.gif)
Jack Cole (artist)
Encyclopedia
Jack Ralph Cole was an American comic book
artist
and Playboy
magazine cartoonist
best known for creating the comedic superhero
Plastic Man
.
He was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999.
Born in New Castle
, Pennsylvania
, Cole—the third of six children of a dry goods
-store owner and amateur-entertainer father and a former elementary school
-teacher mother—was untrained in art except for the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course. At age 17, he bicycled solo cross-country to Los Angeles, California and back. Cole recounted this adventure in an early self-illustrated professional sale "A Boy and His Bike" (which has often been cited as appearing in Boy's Life magazine, but in fact the source of this article is unknown, but speculated to have likely appeared in Cole's hometown newspaper). Back home, Cole took a job at American Can and continuued to draw at night.
In 1936, having married childhood sweetheart Dorothy Mahoney soon after graduating high school
, Cole moved with his wife to New York City
's Greenwich Village
. After spending a year attempting to break in as a magazine
/newspaper
illustrator, Cole began drawing for the studio of the Harry "A" Chesler, one of the first comic-book "packagers" who supplied outsourced stories to publishers entering the new medium. There, Cole drew such features as "TNT Todd of the FBI" and "Little Dynamite" for Centaur Publications
comics such as Funny Pages and Keen Detective Funnies. He produced such additional features as "King Kole's Kourt" (under the pseudonym
Geo. Nagle), "Officer Clancy", and "Peewee Throttle" (under the pseudonym Ralph Johns), and "Ima Slooth."
hired Cole in 1939 to edit Silver Streak Comics, where one of his first tasks was to revamp the newly-created superhero
Daredevil
. Other characters created or worked on by the prolific tyro include MLJ
's The Comet in Pep Comics
—who in short order became the first superhero to be killed—and his replacement, the Hangman.
After becoming an editor at Lev Gleason and revamping Jack Binder
's original Golden Age
Daredevil
in 1940, Cole hired on at Quality Comics
. He worked with Will Eisner
, assisting on the writer-artist's signature hero The Spirit
—a masked crime-fighter created for a weekly syndicated, newspaper Sunday-supplement, with his adventures reprinted in Quality comics. At the behest of Quality publisher Everett "Busy" Arnold, Cole later created his own satiric, Spirit-style hero, Midnight, for Smash Comics #18 (Jan. 1941). Midnight, the alter ego of radio
announcer Dave Clark, wore a similar fedora
hat and domino mask, and partnered with a talking monkey
—questionably in place of the Spirit's young African-American sidekick, Ebony White
. During Eisner's World War II
military service
, Cole and Lou Fine
were the primary Spirit ghost artists; their stories were reprinted in DC Comics
' hardcover collections The Spirit Archives Vols. 5 to 9 (2001–2003), spanning July 1942 – Dec. 1944. In addition, Cole continued to draw one and two-page filler pieces, sometimes under the pseudonym Ralph Johns, and a memorable autobiographical appearance in "Inkie," which appeared in Crack Comics
#34.
#1 (Aug. 1941). While Timely Comics
' quickly forgotten Flexo the Rubber Man had preceded "Plas" as comics' first stretching hero, Cole's character became an immediate hit, and Police Comics lead feature with issue #5. As well, Cole's offbeat humor, combined with Plastic Man's ability to take any shape, gave the cartoonist opportunities to experiment with text and graphics in groundbreaking manner—helping to define the medium's visual vocabulary, and making the idiosyncratic character one of the few enduring classics from the Golden Age to modern times. Plastic Man gained his own title in 1943.
By the decade's end, however, Cole's feature was being created entirely by anonymous ghost writers and artists—including Alex Kotzky
and John Spranger—despite Cole's name being bannered. One last stint by Cole himself in 1949–1950 could not save the title. Progressively floundering, the comic Plastic Man was cancelled in 1956 after several years of reprinting the Cole material, and new stories by lesser talents.
