Jack Cole's 1938 Screwball Comics

One spring morning in 1938, Jack Cole walked the 10 or 15 blocks from his Greenwich Village apartment to a broken down old five-story warehouse on West 23rd. On the street, trucks rattled by, and dozens of other people were entering similar buildings to run tiny little factories that made everything from clothes to hardware. The factory Cole reported to, the Harry "A" Chesler Shop, made comic books.

He took the rickety elevator up to the fourth floor, said good morning to his boss, Harry Chesler, who at at a desk just outside the elevator. Chesler, a stout, round-faced man, was wearing a vest with a watch chain, a derby, and smoking a cigar.  Cole walked past him into the large rented room in which several artists were already hard at work, hunched over their drawing boards. "Good morning Fred. Bob. Charlie." Cole greeted a few of his colleagues and sat down to work.

This is how I imagine the scenario of Cole's first months drawing comics. He had moved to New York City in late 1937 or early 1938 with his wife, Dorothy. Cole had come to New York to establish himself as a magazine gag cartoonist. He had managed to break in to several top markets, most notably Collier's and Judge. And he was selling regularly to Boy's Life. But his progress was too slow and he was running out of money and time. He very likely answered an ad in the New York Times, and found himself working for Harry "A" Chesler, an entrepreneur who hired artists to create comic book stories that he then sold to publishers.

Over his first few months at the Chesler Studio in early 1938, Cole began to develop into a comic book artist, moving from gaga panels and spot illustrations to one- and two-page sequential narratives. In spring or early summer of 1938, Chesler was hired by Quality COmics (Cole's future employer) to produce an advertising giveaway book for them. the book, The Cocomalt Big Book of Comics, was printed around August 1938, and featured several of Cole's early pages. It's possible that Cole was even hired by Chesler to be the art director of the book, which could account for the use of so much of his material as compared to other artists.

Cocomalt was a powdery vitamin additive to milk. Mothers in the 1930's and 40's were urged to save their children from malnutrition with a steady diet of the "sunlight vitamin." The product vanished from the shelves of American grocery markets sometime in the 1950's, well before I landed on this crazy lump of coal we call Earth. Reportedly, Cocomalt was as hard to mix with milk as oil with water.

Nevertheless, it must have been a popular product, due, if nothing else, to a hefty advertising budget. Cocomalt sponsored radio shows, buried cool Buck Rogers paper ray guns in the canisters of powder, and gave away numerous free premiums.

The Cocomalt Big Book of Comics was one such premium, published in 1938, and by Quality Publications (although no publisher, or month is listed anywhere on the book). The cover of the book is by Charles Biro, and features radio star Joe Penner. I'm just guessing here, but probably Cocomalt sponsored Penner's radio show.

When I wrote about this book a few years ago, I missed some of Cole's art in the book, and attributed work done by others to him. After years of study, I've developed a better "eye" for Cole's art, and can now correct the record.

Cole's first page in the book is a one-pager called "Insurance Ike." It appears that Cole did not create this character, since there are earlier episodes published before Cole joined the Chesler shop. This page is filled with Cole's life. The dialogue Ike has with his reflection in the mirror may have been a reflection of how Cole was feeling about his life at the time, as he struggled to make it as a cartoonist.

I've written more on this page and Cole's 1938 work  in my latest column, Framed! for The Comics Journal. You can find it here.

In his next page, Cole draws radio comedian Joe Penner. The first panel is a pun in Penner's name. In true screwball comics fashion, Cole uses a lot of funny background signs in this page. The cigar smoking duck sidekick in panel two is a winner -- one wishes Cole had used this character more.

Cole's next contribution in the Cocomalt book is a two-page King Kole's Kourt. Despite the play on Cole's name, this was a series that Chesler had run since 1935, long before Jack Cole came along. Again, the subject matter Cole chooses is concerned with meeting expenses.

