene are rich with detail, vibrating with dynamic poses, and move the story forward beautifully.


In fact, the entire page is a tour de force of design, elegantly moving the reader through the story in a dense, rich series of up and down curves that work left to right, in three tiers (click to study a larger version):

The red lines and arrows show how Cole used his character's poses, and props such as the waterfront dock pilings, to create design elements that resulted in an extremely clear communication of movement on the page. The speedboat, with it's triangular shape, serves as almost an arrow in itself, directing us first down into the bottom tier, and then onto the next page.



This page also contains a DICK TRACY moment, in which Cole stops the manic chase for a beat to give us an information diagram that introduces Midnight's new weapon. The suction cup gun is a crazy invention that would never work in real life, but as we have seen Cole -- an inventor himself -- was quite fond of putting fantastic devices into his stories.



Here's another beautiful panel, demonstrating how Cole's art often used patterns as a design device. I love how there are two sets of shadows in this composition, visually suggesting a connection between the two characters that would come to pass (Midnight will adopt the woman's pet/child when she dies). This is literal foreshadowing, and innovative graphic storytelling!



Another hallmark of Cole's graphic storytelling is the masterful use of sound effects as graphic devices. Look at how the sound effects in this panel point to the action like arrows. Also notice Cole has thrown a pair of white eyes in the blackness, Gabby's eyes. The panel is a great illustration of Cole's newfound combination of action-adventure and comedy, which he would employ to great effect in his PLASTIC MAN stories.



Towards the end of the story, Cole creates a lovely silhouette with a full moon backfrop, something he was quite fond of during this period. Also, very appropriate, as Midnight's early adventures take place in the, um, dead of night. Midnight's pose is also characteristic of Cole's early hero work. The sideview-running pose was something Cole created and used often, until he began to think in more three-dimensional terms in his PLASTIC MAN stories. For example, here is a comparison with Cole's splash page from Silver Streak #4 (May 1940 - Lev Gleason):




Jack Cole's stories also often included a woman. The women in his early hero stories were usually typical damsels in distress. The women in his later stories were sexy villains. The woman in this story, who shares the last name of another Cole creation, Angles O'Day, is rather unique, being a talented scientist who invents a way to give Gabby the monkey the power of human speech. Cole even draws her differently, with her hair chastely pulled back in a bun, and often with her face and body partially obscured. At the risk of being too psychoanalytical, one could say the inventor-female in this story is a shadow of Jack Cole himself.




This story would not rank as a Jack Cole classic unless somebody dies in a bizarre way that vengefully corrects an injustice. In this case, the man who kills the woman scientist is impaled on a church steeple. One can safely assume that Cole didn't stop to think too hard about the socio-religious implications he had made with this climactic ending. Part of the appeal of Cole's comics (and much of golden age comics) is the streaming flow of imagery and symbolism from the collective unconscious.

Incidentally, this church clocktower is the very one which Midnight swung into action across in the stunning opening page if this story. Cole has brought the reader full-circle, and provided a deeply satisfying poetic ending as the clock tolls midnight.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis of a true Jack Cole classic in which justice is served at (and by) midnight!

Speed on Paper - Quicksilver (1941)

Story presented in this post:

"Quicksilver" (Story and art by Jack Cole)

National Comics #13 (July, 1941 - Quality)

How do you show three-dimensional movement at high velocity in a two-dimensional context?

Or, minus the five-dollar words, how do you show speed on paper? That's a question that seems to occupy Jack Cole's mind in the early and, to a lesser degree, middle years of his career as a graphic storyteller. A great deal of his comic book work from 1939-1950 has speed both as a concept of the story, and a quality of the pacing itself. Cole's stories zip, screech, and zoom through ideas and innovations like no other, and it's one of the things that makes Cole great.

Jack Cole didn't create the character of Quicksilver, but he easily could have. Just a year or so earlier, he created another silvery speedster, THE SILVER STREAK, as well as THE COMET. Both heroes drew their power from whirlwind speed.

The "laughing Robin Hood," as Quicksilver was often called, debuted without an origin story in National #5, and ran for eight episodes before Cole turned in the one and only story he would make with this character. The primary artist on the series was the great Nick Cardy, but Cole's story is the stand-out in the series, which stayed a 6-page backup feature through 1949.

Poor Quicksilver never had an origin story or civilian identity. It hardly seems to matter in Cole's story. Aside from the greatest PLASTIC MAN stories, this dense six-page story may be the most perfect and pure expression of a Jack Cole superhero story. The words and images are perfectly melded together, the characters are lively and well-realized, the action is breathless and bizarre, and -- of course -- the level of invention in showing speed on paper is unsurpassed.

In comparing the earnest but grimly moralistic tone of his earlier superhero creations, THE COMET and SILVER STREAK, one sees the emergence of a sense of humor, and a decision to treat the idea of fighting crime as an absolute absurdity in itself, rich with irony and subtext -- a new direction that would result in the creation of Jack Cole's satirical and slapstick masterpiece, PLASTIC MAN, which would debut just one month later.

