Comic book illustrator, cartoonist and Playboy's premier artist, Jack Cole was a tragically short lived comic giant.
After working with Will Eisner (subject of Part Two in this series) on The Spirit, and then later creating his own satirical take on the hero with Midnight (complete with fedora, domino mask and ahem, a talking monkey), Cole then went on to create Plastic Man. Plas (as he was known) was an off-beat kind of superhero, and an immediate hit with the funny-book reading public. A cheap wiseguy, Eel O'Brian gained his powers of elasticity after being dunked in a vat of acid. Abandoned by his cronies, Eel was soon fighting crime with his bizarre stretching powers, along side his comic relief partner, Woozy Winks (a notorious jail breaker). The character's ability to take any shape gave Cole a huge amount of license to experiment with layout and text. Although Cole was outwardly a mild-mannered Clark Kent kind of guy, Plastic Man's manic and surreal magic act hinted at the troubles that bubbled beneath the surface.
Despite his success in the comic field, Cole had always harboured ambitions of being a full-time gag cartoonist, and in 1954, along came Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. Hef, a cartoonist himself, and fan of Plastic Man encouraged Cole to produce full page, lavishly watercoloured gag 'toons of beautiful but slightly dim girls who mesmerised the poor saps within their orbit. His art appeared in the fifth issue of Playboy and he would have at least one piece published in every issue until his death. In 1958 Cole also realised another ambition when he created his own syndicated newspaper strip, Betsy and Me.
Then, not four months later Cole one morning drove to a store and bought a .22 pistol. He mailed two letters, one to his wife and one to Hefner, then drove to a secluded spot and shot himself in the head. The two letters were effectively suicide notes, and neither were made available to the public, although his wife testified that 'Jack had given his reasons.'
2 comments:
Wow, tragic. Not even any vague theories why he did it?
No, it's pretty much a mystery. His wife said they had argued and that the letter gave his reasons but it all went undisclosed. The letter to Hef was more of a goodbye to a friend, saying 'I cannot go on living with myself and hurting those I love'.
It's a strange story, and stranger still is the fact that he went to school with another Jack Cole, and he was often blamed for Cole's stunts and pranks. They later both married women called Dorothy and the other Cole also shot himself a year after Cole's suicide.
What a wierd world...
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