" cartoons for magazines, using the pen name "Jake", Cole became the premier cartoon illustrator for Playboy. Under his own name, he produced full-page, watercolored gag cartoons of beautiful but dim girls and rich but equally dim old men. Elaborately finished, they provided the template for similar cartoons in the magazine. Cole's art first appeared in the fifth issue; he would have at least one piece published in Playboy each month for the rest of his life. So popular was his work that the second item of merchandise ever licensed by Playboy (after cufflinks with the famous rabbit-head logo) was a cocktail-napkin set, "Females by Cole", featuring his cartoons. Cole biographer Art Spiegelman
said, "Cole's goddesses were estrogen soufflés who mesmerized the ineffectual saps who lusted after them."
, Betsy and Me, and successfully sold it to the Chicago Sun-Times
syndicate. The strip began on May 26 and chronicled the domestic adventures of nebbishy Chester Tibbet as narrator, his wife Betsy, and their 5-year-old genius son, Farley. The strip was drawn in the "ultra-modern abstract style" popularized by UPA
animations such as Mr. Magoo
and the comedy arose from the contradiction between the drawings and their captions. Betsy and Me ran for two and half months. On August 13, 1958, Cole killed himself. His last daily was published on September 6 and his last Sunday on September 14. A number of cartoonists tried to continue the strip but it was eventually discontinued in December.
described it as "one of the most baffling events in the history of cartooning". Cole was living at 703 Silver Lake Road in Cary
, Illinois
, about 40 miles northwest of Chicago
, and told his wife at about two in the afternoon that he was picking up the mail and the newspapers. Driving his Chevrolet station wagon to Dave Donner's Sport Shop in nearby Crystal Lake
, he purchased a .22 caliber, single-shot
Marlin
rifle
. He phoned a neighbor between 5:15 and 5:30 p.m. to say what he was doing, and for the neighbor to tell Dorothy. Parked on a gravel
road west of the intersection of Illinois Routes 176 and 14, Cole was found by three boys at approximately 6 p.m., shot in the head but still alive. A McHenry County sheriff
's deputy arrived and called for an ambulance ten minutes later. Cole died at nearby Woodstock Hospital at 6:45 p.m.
That morning, he had mailed two suicide notes, one to Dorothy (who at a coroner
's inquest
testified that he had given his reasons) and one to his friend and boss, Playboy editor-publisher Hugh Hefner
. The letter to his wife was never made public and the reasons for Cole's suicide have remained unknown. Dorothy never again spoke with her late husband's family nor with Hefner, and remarried approximately a year later.
Cole's story "Murder, Morphine and Me", which he illustrated and possibly wrote for publisher Magazine Village's True Crime Comics #2 (May, 1947), became a centerpiece of psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham
's crusade against violent comic books. Wertham, author of the influential study Seduction of the Innocent
, cited a particular panel of the story's dope-dealing narrator about to be stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle
as an example of the "injury-to-the-eye" motif.
In 2003, writer-artist Art Spiegelman and artist Chip Kidd
collaborated on a Cole biography, a portion of which had been published in The New Yorker
magazine in 1999.
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
magazine cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
best known for creating the comedic superhero
Superhero
A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...
Plastic Man
Plastic Man
Plastic Man is a fictional comic-book superhero originally published by Quality Comics and later acquired by DC Comics. Created by writer-artist Jack Cole, he first appeared in Police Comics #1 ....
.
He was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999.
Early life and career
New Castle, Pennsylvania
New Castle is a city in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, United States, northwest of Pittsburgh and near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border just east of Youngstown, Ohio; in 1910, the total population was 36,280; in 1920, 44,938; and in 1940, 47,638. The population has fallen to 26,309 according to the...
, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, Cole—the third of six children of a dry goods
Dry goods
Dry goods are products such as textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and sundries. In U.S. retailing, a dry goods store carries consumer goods that are distinct from those carried by hardware stores and grocery stores, though "dry goods" as a term for textiles has been dated back to 1742 in England or...