A word about about digital restoration. In some cases, it seems a good idea to take raw scans and alter them so they are more readable. The original work is treated with great respect. The biggest alteration we make to the pages is the replacement of the background paper, which is often discolored and has the reverse-side printing bleeding through. In the example below, you can see an example of what, hopefully, you will agree is an improvement. On this page, in addition to restoring the background paper, the areas of the title and the target were touched up.

It's too bad Jack Cole only made one Quicksilver story. On the other hand, it's a terrific story. Enjoy!

Manhunters (1940) - Second story in Jack Cole's early crime series

Story presented in this post:
"California's Kidnap-Murder Mystery" (Story and art by Jack Cole)
Top-Notch Comics #2 (Jan. 1940, MLJ/Archie)

Jack Cole's second MANHUNTERS crime story is perhaps the weakest of the three. The writing doesn't sell the co-incidences, breezing over just how a gun was found lying untouched, on a busy street, for example.

Top-Notch Comics #2 cover. Not by Cole

In the course of his career, Jack Cole would periodically turn in a very engaging story about child abuse. Police Comics #22 had the affecting and sad story, "The Eyes Have It," for example. The story here may be the first incidence of abuse of a child in Cole's work. The child here is "spunky" enough to fight back, but one still feels sympathy for the kid when she is ditched by the cop-killing kidnapper and is lost and traumatized.

As in the first story and in much of his 1939-41 work, Cole inserts an enagging information diagram:

Cole's obsession with movement and speed, another characteristic design theme in his comic book work, crops up in this story in a beautifully designed car/motorcycle chase sequence on page 2. In one panel, the speeding car is moving so fast, it even breaks out of the panel.

The pages below are the only scans we've been able to locate of this rare story. Unfortunately, the original images were quite distorted with curling. We have retouched the artwork to make it more readable and minimized the distrotion as much as possible. The curved edges of some of the panels in the scans below are due to this, not to Cole's design.

As with nearly all of his comic book stories, the story opens with a visually compelling splash page.

Speed on Paper (Smash Comics 37, Nov. 1942)

In an earlier Speed On Paper design study, we looked at Jack Cole's unsurpassed ability to inject his characters and stroylines with manic energy. Here is another stellar example, from Smash Comics #37 (November, 1942, Quality Publications).

The story features MIDNIGHT, one of Cole's longest-running characters. Originally designed by Quality publisher Everett M. "Busy" Arnold as a knock-off of Will Eisner's instantly sucessful THE SPIRIT, the feature very quickly morphed into one of Cole's richest and most unique creations.

This story, Cole's 14th MIDNIGHT episode, is one of my favorites. It is brimming with graphic invention as the characters smash the panel borders and zoom off the page. This 9-page gem respresents perhaps the apex of Jack Cole's invention in putting speed on paper!

Speed on Paper (Police Comics 95, 1949)

One of the hallmarks of the comic book work of Jack Cole is his seemingly inexhaustable ability to invent ways to depict three-dimensional movement on the static, two-dimensional printed page. Cole's comics are all about speed and movement. Consider some of his early creations: THE COMET and THE SILVER STREAK.

In his mature work, of which the story from Police Comics #95 (1949) presented here is a prime example, Jack Cole infused nearly every panel with something to indicate motion. He used anatomical distortion, speed lines, multiple images, blurry images, puffs of smoke, and the displacement of objects to suggest motion.

Sometimes, he even used the body of Plastic Man himself, stretched and twisted in reaction to the bullet-like propulsion of another character, as though the very air were being pushed back so forcefully that it pulled Plastic Man's body like a Jello sculpture inhaled by a vacuum cleaner.

At times, the images begin to resemble the deconstructionist/cubist artwork of the early 20th century. Compare the Pablo Picasso painting below, Girl With Dark Hair, and the panel taken from our featured Cole story at the top of this posting.

Jack Cole fan and expert, Art Spiegelman drew a marvellous cover for the April 17, 1999 issue of The New Yorker (which included his landmark essay on Jack Cole, later expanded into the totally awesome book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits) which gets at the same point.



Cole's art sometimes transcends the plot, and becomes a surreal excursion into what the world would look like if you could freeze-frame it and then make it two-dimensional. In some of his work from the late 1940's, I can't help but marvel at Jack Cole's miraculous drawings that showed several moments in time in a single panel. One thinks of Marcel Duchamp's famous painting of 1913, Nude Descending a Staircase.


High-falutin' comparisons to famous fine art, aside, the effects of motion and speed in Cole's comic book art are just plain fun to look at. Somehow, by showing the characters of his stories in motion, the stories become even funnier. We get a sense of what the character's body language is saying, which is often in comic contrast to their dialogue. Compare the self-proclaimed mastery of power of the villain's dialogue in the story presented here with his baby-like body movements.

I think Cole might have been a great animated cartoon director, if he had chosen to go that path. In his comic book work, he came to think in terms of motion, not static images stuck in square boxes. By the late 1940's, Cole routinely worked on a lofty level of graphic sophistication that few others have ever touched.

In December of 2008, the perpetually pleasing Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine posted one of the greatest examples of Jack Cole's speed on paper, the Plastic Man story from Police Comics #95 (1949). Thanks, Pappy! View it here.