I missed this years ago, but Cole provides some great illustrations for three pages of sheet music. The song is co-written by Joe Penner. This may be the only instance of Cole providing spot art for sheet music.There are lots of great screwball gags worked into the art, including inverted coo coo calls from cuckoo birds.

Cole also leans on his experience creating magazine gag panels. In the "Myrth-Parade" one-pager, he contributes three gags:  panels two, three, and six. Panel six features an early sexy girl. Panel one appears to  be by Bob Wood, and panel five is by Fred Schwab. Panel four may be a collaboration between Jack Cole and Fred Schwab.

Cole's last contribution to The Cocomal Big Book of Comics is another gag panel. The fourth panel in this page is by Cole, with the other panels being by other Chesler artists (that's Fred Schwab in panel two).

It's intriguing to think that the Cocomalt Big Book of Comics was Cole's first editing job, but we probably will never really know for sure. What we can be sure of is that, within a few months of joining the Harry "A" Chesler shop, Cole was already standing out with comics that were highly original and invested with manic comic energy.

For more about Jack Cole's 1938 work with Chesler, see my new Comics Journal article, The Lost Comics of Jack Cole - Part Two (1938).

Thanks for reading,

Paul Tumey

The Evolution of the Cole Female: Jack Cole's Early Magazine Cartoons 1938-45

Jack Cole fans know the story about how he left Plastic Man and comic books in 1954 adroitly stretching into a successful new career as Playboy magazine's first signature cartoonist. 


Despite appearances, Jack Cole's mastery of magazine cartoons - a vastly different form than the multi-page comic book story that Cole spent 16 years developing -- did not happen overnight. In fact Cole started out as a magazine cartoonist and continued to sell cartoons to various publications from 1938-45, while he was also developing a career in comic books.

Here's a look at a few of those early magazine cartoons, the result of hours of digging. Many thanks to Ger Apeldoorn, who found four of these rare items and first published them on his Fabulous Fifties blog.

In a 1956 Freelancer article (the first page of which is shown above), Jack Cole wrote about his early efforts as a magazine cartoonist:

"Here a buck -- there a buck --- I tried style after style until I finally sold one cartoon to Gurney Williams, then at Collier's Magazine."

The Freelancer article reprints that cartoon, but without the tagline. After much digging, I've finally located Jack Cole's first sale to Collier's Weekly! Here's the page it appeared on:

Collier's Magazine - August 27, 1938
Jack Cole's first cartoon sale to Collier's

 And here's the cartoon:

Collier's Magazine - August 27, 1938
Jack Cole's first cartoon sale to Collier's

It's important to note that, while this was a big event for Jack, it was not his first sale. By this time, he had already sold over a dozen cartoons to Boy's Life magazine. See my article on Jack Cole's Boy's Life cartoons for nearly 2 dozen delightful early works by the master!

During the 1940s, Gurney Williams -- the cartoon editor that Cole mentioned in his Freelancer article -- was the cartoon editor for Collier's, American Magazine and Woman's Home Companion, paying $40 to $150 for each cartoon. From a staggering stack of some 2000 submissions each week, Williams made a weekly selection of 30 to 50 cartoons, lamenting


"The other day I found myself staring at the millionth cartoon submitted to me since I became humor editor here. I wish it could have been fresh and original. Instead, it showed several ostriches with their heads buried in the sand. Two others stood nearby. Said one to the other: 'Where is everybody?' "  (Time Magazine, August 12, 1946)

A sale to Collier's in 1938 was an auspicious start for any new cartoonist, including Jack Cole. At the time, Gurney Williams was publishing cartoons by such greats as Otto Soglow:

Collier's - Jan 8, 1938 - Otto Soglow

William Steig:

Collier's - Feb 4, 1939 - William Steig

And Charles Addams:

Colliers - June 10, 1939 - Charles Addams

Cole's first sale to Collier's is drawn in a completely different style than his Plastic Man and Playboy work.

