MIDNIGHT RETURNS! Atomic Dice and Exquisite Layouts – Episode 1 (second run)

 Story This Post:
Midnight - “Atomic Dice”
Story and art by Jack Cole
Smash Comics #68
Dec., 1946

 

Before he invented PLASTIC MAN, Jack Cole created and lavished attention on MIDNIGHT, his first feature series for Quality comics. When the rubbery madness of PLASTIC MAN’s world caught on, Cole left MIDNIGHT to devote most of his energy to his breakout creation, which was granted an unusually generous 15 pages per story in POLICE COMICS.

After a four-year stretch (if you’ll pardon the pun), Jack Cole returned to MIDNIGHT for a glorious run of 19 stories that have been unseen and uncommented upon for over 60 years. I’m pleased to excavate these from the Cole-mine for you over the next few months. (If you’d like to read the earlier MIDNIGHT stories, look here.)

Many of Jack Cole’s second-run MIDNIGHT stories feature eye-popping art and design, convoluted stories, and regular touches of brilliance.

In terms of character, not much changed in the four years that PAUL GUSTAVSON owned the series. GUSTAVSON added a new character, the Woozy-Winks-like Sniffer Snoop, which Cole embraced and wrote as if he were Woozy Winks.

Cole returned triumphantly to his series with, “Atomic Dice,” a three-ring circus of a story – there seems to be more than one thing happening in almost every panel. In the four years he had been away from MIDNIGHT, Cole had matured into a master graphic storyteller. Many of the innovations he piloted in the early MIDNIGHT stories return here with polished flourishes, like the act of a seasoned magician.

For example, just look at the splash page and study how Cole positions groups of figures in the background and foreground in a strong diagonal to emphasize the movement. And, for the flourish, just look at the graceful, swirling, speed lines of the dangerous dice…

For this story, Cole returned to his tried and true formula of crazy inventions. But, this time, there are no rays that melt the ground, or freeze people into flavorful popsicles. There’s not even a vacuum gun. The invention this time reflected reality, perhaps indicating the more serious turn Cole – and the country – would take at the end of of the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Just as PLASTIC MAN was a covert satire of American life, this MIDNIGHT story reflects the onset of the Atomic Age in the “real” world. About a year earlier, the United States had unleashed atomic explosives on two cities in Japan, ending World War II.

Three years earlier, in 1943, Cole used dice as a design element in the splash of his lead story in PLASTIC MAN #1.

Cole’s art on this story is amazing. Consider this panel from page four, which already has a stunning layout without this elaborately-rendered house:

There’s the graceful plume of smoke again, by the way. But what really excites me about panels like this is how Cole breaks up time and space. Cole has shifted the camera angle to allow us to see one man entering while another is leaving, throwing the plot into high gear.

There are wonderful touches in the art throughout, such as the way Cole indicates the buildings with a field of white defined by a dark sky and shadows on the windows.

By the way, there’s 7 characters in this panel, each with distinctive body language. In fact, this is a classic Jack Cole panel, with speed, comically distorted bodies (as though the scene had been filmed with a high-speed camera and then freeze-framed for this one panel), graphic brilliance, and great dialogue, expertly lettered.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that if you have a gun on the mantelpiece in act 1, it must be fired before the play ends. Thus, being a master storyteller, Cole knew that if he introduced a devastating explosive device on page 1, he would have to have a massive explosion on the last page. Here’s the explosion, with the surrounding art removed.

 

Cole literally splits the page in half with one of his biggest sound effects ever (note the patented Jack Cole pointed exclamation mark). Even the letters in KABOOM! are cracking from the force! The explosion rocks the panel and throws the characters to the ground. Cole draws them as anonymous shadows… did he have Hiroshima and Nagasaki on his mind?

The wiggly panel borders were another Cole invention, used most famously in the needle-in-the-eye panel from “Murder, Morphine, and Me” (True Crime Comics Vol.1 #2, May 1947).

