PLASTIC MAN Volume 1

Featuring art AND brilliant storytelling by the great Jack Cole. This was one of the most imaginative, innovative, and just plain fun strips of the 1940s. Cole was a genius, and right here is his finest work in comics. Four great 64-page issues. For good reason, Plas was one of the longest running of the Golden Age heroes...lasting until 1956! Plastic Man actually began in Police Comics. We hope to see PS eventually collect all those stories here also. In the meantime, the DC Archives series did collect the Police run in six volumes and as I write this, we have two sets in stock. With additional artwork by John Spranger and Bart Tumey....but 95% of this is pure outlandish, fantastic Jack Cole! Cole went on to become a Playboy cartoonist, much favored by Hugh Hefner. A book of his girlie cartoons was even published. Sadly, he committed suicide for still unknown reasons. Here's more from Lambiek, online: Jack Cole was a natural talent in cartooning, and is best known as the creator of the legendary Golden Age hero 'Plastic Man'. Born in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, his only formal training was through a Landon Correspondence Course in Cartooning. Cole became editor of the Lev Gleason Publications group in 1939, and there he wrote and drew comics like 'Daredevil' (with Jack Binder), 'Silver Streak', 'Dickie Dean the Boy Inventor' and 'The Claw' in Silver Streak Comics. He was also present at MLJ with 'The Comet' in Pep Comics. From 1940, he assisted Will Eisner on 'The Spirit'. During this period, he also began a large production for the Quality Comics Group. He created features like 'Wung Cloo' and 'Mr. Midnight' (strongly inspired by 'The Spirit') for Smash Comics. Also for Quality, Cole created the legendary 'Plastic Man' for Police Comics in 1941. This humorous superhero feature, in which Cole did lots of graphical and narrative experimentation, got its own comic book in 1943. Cole went on to draw his cult comic for many years, until he handed it over to other artists around 1950. The comic ran for another six years, still under Cole's name. Cole additionally worked as a freelance cartoonist and illustrator for several magazines, until 1954, when Playboy hired him to draw 'Females by Cole', one of the best cartoon features the magazine ever had. In 1958, Jack Cole was lured back to making comic strips again by the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate, which commissioned him to do the humorous, slightly autobiographic strip 'Betsy and Me'. It lasted only for a few months, because on 13 August 1958, Jack Cole committed suicide. The reasons for this tragic deed have often been speculated, but never permanently clarified.