It's a loose, fragmented, agitated brush style. The eyeballs of the characters are black raisins. His first Collier's cartoon has an air of freshness about it that went beyond the visual style itself. The joke is genuinely funny and character-driven.  We feel that we know this sweet, old-fashioned dowager personally and find it amusing that she thinks an airmail letter is an adventure. 


It's interesting to note that the man who would become the creator of some of the sexiest cartoons for men's magazines ever drawn started out with a charmingly innocent cartoon featuring an elderly spinster.


It's also worthwhile to note the details Cole has stuffed into this small, narrow cartoon: the silhouette portraits on the wall that bespeak of a graceful time of the past, the antique grandfather clock, and especially the adorable cat blending into the rug at bottom left -- very similar to one Plastic Man's first tricks:

Police Comics #1, August 1941

Another golden age comic artist, Hal Sherman (known for his early 40s work at DC on Dr. Fate), also had a sale to Collier's around the same time, indicating that the twin trajectories of Jack Cole's careers in magazine cartoons and comic books was not totally unique:

Collier's - March 11, 1939 - Hal Sherman

I've scoured the pages of Collier's Weekly from 1938-1940, and turned up just one more Jack Cole cartoon - one that has been "lost," until now:

Collier's - May 20, 1939 - Jack Cole

Note this cartoon is in the exact same modernistic bush style as Cole's first Collier's sale. Here we have a man, a woman, and a toaster. The woman resembles nothing of the sexy "estrogen souffles" that Cole would become famous creating for Playboy and Humorama (as "Jake"). There is nothing sexy about this woman at all, but it may not be for lack of trying. The decorative hat and veil suggest feminine energy, and foreshadow the filigree touches Cole would use in his Jake and Playboy cartoons. In fact, she seems to be wearing the same old-fashioned clothes as the spinster in the earlier cartoon!

 Evidently - and rightfully so -- Cole thought toasters were funny. he created another toaster joke in 1955:

Mirth, 1955 - Jack Cole

Jumping back in time a little, here's another cartoon sale Jack made in 1938, this time to Judge -- another one of those "buck here, buck there" events:

Note the different signature, which is closer to Cole's Boy's Life cartoons of the period. The art style is a less aggressive version of the loose brushwork. The gag is solid, and... what's this? A nurse? yes, a nurse that once again is nothing close to the sexy nurses and women Jack Cole would later turn out like a man possessed, such as in this 1944 comic book story:

Military Comics 30 - July, 1944 - Jack Cole

Jack Cole was considerably more innocent in his younger years and earlier cartoons. His drawing abilities were evolving rapidly, with uneven results. He leaned toward a goofy, screwball sense of humor in his work, such as in this unidentified delightful Rube-Goldberg-style lunch counter scene:

Or in this pair of cartoons from a 1942 issue of the over-sized Gags magazine, which appear to be chopped up to make room for blocks of copy:

Gags Magazine, 1942 - Jack Cole

Gags Magazine, 1942 - Jack Cole

Even as late as 1945, while he was a master in comic books, Cole was still struggling to master the gag cartoon -- especially the sexually loaded cartoon, as in this example from Judge, which -- oddly -- has the same left-leaning pose as the dental cartoon above!

Judge - December, 1945 - Jack Cole

This may have been Cole's first published wash cartoon. By now, some 7 years after the non-sexy Collier's and Judge cartoons of 1938, Cole has developed a desire to depict sexy women in his work. Yet, he hasn't quite got it. This drawing is too labored over and wooden to be appealing. It contains only hints of the greatness to come. Compare the 1945 Judge cartoon above with this masterful wash composition from sometime in the early 1950's:

Jack Cole 'Jake" cartoon reprinted in 1962 Humorama publication

It's interesting to me, though, to note that Cole hasn't thrown away his desire to draw little swirly filigree abstract designs to suggest sexual excitement and feminine energy, in the same spirit as the woman's veil in his 1939 Collier's cartoon:

It's the same idea we find in the mouth-watering Humorama cartoon above, just done about a thousand times better.

