Plastic Man!

Today I had the pleasure of reading some of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. At least I think it was pleasurable. It was funny and colorful, so yeah, I guess I could say it was pleasurable. Anyways, I realized that when I was reading some of these comics my eyes were traveling very quickly and turning the pages every minute or so. Something about the story and the way the dialogue was drawn out made me want to read very quickly. Probably because the characters in Plastic Man were very fast paced. They were here, and then they were in the ocean, and then Plastic Man was stretching across a few frames on to an entirely different street of his made up city.

The colors in this comic were very bright and primarily red, blue, green, and yellow. The colors were flat and weren’t used to bring extra dimensions to the buildings and landscapes that gave the overall feeling of the comic book a very “acid-trippy” feel to it. The stories are pretty cheesy and ridiculous but I think this is what made the comics so funny. The first one was about Sphinx, a rotten crook that has a plan to use the cute Bright Eyes as a way to con people of their money. Sphinx is also buying orphaned children to sell to parents hoping to adopt. When his plan begins to fail he puts all the children in a boat that sinks and Bright Eyes ties himself to a string with the other end attached to the boat. He swims to shore and is found washed up on the beach by Plastic Man and his sidekick Woozy Winks. When they find Bright Eyes Plastic Man saves the sunken ship with the children and comes back to tell Woozy that everything’s all right. I thought it was funny how they never actually show Plastic Man save the children; he just comes back in a flash and claims that he did. This is what I thought was so funny about this comic. Everything that seemed weird and impossible was quickly explained by one of the characters. It was like “Dues ex machina” or “God in the machine”, where situations were easily handled or explained through an impossible or “God-like” miracle. I read a little about the life of Jack Cole and thought it was interesting that he went on to draw for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. I quite liked the cartoony nudes he painted with watercolors that he made as considerations for the magazine.