Remembering Jack Cole

December 14th marks the anniversary of the tragic end of one of comicdom’s finest talents: Jack Cole. There are any number of both sincere and ham fisted tributes out there, so I won’t bother to do a bio piece that regurgitates the same material you can glean from Wikipedia. Perhaps the best celebration of Cole is...well, his work. Probably best known as the creator of Plastic Man and an illustrator of highly influential pinup art for Playboy, Cole was one of the great talents of the Golden Age of comics.

I highly recommend checking out the original Plastic Man stories from Police Comics. They’re fantastically humorous, full of action and 100% fun. Before Cole’s declining mental state (presumably) that led to some incredibly dark stories at the end, before mysteriously taking his own life 60 years ago today. Sadly, the modern revamped version of his brilliant brainchild seems to be a one-note sexual predator with a Dane Cook sense of humor, but, as with all remakes or bastardizations of great source material, we’ll always have the originals.

For a much better understanding of the man and his work, I highly recommend visiting the excellent Cole’s Comics links on the right-hand side of this page.