Jack Cole and Plastic Man And Me!

Forms Stretched to Their Limits - Jack Cole and Plastic Man is an absolutely fascinating book, as unique as any I own, at once fascinating, bizarre, and abundantly vivid.

This book published in 2001 by Chronicle Books and designed by the creative and sometimes controversial Chip Kidd offers up vintage Plastic Man comic book stories and others created by the late great Jack Cole blended in with an essay written by Art Spiegelman for The New Yorker a few years before.  You can read that essay (minus the art) here. That essay is presented on actual pages of plastic, the very stuff which gave Cole's hero his name.

Spiegelman reveals his lifelong fascination with the work of Cole, which dubs among the most peculiar and weirdly compelling in the long history of comics and a significant influence on the creators of MAD who followed him. Spiegelman's essay follows along the broad contours of Cole's comic book career, following him from his early days in the Harry "A" Chesler shop and later over to Busy Arnold's Quality Comics line where he eventually created his signature hero Plastic Man. The success, both financially and artistically made Cole's reputation, Plastic Man made him famous.

His stint on True Crime Comics and in particular a yarn called "Murder, Morphine, and Me" made him infamous when a panel from that story became an evocative bit of evidence for Dr. Frederic Wertham in his notorious Seduction of the Innocent. That story is included here and is some relentless reading.

(Like they say in the travel folders, Miss Duncan -- "Getting there is half the fun.")

After leaving comics, Cole found enormous success as a cartoonist both with a syndicated strip and with Playboy magazine. But that didn't stop his successful attempt at suicide on a dusty road in 1958. The causes of Cole's suicide are unknown, and this essay doesn't answer the question, but reading such a heartfelt reflection on the life and career of Jack Cole gave me more empathy for an artist who despite success many in his field could only dream of did not find the peace of mind he needed.

But Plastic Man will not die. The pliable hero who has survived the passing of his creator, the demise of his original comic book company and the cancellation of all of his self-titled series to date. Plastic Man was one of the originals, created by Jack Cole for Quality Comics, there was little chance that this superhero was going to be considered a Superman knock-off.

His ability to transform his ductile body into anything and his beginnings a criminal all gave Plas a distinction found in no other series.

A cavalcade of dandy artists have tried to evoke that Cole magic over the decades in the many attempts to restart Plastic Man's career, among them Gil Kane, Ramona Fradon and a personal favorite of mine Joe Staton. Plas is a hero who is fun, but to be successful cannot be treated like a joke.

Now I have to confess that I first encountered Plastic Man in a vintage issue of The Brave and the Bold and to be honest I didn't fully understand the character. I was confused and thought he was made of plastic, and didn't realize until later that the work "plastic" meant pliable in shape and that the character nearly pre-dates the widespread use of the stuff which has in many ways defined the modern world. I bet I'm not the only one to make that error.

Plastic Man really confused me when I was a mere tyro reading comics in those halcyon days of the late 60's. He'd show up now and again in an issue of The Brave and the Bold or maybe House of Mystery and he even had his own series for a time, but he never seemed to be a real part of the DC Universe, always an oddball. I'd read the Golden Age origin story in The Great Comic Book Heroes and knew he was a reformed criminal, so maybe that had something to do with it.  

I stumbled across the amazing parody in some MAD reprint or other. I have it several times over now. Fantastic work by Russ Heath and Harvey Kurtzman. 

DC revived Plastic Man's comic in 1976, this time drawn by the more than capable Ramona Fradon. 

But I really fell in love the zany character when Joe Staton illustrated his adventures in the pages of Adventure Comics. 

Staton along with Nicola Cuti had created E-Man some years before, a hero at least in part inspired by Plastic Man. Here are some Groovy splash pages. 

DC has worked off and on over the many years to kickstart a Plastic Man series. Kyle Baker's version is often cited as a highlight. 

Anyway, despite all this, I was more than a bit surprised when he got his own cartoon show. Nonetheless I remember it as a passably entertaining animated adventure of its time with a heavy emphasis on humor and with all the travails of limited television cartooning.

