I first came across the work of Jack Cole in the early 80's, I must have been 10 or 11. Discovering Cole's work at such a young age blew my mind. It was akin to my discovering 60's and 70's underground comix just a few years later, it totally blew the lid off of what I understood comic books could be.
Jack Cole began his career in the late 1930's supplying humor strips to various comic book companies during its slow rise on the pop culture spectrum. His first major work appeared in 1940 at Lev Gleason on the character Daredevil (More about that on a later post) but in 1941 his most famous and lasting character, Plastic Man, appeared as a backup feature in Police Comics #1 published by Quality Comics. After a few issues, it soon became apparent that Cole's backup strip was the star of the show and Plas graduated to cover feature and not too long after that he was awarded his own comic. The details of Cole's rise within the medium can be found elsewhere and written about in greater detail by better voices than I, but I can talk about the works I first encountered and what it meant to me.
In the '70s, Alan Light (Of Buyer's Guide "fame") published numerous reprints of golden age comics from the 1940s with color covers and black and white contents. As a kid whose mom drove him to many used bookstores in the late '70s and up through the mid-'80s, I was able to accrue a few of these reprints. The ones that stood out the most and affected my repressed Baptist South Georgia mind was Police Comics #1 (1941) and Plastic Man #1 (1943). Unlike the sanitized (but fun) super-hero comics on the stands in my youth, these comics were no holds barred acid trip mind-bending visual delights that also happen to be genuinely hilarious.
Police Comics #1 1941
Plastic Man #1 1943
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