-store owner and amateur-entertainer father and a former elementary school
Elementary school
An elementary school or primary school is an institution where children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as elementary or primary education. Elementary school is the preferred term in some countries, particularly those in North America, where the terms grade school and grammar...
-teacher mother—was untrained in art except for the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course. At age 17, he bicycled solo cross-country to Los Angeles, California and back. Cole recounted this adventure in an early self-illustrated professional sale "A Boy and His Bike" (which has often been cited as appearing in Boy's Life magazine, but in fact the source of this article is unknown, but speculated to have likely appeared in Cole's hometown newspaper). Back home, Cole took a job at American Can and continuued to draw at night.
In 1936, having married childhood sweetheart Dorothy Mahoney soon after graduating high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
, Cole moved with his wife to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
's Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
. After spending a year attempting to break in as a magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
/newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
illustrator, Cole began drawing for the studio of the Harry "A" Chesler, one of the first comic-book "packagers" who supplied outsourced stories to publishers entering the new medium. There, Cole drew such features as "TNT Todd of the FBI" and "Little Dynamite" for Centaur Publications
Centaur Publications
Centaur Publications was one of the earliest American comic book publishers. During their short existence, they created several colorful characters, including Bill Everett's Amazing Man....
comics such as Funny Pages and Keen Detective Funnies. He produced such additional features as "King Kole's Kourt" (under the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Geo. Nagle), "Officer Clancy", and "Peewee Throttle" (under the pseudonym Ralph Johns), and "Ima Slooth."
Golden Age of Comic Books
Lev Gleason PublicationsLev Gleason Publications
Lev Gleason Publications, founded by Leverett Gleason, was the publisher of a number of popular comic books during the 1940s and early 1950s, including Daredevil, Crime Does Not Pay, and Boy Comics....
hired Cole in 1939 to edit Silver Streak Comics, where one of his first tasks was to revamp the newly-created superhero
Superhero
A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...
Daredevil
Daredevil (Golden Age)
Daredevil is a fictional character, an American comic book superhero that starred in popular comics from Lev Gleason Publications during the 1930s–1940s period historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books. The character is a separate and unrelated entity from Marvel Comics' Daredevil...
. Other characters created or worked on by the prolific tyro include MLJ
Archie Comics
Archie Comics is an American comic book publisher headquartered in the Village of Mamaroneck, Town of Mamaroneck, New York, known for its many series featuring the fictional teenagers Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle and Jughead Jones. The characters were created by...
's The Comet in Pep Comics
Pep Comics
Pep Comics is the name of an American comic book anthology series published by the Archie Comics predecessor MLJ Magazines Inc. during the 1930s and 1940s period known as the Golden Age of Comic Books...
—who in short order became the first superhero to be killed—and his replacement, the Hangman.
After becoming an editor at Lev Gleason and revamping Jack Binder
Jack Binder (comics)
Jack Binder was a Golden Age comics creator and art packager. A fine artist by education, Binder had a prolific comics career that lasted from 1937–1946, then continued from "semi-retirement" until 1953. He was the creator of the original comic book Daredevil, for Lev Gleason Publications...
's original Golden Age
Golden Age of Comic Books
The Golden Age of Comic Books was a period in the history of American comic books, generally thought of as lasting from the late 1930s until the late 1940s or early 1950s...
Daredevil
Daredevil (Golden Age)
Daredevil is a fictional character, an American comic book superhero that starred in popular comics from Lev Gleason Publications during the 1930s–1940s period historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books. The character is a separate and unrelated entity from Marvel Comics' Daredevil...
in 1940, Cole hired on at Quality Comics
Quality Comics
Quality Comics was an American comic book publishing company that operated from 1939 to 1956 and was an influential creative force in what historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books....
. He worked with Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...
, assisting on the writer-artist's signature hero The Spirit
The Spirit
The Spirit is a crime-fighting fictional character created by writer-artist Will Eisner. He first appeared June 2, 1940 in "The Spirit Section", the colloquial name given to a 16-page Sunday supplement, distributed to 20 newspapers by the Register and Tribune Syndicate and reaching five million...