Anyway, despite all this, I was more than a bit surprised when he got his own cartoon show. Nonetheless I remember it as a passably entertaining animated adventure of its time with a heavy emphasis on humor and with all the travails of limited television cartooning.

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Of Maus And Meta-Maus!

Yesterday was a certain lunatic dictator's birthday. To commemorate this asshole's entry into the world, I give you Art Spiegelman's Maus, one of the most powerful examinations and indictments of the Holocaust in comics form. I've re-read Maus, but this time with insights gleaned from reading MetaMaus, a tome which gathers together sundry interviews and other materials pertinent to the creation. 

This time I read the collected Maus. MetaMaus is keyed to this volume and page numbers are specific to this collection book. It's only been a few years since I read and commented on this story, but current events push me to engage with it again. I wonder how my feelings will change when the oppressions depicted in the story are similar to those we might feel today. 

Art Spiegelman's Maus - A Survivor's Tale is one of the most brutally frank comics I've ever read. Spiegelman is not only intent on relating the dreadful details of his father's survival of the Nazi regime's attempt to exterminate the Jews in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, but he shows what effect that bloody campaign had on the survivors of the genocide. His father was one such survivor and the man Vladek Spiegelman is presented as a fully rounded character, a man with grit and capacity for love, but a man who is overwhelmed by his need to be prepared for the next time the Jews come under assault. This need expresses itself in his miserly approach to life which makes him a challenging person to live with. Spiegelman does not attribute all of Vadek's stingy ways on his war experience, but increasingly as the story unfolds before us in chapter after chapter, we see that had Vladek been someone else, he and his wife might not have lived through the horror of Auschwitz. And we also can tell that the survival has also had a toll on Vladek 's spirit. The story follows Vladek's and Anja's story as they see the rise of the Nazi regime and attempt to survive and later hide from the predations. They are ultimately unsuccessful, and the story leaves off as they are both ultimately captured and sent to join their people in Hitler's death camps. 

Maus was originally produced in six chapters spread over six issues of the comic magazine RAW. RAW produced a new issue annually for the most part and so the saga of Maus was begun by Spiegelman in issue number two of RAW in 1980. And each issue and year after that until the final installment of what became part one of the saga was published in RAW#7 in 1985. The story was then collected and published by Pantheon Books as Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986. When a sequel was finished some years later the title was lengthened to Maus - A Survivor's Tale Part I My Father Bleeds History. (We'll get around to Part II next week.) 

Spiegelman is attempting some complex things in this story. He simultaneously wants to detail the horrors of the Holocaust as seen first-hand through his father's eyes. In addition, he wants to show the relationship between himself and his father which is rocky at best. Spiegelman's mother Anja had committed suicide some years before and his father had remarried to a woman named Mala. Spiegelman also had a brother who was killed during the Holocaust, and he seems to suffer from having been compared all his life to this ideal brother who never grew up. It's clear that guilt and angst are wide and deep inside the family and getting an understanding of that dysfunction seems to be Spiegelman's ultimate goal in pushing his father for details of the WWII atrocities. 

Maus also makes an interesting choice, one which I'm sure has made for its long-lasting reputation and that is to use the tried-and-true comic book convention of using intelligent animals to stand in for human beings. Whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or Huckleberry Hound, we respond to this idea with eagerness, and it allows for the crimes and horrors to be shown with a degree of separation which oddly allows them to bypass our defense mechanisms to no see horror. It seems we understand immediately that certain animals can represent certain kinds of people, perhaps too easily. Spiegelman has drawn criticism for using pigs to represent non-Jewish Poles and cats to represent the Nazis. But it only makes sense in a universe in which the oppressed Jews are seen as Mice. The seeming slow but steady progress by the Nazis to eradicate the Jews is presented at one level in the story as literally a "cat-and-mouse" game. 

