The Origin (of sorts) of Sadly-Sadly in Jack Cole’s last SPIRIT story

Jack Cole’s final SPIRIT section story, Sad Sam’s Last Laugh (Spirit Section June 25, 1944), was an early version of Sadly-Sadly (Plastic Man #20, November 1949), one of his best stories, and once again presents us with his patented mix of gruesome death and funny cartooning.

Cole ghosted THE SPIRIT for about a six-month period, writing and penciling (by my count) 17 stories. “Sad Sam’s Last Laugh” was also Jack Cole’s last Spirit. His Spirit stories, while carefully modeled after the patterns and look creator Will Eisner and first assistant Lou Fine had established, put more emphasis on both physical slapstick humor and death. This last story is remarkable enough to warrant a post of its own, for several reasons, which I’ll cover after you read this wild story, shown here in its 1946 reprint version from THE SPIRIT #5 (Quality Comics):
 

“Let US seriously contemplate suicide, too!” – chilling words to read, considering that Jack Cole took his own about 14 years after writing and drawing this story.

Suicide turns up over and over in Cole’s “comic” book stories. Although he often plays it up for laughs, there is nearly always an undercurrent of sadness. In this story, Sad Eyes Sam rather small-mindedly robs himself of his last day of life merely to cheat his fellow crooks. He accomplishes this by stabbing himself with a surgeon’s scalpel. Cole’s stories are filled with gruesome death and disfigurement, often creatively executed in bizarre fashion.

This story is also one of the earliest instances of what could be called Cole’s Grotesques. The faces of the criminal gang in this story are both comic and bizarre (page 3, panel 2 for example), in the best tradition of cartoonists such as Goya, Daumier, and Hogarth. It is not known that Cole drew upon any of the works of these artists for his own inspiration. We do know that Cole cited Chester Gould’s comic strip, DICK TRACY, as a major influence… and he may have gotten the idea of grotesque criminals from Gould.

In any case, this story features some excellent cartooning, even if the unknown inker did rob Cole’s lines of much of their life and spontaneity.

While Cole, like any great artist, returned to his themes and story settings  over and over, this story is thus far the only instance documented in which he recycles a story concept. The character of Sad Eyes Sam would be reborn about 5 years later as Sadly-Sadly, in one of Jack Cole’s masterpieces, often reprinted, and shown here from it’s original appearance in PLASTIC MAN #20 (November, 1949).


It is interesting to compare the two stories to see how far Cole developed in just five years. The Sadly-Sadly story is nothing short of breathtakingly brilliant. Keep in mind, though, that Cole was ghosting on the Spirit story, and was obviously holding back to keep the stories looking and feeling similar to the “house” look well established for the wildly successful series.

The Grand Comics Database, a terrific resource and one which I’ve used heavily in developing this work on Jack Cole, lists Joe Millard as the writer for the Sadly-Sadly story. I found this hard to believe when I first read it. Having found this earlier version of the story by Cole, I have even stronger doubts that this classic story was written by anyone other than Cole. It’s too bad no records of who did what at Quality seem to exist.

From December 19, 1943 to June 25, 1944, Jack Cole ghosted 17 Spirit stories, by my count. After careful study of the Spirit Sections, here is my current, annotated, list of stories that Jack Cole wrote and penciled (they were inked by other hands, including Robin King):

12/19/43 – Death After Death
12/26/43 – Cloak and Coffin
1/2/44 – Killer Ketch (shapeshifting story)
1/16/44 – Ebony’s Inheritance (similar character shows up in other Cole stories, including Midnight Episode 18 , First Run)
1/23/44 – Murder By Magic
1/30/44 – Circumstantial Evidence (suicide, panel in story used as basis for Plastic Man splash)
2/6/44 – Radio Burglars
2/13/44 – Man O’ War
2/20/44 – In The Moorish Section of Central City
3/5/44 – The Charity Ball
3/12/44 – Double Eagle (Aztec Indian later used in Police Comics #75 story, “Case of the Ancient Clues”)
3/19/44 – Skelter and Crabb
3/26/44 – Torchy Tyler
4/23/44 – Rogoff (statue used in “Granite Lady” splash from Plastic Man, also lightning shock bolts used in later work)
4/30/4 – The Voodoo of Dr. Peroo
5/21/44 – Black Marx
6/25/44 – Sad Eye Sam’s Last Laugh (suicide, early version of “Sadly-Sadly” Plastic Man story)

Most of these stories can be found in the 8th volume of the SPIRIT ARCHIVES. This list is presented as a starting point, but it may change as I look at the stories with more attention.

FANNIE OGRE – Jack Cole’s Great Lost SPIRIT Story (1942)

THE SPIRIT first appeared as a weekly comic book insert. It was so successful that a daily newspaper strip soon followed. SPIRIT creator Will Eisner wrote and drew the first six weeks of the strip. When the wartime effort drafted Eisner into military service, Jack Cole took over the strip. In August, 1942, Cole left the strip to create a new back-up feature in the pages of Police Comics, a little thing called PLASTIC MAN.
A couple of years later, in 1944, Jack Cole wrote and penciled some of the SPIRIT Sunday comic book insert stories, which can be found here and here.
 