THE JERRY MORRIS CLAW STORIES – Dreamslaves and the fiery brilliance of youthful comic book invention

Stories in this post:

THE COMING OF THE CLAW
Story, art, lettering by Jack Cole
Silver Streak Comics #1
December, 1939
Lev Gleason

 

HIGHWAY OF ICE
Story, art, lettering by Jack Cole
Silver Streak Comics #2
January, 1940
Lev Gleason

 

 

In late 1939, Jack Cole got his first comic book to edit, Silver Streak Comics. The first two issues were filled with lackluster leftover Chesler shop stories, but no matter. The lead stories featured one of Cole’s most feverish creations: THE CLAW.

Cole developed THE CLAW for the next 10 issues, culminating in a 4-issue mash-up epic, “Daredevil Battles the Claw.” This inspired idea for expanding a story across issues and including the line’s best heroes and villains all in one story set the tone for the Golden Age era of comics.

The first two CLAW stories featured the “chemist-adventurer” JERRY MORRIS as the hero. After this, Cole would pit his gargantuan oriental nightmare against heroes who had superpowers. The first two CLAW stories are, in my opinion, pretty special.

JERRY MORRIS has no extraordinary physical powers, but he appears to have no fear and, best of all, he has the ability to create mind-boggling inventions. In Silver Streak #3, Cole would introduce an extraordinary, slightly auto-biographical story cycle about another inventor, DICKIE DEAN, BOY INVENTOR.

Crazy inventions were a major theme of Cole’s work, and a story device he turned to time and time again throughout his career.

In this first CLAW story, Jerry Morris invents a “radium serum” that makes him immune to the Claw’s ability to control others through their dreams. (See the post on “The Dictator of Dreams” from Police Comics #78, in which Cole returned to this idea as a mature artist).

 

The first CLAW story is filled with elements that would become obsessive mainstays of Cole’s work: fire and water, dark forces, dreams and the sub-conscious, and wild inventions.

In this story, both the hero and the villain have cool inventions. Cole devotes most of pages 8 and 9 to explain THE CLAW’s ingenious method for secretly stealing ships’ cargoes. Thus, THE CLAW’s power is built on both supernatural evil forces and modern technology!

In the second CLAW story, Cole takes a major leap forward as an artist. We move from the rather standard treatment of the Claw’s towering evil presence shown on page three in story one to the astonishingly weird and elegant pose of the villain on page 5 of the second story.

 

 

This story is one of Cole’s wildest ever, and that’s saying a lot. sheer imagination and quantity of the inventions alone is staggering. It’s not the inventions alone that make this story remarkable, but rather their unusual and poetic application.The idea of a car that can travel on top of the roaring ocean waves is a brilliant juxtaposition of modern technology and powerful natural forces. Cole would recycle this idea with a melting ray mounted on a car in a Midnight story a few years later.

This story ranks among the very best of Cole’s early stories, along with “Sounds From the Past” (Dickie Dean, Silver Streak Comics #3), “Wizard Ward and the Boat Race” (Quicksilver, National Comics #13), and the formally perfect fourth Midnight story from Smash Comics #21.

Much in the way Cole created the Plastic Man character out of an evil man, in an almost unconscious reversal of the typical formula, he started his own title without a featured hero and instead made the all-powerful occidental villain THE CLAW the focus of the book. Art Spiegelman said THE CLAW made Ming the Merciless look like Mother Theresa, and even that is an understatement!

The prime creators of the early Golden Age comics channeled the evil forces around them that were growing in power. In the second CLAW story, from 1940 (before the United States joined the war), Cole includes Hitler and Nazi Germany.

In these stories, Cole also showed his own inner demons and darkness. At the bottom of page 5 in story two, the page with the weirdly graceful pose of the villain, there is a vivid image of a suicide.

In some ways, this story, created early in Cole’s 16-year career in comics, is very similar to his last comic book story, “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill” (Web of Evil #11, 1954) also about a towering giant menace. The difference in the early CLAW stories and “The Monster They Couldn’t Kill,” is a shift in the way technology is viewed. In his last story, Cole’s giant monster is a scientist trying to accomplish something good, and in the end, he does this by killing himself…. a solution Cole would enact in his own life. In the early CLAW stories, however, Cole displays a wholehearted, youthful, fever-pitch enthusiasm for technology and the belief (for it is as much a belief system as any religion) that humanity can invent it’s way out of any crisis.

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!