Given this trope, it's easy to understand why some folks who are careless in their thinking and lazy in their reading might jump to a conclusion that the treatment is inappropriate for kids. Funny animal comics are the very essence of kid's stuff, but this is a different animal story which ain't all that funny after all. The Tennessee school board which banned Maus from its classrooms only succeeded in making sure that more people were aware of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning work and that sales flew through the roof. Their objections to the work are laughable and it seems clear that these folks want their children to grow up free of the moral dilemma the Holocaust presents to all modern peoples. They are derelict in their responsibility both to the students under their care and to history itself which requires that we remember the evil which is done, so that the chances of that evil reviving is minimized. 

The publication of Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986 was one of the markers that comics had grown up into a fully mature narrative form. The splendid creativity and diversity sparked by the advances of the direct sales market meant that while comic books diminished as a mass market entertainment they had in place become fully realized art. Art Spiegelman had hit a home run in the field, book that defied the conventional attempts to categorize it and which functioned equally well as both biographical and autobiographical and which used outsized metaphor to drive home themes that much of a broad audience might reject in a less user-friendly format. 

 

But Spiegelman was not finished. The first chapter of the second volume of the story which would become known as Maus - A Survivor's Tale II - And Here My Troubles Began was first published in the eighth and final issue of RAW magazine where the first part had been serialized. There is a jump in the framing narrative which we'd been following about Spiegelman trying to get the story of his father Vladek's survival of the Holocaust when we learn that Vladek has died. Part of the angst seen in Maus is that of Spiegelman himself who was tortured by his demanding father and the suicide of his mother in 1968. He made it quite clear in the story that he blamed her death on his father and his unyielding pressure about money and other details of daily life. Working through this anger with the help of his wife Francoise Mouly is part of the story we must also consider. 

This story has Vladek and his wife Anja captured at last after many long months of avoiding the Nazis. They are sent to the death camps, and we follow Vladek as we lose touch with Anja's story. There is intense frustration on Spiegelman's part about this aspect of the story since his father had destroyed his wife's diaries about the events of the Holocaust. So, we are left with only Vladek's story, and we see that he survived the camps by good fortune and savvy working of personalities and resources. The Jews in the camps are beaten and killed and summarily marched to their deaths by a regime that seemed all too intent on this singular proposition. From the perspective of this story WWII seems much less about tactical decisions on the battlefield and all about the singular mania which demanded that Jews everywhere be put to death, that all things Jewish be absorbed or obliterated. There was little distinction between man and woman or adult and child, all were subject to perhaps the most organized and banal genocide in human history. 

While we follow Vladek's journey in the camps and then out again where the danger is no less intense it seems, we see the horrors of Nazi regime and the war it perpetrated reflected in individuals and their losses. They might be mice and cats and pigs and dogs as rendered by Spiegelman but never does the forget that these are people suffering in stunningly brutal ways. Sudden violent death was a commonplace and only relentless effort and luck could stave it off.  By the end of this second tale, we have followed Vladek not only from Auschwitz to Sweden to New York to Florida and to New York again, we have seen one old and tortured soul who longs for connection with his son but cannot give of himself long enough to find it. There is no happy ending in Maus - Survivor's Tale, just an ending of sorts. Survival is a story that never ends and travels from generation to generation for all time as tragically we are learning again today. 

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MAUS A Survivor's Tale - Part Two!

The publication of Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986 was one of the markers that comics had grown up into a fully mature narrative form. The splendid creativity and diversity sparked by the advances of the direct sales market meant that while comic books diminished as a mass market entertainment they had in place become fully realized art. Art Spiegelman had hit a home run in the field, book that defied the conventional attempts to categorize it and which functioned equally well as both biographical and autobiographical and which used outsized metaphor to drive home themes that much of a broad audience might reject in a less user-friendly format. 

 

But Spiegelman was not finished. The first chapter of the second volume of the story which would become known as Maus - A Survivor's Tale II - And Here My Troubles Began was first published in the eighth and final issue of RAW magazine where the first part had been serialized. There is a jump in the framing narrative which we'd been following about Spiegelman trying to get the story of his father Vladek's survival of the Holocaust when we learn that Vladek has died. Part of the angst seen in Maus is that of Spiegelman himself who was tortured by his demanding father and the suicide of his mother in 1968. He made it quite clear in the story that he blamed her death on his father and his unyielding pressure about money and other details of daily life. Working through this anger with the help of his wife Francoise Mouly is part of the story we must also consider. 

