Jack Cole (artist)
| Jack Cole | |
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| Born | Jack Ralph Cole December 14, 1914 New Castle, Pennsylvania |
| Died | August 13, 1958 (aged 43) Crystal Lake, Illinois |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist, Writer, Editor |
| Pseudonym(s) |
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Notable works
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Plastic Man |
| Awards |
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Jack Ralph Cole (December 14, 1914 – August 13, 1958) was an American cartoonist best known for creating the comedic superhero Plastic Man, and his cartoons for Playboy magazine.
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 Boys' 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 continued 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."
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