—a masked crime-fighter created for a weekly syndicated, newspaper Sunday-supplement, with his adventures reprinted in Quality comics. At the behest of Quality publisher Everett "Busy" Arnold, Cole later created his own satiric, Spirit-style hero, Midnight, for Smash Comics #18 (Jan. 1941). Midnight, the alter ego of radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
announcer Dave Clark, wore a similar fedora
Fedora (hat)
A fedora is a men's felt hat. In reality, "fedora" describes most any men's hat that does not already have another name; quite a few fedoras have famous names of their own including the famous Trilby....
hat and domino mask, and partnered with a talking monkey
Monkey
A monkey is a primate, either an Old World monkey or a New World monkey. There are about 260 known living species of monkey. Many are arboreal, although there are species that live primarily on the ground, such as baboons. Monkeys are generally considered to be intelligent. Unlike apes, monkeys...
—questionably in place of the Spirit's young African-American sidekick, Ebony White
Ebony White
Ebony White is a fictional character from the 1940 comics series The Spirit, created by Will Eisner. He first appeared in the The Spirit comic strip of June 2, 1940. He is a black sidekick to Denny Colt, the title character. His age is ambiguous: sometimes he appears to be a young boy, at other...
. During Eisner's World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
military service
Military service
Military service, in its simplest sense, is service by an individual or group in an army or other militia, whether as a chosen job or as a result of an involuntary draft . Some nations require a specific amount of military service from every citizen...
, Cole and Lou Fine
Lou Fine
Louis Kenneth Fine was an American comic book artist known for his work during the 1940s Golden Age of comic books, where his quality draftsmanship became an influential model to a generation of fellow comics artists....
were the primary Spirit ghost artists; their stories were reprinted in DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
' hardcover collections The Spirit Archives Vols. 5 to 9 (2001–2003), spanning July 1942 – Dec. 1944. In addition, Cole continued to draw one and two-page filler pieces, sometimes under the pseudonym Ralph Johns, and a memorable autobiographical appearance in "Inkie," which appeared in Crack Comics
Crack Comics
Crack Comics was an anthology comic book series published by Quality Comics during the Golden Age of Comic Books. It featured such characters as The Clock, Black Condor, Captain Triumph, Alias the Spider, Madame Fatal, Jane Arden, Molly the Model, and Red Torpedo...
#34.
Plastic Man
Cole created Plastic Man for a backup feature in Quality's Police ComicsPolice Comics
Police Comics was a comic book anthology title published by Quality Comics from 1941 until 1953. It featured short stories in the superhero, crime and humor genres....
#1 (Aug. 1941). While Timely Comics
Timely Comics
Timely Comics, an imprint of Timely Publications, was the earliest comic book arm of American publisher Martin Goodman, and the entity that would evolve by the 1960s to become Marvel Comics....
' quickly forgotten Flexo the Rubber Man had preceded "Plas" as comics' first stretching hero, Cole's character became an immediate hit, and Police Comics lead feature with issue #5. As well, Cole's offbeat humor, combined with Plastic Man's ability to take any shape, gave the cartoonist opportunities to experiment with text and graphics in groundbreaking manner—helping to define the medium's visual vocabulary, and making the idiosyncratic character one of the few enduring classics from the Golden Age to modern times. Plastic Man gained his own title in 1943.
Alex Kotzky
Alex Kotzky was a cartoonist best known for his three decades of work on the comic strip Apartment 3-G, distributed by Publishers-Hall Syndicate....
and John Spranger—despite Cole's name being bannered. One last stint by Cole himself in 1949–1950 could not save the title. Progressively floundering, the comic Plastic Man was cancelled in 1956 after several years of reprinting the Cole material, and new stories by lesser talents.
Playboy
Cole's career by that time had taken on another dimension. In 1954, after having drawn slightly risqué, single-panel "good girl artGood girl art
Good girl art is found in drawings or paintings which feature a strong emphasis on attractive women no matter what the subject or situation. GGA was most commonly featured in comic books, pulp magazines and crime fiction...