This story has Vladek and his wife Anja captured at last after many long months of avoiding the Nazis. They are sent to the death camps, and we follow Vladek as we lose touch with Anja's story. There is intense frustration on Spiegelman's part about this aspect of the story since his father had destroyed his wife's diaries about the events of the Holocaust. So we are left with only Vladek's story, and we see that he survived the camps by good fortune and savvy working of personalities and resources. The Jews in the camps are beaten and killed and summarily marched to their deaths by a regime that seemed all too intent on this singular proposition. From the perspective of this story WWII seems much less about tactical decisions on the battlefield and all about the singular mania which demanded that Jews everywhere be put to death, that all things Jewish be absorbed or obliterated. There was little distinction between man and woman or adult and child, all were subject to perhaps the most organized and banal genocide in human history. 

While we follow Vladek's journey in the camps and then out again where the danger is no less intense it seems, we see the horrors of Nazi regime and the war it perpetrated reflected in individuals and their losses. They might be mice and cats and pigs and dogs as rendered by Spiegelman but never does the forget that these are people suffering in stunningly brutal ways. Sudden violent death was a commonplace and only relentless effort and luck could stave it off.  By the end of this second tale, we have followed Vladek not only from Auschwitz to Sweden to New York to Florida and to New York again, we have seen one old and tortured soul who longs for connection with his son but cannot give of himself long enough to find it. There is no happy ending in Maus - Survivor's Tale, just an ending of sorts. Survival is a story that never ends and travels from generation to generation for all time. 

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MAUS A Survivor's Tale - Part One!

Art Spiegelman's Maus - A Survivor's Tale is one of the most brutally frank comics I've ever read. Spiegelman is not only intent on relating the dreadful details of his father's survival of the Nazi regime's attempt to exterminate the Jews in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, but he shows what effect that bloody campaign had on the survivors of the genocide. His father was one such survivor and the man Vladek Spiegelman is presented as a fully rounded character, a man with grit and capacity for love, but a man who is overwhelmed by his need to be prepared for the next time the Jews come under assault. This need expresses itself in his miserly approach to life which makes him a challenging person to live with. Spiegelman does not attribute all of Vadek's stingy ways on his war experience, but increasingly as the story unfolds before us in chapter after chapter, we see that had Vladek been someone else, he and his wife might not have lived through the horror of Aushwitz. And we also can tell that the survival has also had a toll on Vladek 's spirit. The story follows Vladek's and Anja's story as they see the rise of the Nazi regime and attempt to survive and later hide from the predations. They are ulitmately unsuccessful and the story leaves off as they are both ultimately captured and sent to join their people in Hitler's death camps. 

Maus was originally produced in six chapters spread over six issues of the comic magazine RAW. RAW produced a new issue annually for the most part and so the saga of Maus was begun by Spiegelman in issue number two of RAW in 1980. And each issue and year after that until the final installment of what became part one of the saga was published in RAW#7 in 1985. The story was then collected and published by Pantheon Books as Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986. When a sequel was finished some years later the title was lengthened to Maus - A Survivor's Tale Part I My Father Bleeds History. (We'll get around to Part II next week.) 

Spiegelman is attempting some complex things in this story. He simultaneously wants to detail the horrors of the Holocaust as seen first-hand through his father's eyes. In addition, he wants to show the relationship between himself and his father which is rocky at best. Spiegelman's mother Anja had committed suicide some years before and his father had remarried to a woman named Mala. Spiegelman also had a brother who was killed during the Holocaust, and he seems to suffer from having been compared all his life to this ideal brother who never grew up. It's clear that guilt and angst are wide and deep inside the family and getting an understanding of that dysfunction seems to be Spiegelman's ultimate goal in pushing his father for details of the WWII atrocities. 