++++

Jack Cole In The News:

Silver Streak 6 on the Auction Block

A key Jack Cole comic is at auction on Ebay. Currently, the bid is $1,000.00. The auction ends Feb 12, 201211:15:10 PST.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Silver-Streak-6-Classic-Jack-Cole-cover-Origin-Daredevil-Claw-returns-/160730014101

UPDATE: The book sold for $1,447 sheckles!

All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey

Insane Comics: 3 Rare Jack Cole Stories From 1938

Presenting 7 pages of rare Jack Cole comics from late 1938!

Funny Pages Volume 2, issue 11 (November, 1938) featured a panoply of Jack Cole's screwball stories. At the time, Cole was working for the Harry "A" Chelser studio in New York. Sometime in 1936, Jack borrowed some money from various merchants in his home town of New Castle, PA and moved to New York to start a career as a cartoonist. After a year of near starvation, Cole connected with the Chesler studio, which was packaging original comic book content to meet the growing demand for comics.

Cole's work of this time is very much influenced by the "screwball" school of newspaper comics, most famously represented by Bill Holman (Smokey Stover), Dr. Seuss, and Gene Ahern (Nut Brothers, Squirrel Cage). Here's a typical example of Ahern's Nut Brothers (written and drawn by someone other than Ahern who had left the NEA syndicate about three years earlier). This strip shows the screwball school in fine form around the time Jack Cole entered comics (note the Napoleon hat in panel 3) :

Jack Cole's determined screwball approach is certainly evident in his Nutty Fagin one-pager in Funny Pages Vol. 2, issue 11 (November, 1938):

Note that Jack Cole signs this page "Sassafrass." As far as I know, this is the single occurrence of this particular pen name. Other pen names Jack Cole used were: Richard Bruce, Ralph Johns, and Jake. 

One thing that strikes me about this page is the bold pattern of the crepe paper bunting that adorns the speaker's podium, and the pattern of polka dots on Fagin's boxer shorts. Over the course of his 16-year career creating hundreds of  comic book stories, Jack Cole would expertly use patterns to add visual appeal to his work over and over.

Another screwball artist that I suspect was a huge influence on Cole was Milt Gross. The energy and zaniness, as well as the sheer love of distorting the human figure that is so evident in Gross' comics must have inspired Jack Cole. Here's a couple of Milt Gross Sunday comics from 1931, when Jack Cole was 16 years old and starting to learn to cartoon.

Next we find a rare example  of Jack Cole drawing the extremely non-PC "Cheerio Minstrels" two-pager series that seems to have been quite popular at the time, judging by how many Centaur comics have it. I think the "cheerio" concept was probably a core idea for Chesler. Here's the cover to one of his earliest publications, a newspaper Sunday magazine insert called Cheerio from January, 1936:

Note that, among the listed comics inside, we have "Cheerio Hotel" (and also "King Kole's Kourt," appearing before Jack Cole joined the studio -- which confirms that Cole's later episodes of the strip were a happy coincidence, and that he was not the originator of the comic). The Cheerio Minstrels  format was always a trio of African Americans singing a song in a sort of comic book version of a vaudeville minstrel routine. Cole's treatment is a shifting filmstrip of insanity:

Observe, if you will, how, in the bottom of page one, Cole pneumatically propels the characters around the panel. This exaggerated movement is another element Cole would develop, particularly in his Plastic Man stories. In fact, Cole recycled the fourth panel on page 2, with the arm amputation with a saw, in his first Woozy Winks story (Police Comics 13):

Last, but far from least, is a zany 4-page story by Jack Cole, Smart Alec, in which the main character is resplendently adorned with reverse polka dot trousers. I particularly love the wonderful 2-panel spread at the bottom of page 3. I don't have a lot to say about this material, but just wanted to share it! Enjoy!

A big thank you to Digital Comics Museum and scanner "dsdaboss" for these marvelous scans!