Cole’s work on the SPIRIT DAILIES runs from May 18, 1942 to August 8, 1942, and covers a complete storyline, start to finish. In this post, we share the complete story, which features the proto-typical Chester Gould/Jack Cole comic strip femme fatale, FANNIE OGRE.
There are several “tells” in the artwork itself that this sequence was mostly penciled, inked, and even lettered by Cole. The artwork strongly resembles his MIDNIGHT (which was created as a SPIRIT duplicate) stories of the same period, and uses many of the same characteristic visual elements, including:

• Decorative patterns
• Pointed exclamation marks
• Distinctive lettering (so that the simple sentence “Oh ho! Do I!” has a wealth of nuance and tonality)
• Extreme camera angle
• Funnel-shaped sound effects
• Speed lines and clouds that include the speed sound effects of “zip!”
• Beams of light slashing through darkness, usually with pointillism effects at the edges

Many of these devices can be spotted in the following two strips:

Aside from the art, the storytelling is classic Cole. In the example shown above, we have a casual graphic description of torture and dismemberment, with a comic edge!
After an introductory bit of comic business with Spirit assistant Ebony and his con-man cousin Scallywag, Cole teasingly introduces the grotesque figure of FANNIE ORGE, a youthful, shapely woman with a horribly wrinkled face… sort of a female Prune Face (Cole borrowed a lot from Chester Gould’s DICK TRACY, and never more so than in this early newspaper strip effort).
Cole’s graphic stories were filled with crazy inventions, and this story is no exception. A jar of magical beauty cream erases FANNIE’s wrinkles, bringing Cole’s core theme of shapeshifting and identity/face change to the fore.
When he created the character of PLASTIC MAN, Cole had the inspiration of tweaking the superhero origin story by making the non-super self a crook and then having the hero keep the identity of the criminal (for a while, at least). This same playfulness around the conventions of the crime-fighter hero story is evident in FANNIE ORGE, when she extracts a promise from THE SPIRIT to lay off crime-fighting until August 1 (co-incidentally PLASTIC MAN’s birth date, roughly).
The story ends with, yes, you guessed it.. a suicide. For a man who ended his life in suicide, it is haunting that so many of Jack Cole’s comic book stories include suicide. More people killed, or attempted to kill themselves in Jack Cole’s “funny” comic book stories than in any other series in the history of comics and, possibly literature.

FANNIE ORGE’s death is almost an exact copy of the ending of the classic 4th MIDNIGHT story, written and drawn by Jack Cole about 8 months earlier, with the silhouette of the plunging figure and the clock tower tolling the death knell. Ask not for whom the bell tolls… it tolls for thee.
With the exception of Cole’s last work on his newspaper comic strip Betsy and Me, this story represents the longest sustained graphic narrative of his career, at roughly the equivalent of 24 pages in comic book format (the longest PLASTIC MAN stories were 15 pages in length).
It is interesting to note how Cole’s treatment of Ebony prefigures PLASTIC MAN’s sidekick, Woozy Winks. This story is the missing link between Ebony White and Woozy Winks, and shows the creative cross-pollination that happened between Jack Cole and Will Eisner.
A disclaimer is also necessary here. Cole’s depiction of Black Americans (thousands of which were off fighting for the United States in World War Two when this story was created) is inexcusable. We present this work here not to put anyone down, but to look at the artistic development of an important figure in American art.
I hope you enjoy FANNIE OGRE, a lost classic dug up for you from the Cole-mine!
 

IS THIS COLE? - The Spirit 186: Jack Cole's First Spirit Section?

Story presented in this post:
"Druce's Time Bomb" AKA "Death After Death" [Story and pencils by Jack Cole(?), inks by Robin King (?)]
Originally published as Spirit Section 186 (December 19, 1943)
Reprinted (version in this post) in The Spirit #2 (1945, Vital)

Here's another fun SPIRIT story that seems to bear the unmistakable stamp of Jack Cole's flair for mixing the macabre and the madcap. I'll share a few thoughts, but first, the story itself:

Jack Cole ghosted THE SPIRIT for Will Eisner during WWII. Eisner, like so many other American comic book writers and artists served in the military (in Eisner's case, the Army and even some time at the Pentagon).

In 1943-45, Cole was one of the few American comic book artists not working for the war effort. As such, he took on as much of the available extra work as he could, more than likely building up a cash reserve against the day he would be called up (he never was).

If "Druce's Time Bomb" AKA "Death After Death" is Cole's work, then it would be his first SPIRIT Sunday section.

Cole had been ghosting the SPIRIT daily comic strip for a few months (soon to be reprinted in this blog, stay tuned!). We know this because, according to comics publisher, scholar, and SPIRIT expert Cat Yronwode's research, Jack Cole wrote and penciled some of the Spirit Sunday Section stories from December 19, 1943 (section number 186) to Aug 13, 1944 (section number 220). See Yronwode's checklist, here.

The opening splash panel, if it is by Cole, certainly is a departure from his style. The fine line work suggests to me the hand of Lou Fine. However, the bottom tier on page one, and the rest of the story certainly feels like Jack Cole's trademark farrago of comically contorted figures.

The script idea is very much in the vein of the supernatural, eerie ghost story that Will Eisner frequently wrote for this series. However, it goes in a direction very different than where Eisner would have typically taken it. Cole goes for laughs where Eisner went for creeps. Still, it is possible that Cole worked on this first effort from notes, or a partial script written by Eisner.

There are a few "tells" in the artwork that Cole's hand is present in this story. Most notably is the polka-dotted green pants of the clown, very similar to WOOZY WINK's unforgettable costume.

Another tell is the use of the jagged-edge balloon to emphasize an exclamation. Here's a panel from this story, and several others, to compare.

Also, the over-the-top drawings of the terrified MIXIE (see the art at the top of this post) in the final pages feels very similar to Jack Cole's comically over-dramatic reactions regularly found in his PLASTIC MAN stories.

So there's my thoughts. The story originally appeared in The Spirit Section 186 (December 19, 1943). The version we present here, is the 1945 reprint, from The Spirit #2 (Vital).

The Spirit #2 cover (not by Cole)

So, what do you think, dear reader, is this Cole? Your thoughts are welcome!