Maus also makes an interesting choice, one which I'm sure has made for its long-lasting reputation and that is to use the tried-and-true comic book convention of using intelligent animals to stand in for human beings. Whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or Huckleberry Hound, we respond to this idea with eagerness, and it allows for the crimes and horrors to be shown with a degree of separation which oddly allows them to bypass our defense mechanisms to no see horror. It seems we understand immediately that certain animals can represent certain kinds of people, perhaps too easily. Spiegelman has drawn criticism for using pigs to represent non-Jewish Poles and cats to represent the Nazis. But it only makes sense in a universe in which the oppressed Jews are seen as Mice. The seeming slow but steady progress by the Nazis to eradicate the Jews is presented at one level in the story as literally a "cat-and-mouse" game. 

Given this trope, it's easy to understand why some folks who are careless in their thinking and lazy in their reading might jump to a conclusion that the treatment is inappropriate for kids. Funny animal comics are the very essence of kid's stuff, but this is a different animal story which ain't all that funny after all. The Tennessee school board which banned Maus from its classrooms only succeeded in making sure that more people were aware of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning work and that sales flew through the roof. Their objections to the work are laughable and it seems clear that these folks want their children to grow up free of the moral dilemma the Holocaust presents to all modern peoples. They are derelict in their responsibility both to the students under their care and to history itself which requires that we remember the evil which is done, so that the chances of that evil reviving is minimized. 

Next week we follow Vladek and Anja into the camps of Aushwitz and Birkenau.

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Of Maus And Fighting Men!

"Young people want to learn, they are thirsty for knowledge, they want to understand and remember." - Elie Wiesel

Art Spiegelman's Maus has been on the racks for nearly forty years. It was one of the most important early attempts by any comic creator to do something profound in the then new longform of the graphic novel. I have owned a copy of it since the early 90's and have shoved it in the face of my daughters, not for a moment thinking they might be so sensitive as to be confused by naked mice. Maus is a dynamic memoir that presents and reflects on the Holocaust, the intentional attempt by the Nazi regime to obliterate the Jews from the planet Earth. To that end they dehumanized them, arrested them, transported them, hanged them, shot them, and gassed them with a brutal efficiency and coldness of spirit that still haunts the soul. The recent furor over the teaching of Maus in a Tennessee middle school has brought Spiegelman's great artistic work to the fore once again and reminds us all yet again that we must be vigilant. 

As it turns out comics have been quite outspoken about the Holocaust as revealed in the book We Spoke Out - Comic Books and the Holocaust. The stories in this outstanding collection will be represented during the weekdays here at the Dojo. There are many different stories from many decades by a wide range of creators both famous and ignored. 

On the weekends I will take a closer look at some graphic novels which have used the Holocaust as the setting. One of the greatest of these is Yossel, April 19, 1943 by the great Joe Kubert. 

And on two additional Saturdays look for reviews of Spiegelman's epic. I will devote a day each to both Maus I and Maus II. The furor over these two stunning tales only makes me more eager to revisit these tragic tales. It was a terror for those who lived it and Spiegelman's works make for compelling engagement with this awful subject. No school should shrink from exposing their students to the ugly truths of our history in a necessary effort to make sure atrocities never reoccur. 

Also up is a closer look at one of the very best comic books to draw a chilling picture of a more modern Fascist horror -- V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. I'm finding I need to reread this magnificent work every few years to focus my attention and gird my loins given the dark changes in the world around us all. 

And speaking of atrocity I will also spend a few days on the blood-chilling subject of nuclear war. It was once front of mind for all of us, people who feared a nuclear rain would inevitably fall one day. I'll take a look at some speculative atomic attacks and some all too real ones as well. 

But as awful as war is, there can be other aspects of human nature which are revealed in the terrifying stress of combat. Few express those more noble sentiments better than does Robert Kanigher's and Joe Kubert's Enemy Ace about the exploits of a German air ace in the tragically ironically named "War to End All Wars". Look for this in this month's "Showcase Corner". 