" cartoons for magazines, using the pen name "Jake", Cole became the premier cartoon illustrator for Playboy. Under his own name, he produced full-page, watercolored gag cartoons of beautiful but dim girls and rich but equally dim old men. Elaborately finished, they provided the template for similar cartoons in the magazine. Cole's art first appeared in the fifth issue; he would have at least one piece published in Playboy each month for the rest of his life. So popular was his work that the second item of merchandise ever licensed by Playboy (after cufflinks with the famous rabbit-head logo) was a cocktail-napkin set, "Females by Cole", featuring his cartoons. Cole biographer Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
said, "Cole's goddesses were estrogen soufflés who mesmerized the ineffectual saps who lusted after them."
Betsy and Me
In 1958, Cole created his own daily newspaper comic stripComic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
, Betsy and Me, and successfully sold it to the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
syndicate. The strip began on May 26 and chronicled the domestic adventures of nebbishy Chester Tibbet as narrator, his wife Betsy, and their 5-year-old genius son, Farley. The strip was drawn in the "ultra-modern abstract style" popularized by UPA
United Productions of America
United Productions of America, better known as UPA, was an American animation studio of the 1940s through present day, beginning with industrial films and World War II training films. In the late 1940s, UPA produced theatrical shorts for Columbia Pictures, most notably the Mr. Magoo series. In...
animations such as Mr. Magoo
Mr. Magoo
Quincy Magoo is a cartoon character created at the UPA animation studio in 1949. Voiced by Jim Backus, Quincy Magoo is a wealthy, short-statured retiree who gets into a series of sticky situations as a result of his nearsightedness, compounded by his stubborn refusal to admit the problem...
and the comedy arose from the contradiction between the drawings and their captions. Betsy and Me ran for two and half months. On August 13, 1958, Cole killed himself. His last daily was published on September 6 and his last Sunday on September 14. A number of cartoonists tried to continue the strip but it was eventually discontinued in December.
Cole's death
Cole killed himself on August 13, 1958. R. C. HarveyR. C. Harvey
Robert C. Harvey , popularly known as R. C. Harvey, is an author, critic and cartoonist. He has written a number of books on the history of the medium, with special focus on the history of the comic strip, and he has also worked as a freelance cartoonist.Harvey describes himself as having created...
described it as "one of the most baffling events in the history of cartooning". Cole was living at 703 Silver Lake Road in Cary
Cary, Illinois
Cary is a village located in Algonquin Township, McHenry County, Illinois, United States. The population was 15,531 at the 2000 census. A 2003 special census put the village's population at 17,827.-Geography:Cary is located at ....
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, about 40 miles northwest of Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, and told his wife at about two in the afternoon that he was picking up the mail and the newspapers. Driving his Chevrolet station wagon to Dave Donner's Sport Shop in nearby Crystal Lake
Crystal Lake, Illinois
Crystal Lake is a city located in southeastern McHenry County in northeastern Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs. It is named after Crystal Lake, a lake located west-southwest of downtown. Crystal Lake is also a suburb of the city of Chicago. The population was 38,000 at the 2000 census, but as of...
, he purchased a .22 caliber, single-shot
Single-shot
Single-shot firearms are firearms that hold only a single round of ammunition, and must be reloaded after each shot. The history of firearms began with single-shot designs, and many centuries passed before multi-shot designs became commonplace...
Marlin
Marlin Firearms
Marlin Firearms Co., formerly of North Haven, Connecticut, is a manufacturer of high power, center fire, lever action, and .22 caliber rimfire rifles. In the past, the company made shotguns, derringers and revolvers...
rifle
Rifle
A rifle is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, with a barrel that has a helical groove or pattern of grooves cut into the barrel walls. The raised areas of the rifling are called "lands," which make contact with the projectile , imparting spin around an axis corresponding to the...
