The Fabuleous Fifties

From me To Him

Saturday Leftover Day.

One of my regular stops on the internet is Paul Tumey's blog on Jack Cole. You'll find it linked on the right. Paul is an excellent art critic and his essays on Jack Cole's work are the best I have ever read in the genre. He combines a historian's sense of description with an art critic's abillity to see theme's, meaning, styles... this is comic book essayism that has up till now only been reserved for some of Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman's work and even then not as thorough or complete. If you are in any way involved in comics in a scollary fashion, you should check these out. Or maybe get his annotated digital publication of all of Cole's Midnight stories.

Paul is also always looking for new and rare Jack Cole material. Although a lot is known about his career, there are always new samples of his work to be found. Unsigned stories from his Quality years, earl cartoons, even whole new strips (like the funny strp he did for the Armed Air Forced Features Sunday paper he did in the midfifties.

This Christmas,Paul has assambled twelve days of unseen Cole material, varying from a new Quality story to the first non microfiche scan I have ever seen of Cole's second wildly funny Suicide Squad story. With a big helping of new Cole cartoons Paul found. After Quality stopped producing comics and before Cole started working at Playboy, he made and sold a lot of cartoons. The work he did for Humorama is the best known, if only because they were reprinted so much (although a good complete list is still lacking). But he worked for other magazines as well and Paul has been looking for those.

SO head over there and spread the word. I consider these cartoons a major find. And tehre is probably a lot more where they came from. I wonder what Paul will show tomorrow...