"The Sunday Funnies" feature will take a gander at a completely different sort of mouse -- Mickey Mouse. The iconic success of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse is likely among the reasons that Spiegelman chose mice and other critters to populate his reflection on the Holocaust. I want to take a look at Mickey's earliest comic strip adventures from the 1930's as rendered by his greatest creator Floyd Gottfredson. We might even sneak in a peek at the Sunday color version too if we have time, but we'll see about that. 

And to wrap up our month-long examination of Hitler's horror, we'll celebrate his demise and the end of his wretched Reich with a stunning array of comic book covers that makes sure that old Adolph gets it on the chin among other things. With the ruthless aggression demonstrated by Russia led by Putin in the daily headlines, attention to the many land-grabbing despots of the 20th Century seems an apt occupation. All this and maybe a smidge more this month of March. 

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The Toon Treasury Of Classic Children's Comics!

While The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics is divided into five categories ranging from "Funny Animals" to "Fantasyland", the real categories in this book according to editors Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly really fall between four artists -- Sheldon Mayer, Walt Kelly, John Stanley and Carl Barks. The editors admit as much and work from these giants of comic art dominate this collection regardless of the category a story might fall into. 

Chapter One is titled "Hey, Kids!" and celebrates such titles as Sheldon Mayer's Sugar and Spike (three stories) and Scribbly (one lengthy sequence of one-pagers), as well as two stories featuring Little Lulu by John Stanley. Dennis the Menace makes two appearances in this section and talents such as Jules Feiffer and Harvey Kurtzman are represented by Clifford and Egghead Doodle respectively. We are also treated to a story of Intellectual Amos by Andre LeBlanc from the pages of The Spirit sections. 

Chapter Two is dubbed "Funny Animals" and leading the way is Walt Kelly with a few "Uncle Wiggly" pages, a skewed fairy tale titled "Hickory and Dickory  Help the Easter Bunny", as well as an early Pogo story from Animal Comics. Mayer returns with a funny Three Mousketeers story and we get three Fox and Crow stories by Jim Davis. Donald Duck by Carl Barks is on hand alongside John Stanley's "Jigger". Throw in a Nutsy Squirrel and you have quite a bevy of beasts. 

Chapter Three titled "Fantasyland" delivers the goods as might be suspected. Lots more Walt Kelly with stories (four to be exact) from Fairy Tale Parade and a new name George Carlson shows up with some offbeat fairytale variations. John Stanley returns as does Little Lulu with two offerings. We get a story by Popeye animator Dan Gordon featuring a prototype of Droopy and MAD man Dave Berg is represented with two stories adapted out of Alice in Wonderland. Add in a little Supermouse by Milt Stein and it's a festive section indeed. 

Chapter Four is called "Storytime" and seems to be a section in which some oddball stuff finds inclusion such as more Pogo, more Intellectual Amos, and even a C.C. Beck story starring "The Big Red Cheese" himself  titled "In the Land of Surrealism". The latter is a delight. But the highlights of this section are by Carl Barks who has two Duck stories, one featuring Donald battling bees and the other with Uncle Scrooge and the boys venturing to the distant paradise of Tralla La -- one of comic's great classics tales. 

Chapter Five wraps it all up with under the heading "Weird and Wacky" giving the editors free reign. Such things as three Burp the Twerp one-pagers by Jack Cole, four Hey Look! one-pagers by Harvey Kurtzman, alongside  a J. Rufus Lion story by Mayer and a Patsy Pancake yarn by Milt Gross. Dr. Seuss offers up the peculiar classic "Gerald McBoing Boing" and Dick Briefer's Frankenstein plays music. John Stanley's Melvin the Monster tries to catch a mouse and it doesn't go well. The highlight though of this section are several pages of "Foolish Faces" as well a complete Powerhouse Pepper story by Basil Wolverton. 

The main significant  difference between this 2009 collection and the exceedingly similar Yoe Book collection from 2011 I examined last weekend, is that the latter was more interested in a diverse range of examples from the public domain to showcase what had existed in kids comics. This collection was more about the pure quality of the stories and sacrificing some variety. There's not much to criticize about either collection though if you have any fancy at all for light-hearted comic book tales. 

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