All text copyright 2012 Paul C. Tumey

Jack Cole's Roots: A Rare Wild Early Comic Story and a Documentary!

Jack Cole's work had -- and continues to have -- appeal in part because his work is a heady combination of screwball comedy and the darker side of human nature. It's a mix that shouldn't work, but somehow this one great cartoonist pulled it together.

The Landon School of Cartooning was a prime influence on Jack Cole's development as a screwball, "bigfoot" cartoonist, as we've previously noted.

Below, you'll find an informative and insightful 2009 10-minute documentary  well worth watching about the Landon School and it's influence. The documentary, produced by Enchanted Images, Inc., notes that Jack Cole, among many other notable American cartoonists, took the 28 lessons of Landon School of Cartooning's correspondence.

The documentary, created by artist and writer John Garvin at Enchanted Images (check out his new book, After Carl Barks), points out that the Landon course presented a practical approach to newspaper cartooning, so that "a young kid, working from home, could become a famous cartoonist with nothing more than Landon's lessons, some pen and ink, paper, sweat, and a little talent."

According to Jim Steranko's History of Comics Volume 2, Jack Cole did just that. Seeing an ad for the course, Cole asked his father, who was a hard-working father of 6, to pay for the course. When his Dad refused, the endlessly inventive Cole found a way. He began to sneak down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and quietly make a sandwich to take to school the next day. Cole smuggled the sandwiches to school in a hollowed-out textbook. In this way, Cole was able to save up his lunch money and eventually pay for the course, which, according to Cole's colleague and editor at Quality, Gill Fox, cost around $8 -- or $20 if you wanted to send your work in and get Landon's notes on it.

Garvin's documentary explains how Landon's method of cartooning differed from previous approaches and textbooks on cartooning. Instead of basing the figure drawings on a careful study of human anatomy, Landon developed a way to create humorous pen-and-ink drawings of people with stick figures and basic shapes. It seems to me that learning to cartoon using the Landon method may have freed Cole (and others) from focusing on representational images, allowing him to stretch and distort his figures, as he did so brilliantly, particularly in his Plastic Man stories.




In 1937, Cole created a rather brilliant one-sheet summation of the Landon approach to cartooning:



It's my theory that Cole may have created this one-sheet to self-publish and sell to make a few bucks. In 1937, he had moved from his home town in New Castle, PA to the big city -- New York -- with his new wife, to make a career. This instant cartooning course may have been an attempt by Cole to create an income. If so, it appears to be the only known time that Cole dallied with publishing, as the rest of his known career was as a freelancer and staff artist.

Here's a wonderful 4-page Jack Cole comic book story, appearing for the first time in this blog. It's taken from Ron Goulart's book, Focus on Jack Cole, hence the black and white printing. The influence of the Landon School of Cartooning is very evident in this early work by Jack Cole:

Star Ranger Funnies #1 (December, 1938 - Centaur)

Lest you think this is just too danged weird, a mainstream US television show watched by millions built an episode around a similar concept. "The Darling Baby" from The Andy Griffith Show has the 10-year old Opie Taylor (Ron Howard) narrowly escaping wedlock to a 3-month old baby. It's just them mountain folks' ways, I reckon! You can read a second HOME IN THE OZARKS story, in full color, by Cole from one year later, here.

Cole's cartoon work here is loose and fast, and delightful. The baby reminds me of Swee'Pea, from  Segar's Popeye, another prime influence on Jack Cole.

Cole, by all accounts, was a funny guy. In an Alter Ego interview from a few years ago, Alex Kotzky, a terrific cartoonist who worked with Cole on Plastic Man and the True Crime comics, provides a fascinating insight into Cole's demeanor: "You know who Willard Scott is? Physically, Jack could have been his twin brother. And he was the type of jokester that  Willard Scott is."



Enchanted Images, the creator of the informative documentary, has brought the Landon course back into print, and you can buy it from them for $24.95 at their website.