. He phoned a neighbor between 5:15 and 5:30 p.m. to say what he was doing, and for the neighbor to tell Dorothy. Parked on a gravel
Gravel
Gravel is composed of unconsolidated rock fragments that have a general particle size range and include size classes from granule- to boulder-sized fragments. Gravel can be sub-categorized into granule and cobble...
road west of the intersection of Illinois Routes 176 and 14, Cole was found by three boys at approximately 6 p.m., shot in the head but still alive. A McHenry County sheriff
Sheriff
A sheriff is in principle a legal official with responsibility for a county. In practice, the specific combination of legal, political, and ceremonial duties of a sheriff varies greatly from country to country....
's deputy arrived and called for an ambulance ten minutes later. Cole died at nearby Woodstock Hospital at 6:45 p.m.
That morning, he had mailed two suicide notes, one to Dorothy (who at a coroner
Coroner
A coroner is a government official who* Investigates human deaths* Determines cause of death* Issues death certificates* Maintains death records* Responds to deaths in mass disasters* Identifies unknown dead* Other functions depending on local laws...
's inquest
Inquest
Inquests in England and Wales are held into sudden and unexplained deaths and also into the circumstances of discovery of a certain class of valuable artefacts known as "treasure trove"...
testified that he had given his reasons) and one to his friend and boss, Playboy editor-publisher Hugh Hefner
Hugh Hefner
Hugh Marston "Hef" Hefner is an American magazine publisher, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises.-Early life:...
. The letter to his wife was never made public and the reasons for Cole's suicide have remained unknown. Dorothy never again spoke with her late husband's family nor with Hefner, and remarried approximately a year later.
Legacy
Cole was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999.Cole's story "Murder, Morphine and Me", which he illustrated and possibly wrote for publisher Magazine Village's True Crime Comics #2 (May, 1947), became a centerpiece of psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham
Fredric Wertham
Fredric Wertham was a Jewish German-American psychiatrist and crusading author who protested the purportedly harmful effects of violent imagery in mass media and comic books on the development of children. His best-known book was Seduction of the Innocent , which purported that comic books are...
's crusade against violent comic books. Wertham, author of the influential study Seduction of the Innocent
Seduction of the Innocent
Seduction of the Innocent is a book by German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was a minor bestseller that created alarm in parents and galvanized...
, cited a particular panel of the story's dope-dealing narrator about to be stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle
Hypodermic needle
A hypodermic needle is a hollow needle commonly used with a syringe to inject substances into the body or extract fluids from it...
as an example of the "injury-to-the-eye" motif.
In 2003, writer-artist Art Spiegelman and artist Chip Kidd
Chip Kidd
Chip Kidd is an American author, editor, and graphic designer, best known for his book covers.- Early life :Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kidd grew up in the Reading suburb of Shillington, strongly influenced by American popular culture...
collaborated on a Cole biography, a portion of which had been published in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine in 1999.
Further reading
- "The Rehabilitation of Eel O'Brian" by Don ThompsonMaggie ThompsonMargaret "Maggie" Thompson , is the editor of Comics Buyer's Guide, a monthly comic book industry news magazine...
in The Comic-Book Book, edited by Don Thompson and Dick LupoffRichard A. LupoffRichard Allen Lupoff is an American science fiction and mystery author, who has also written humor, satire, non-fiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he has also edited science-fantasy anthologies. He is an expert on the writing of Edgar Rice...
(Arlington House, 1974) - Focus on Jack Cole by Ron GoulartRon GoulartRon Goulart is an American popular culture historian and mystery, fantasy and science fiction author.The prolific Goulart wrote many novelizations and other routine work under various pseudonyms: Kenneth Robeson , Con Steffanson , Chad Calhoun, R.T...
(Fantagraphics BooksFantagraphics BooksFantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...
, 1986)
External links
- Archive of "Connecticut Talent" at the Connecticut Historical SocietyConnecticut Historical SocietyThe Connecticut Historical Society is the official state historical society of Connecticut. Established in Hartford in 1825, the CHS is one of the oldest historical societies in the nation....
. Original page