Superhero of the day and his creator: Plastic Man and Jack Cole

As much as I dig the wacky shape shifting impossibilities of Plastic Man, I am much more in awe of the mysteries and legacy left behind by his creator Jack Cole.  Plastic may be the greatest creation of a brilliant writer and creator who never seemed satisfied with his own life and career.

For those of you unfamiliar with Plastic Man read the stuff below.

Plastic Man was a crook named Patrick "Eel" O'Brian. Orphaned at age 10 and forced to live on the streets, he fell into a life of crime. As an adult, he became part of a burglary ring, specializing as a safecracker. During a late-night heist at the Crawford Chemical Works, he and his three fellow gang members were surprised by a night watchman. During the gang's escape, Eel was shot in the shoulder and doused with a large drum of unidentified chemical liquid. He escaped to the street only to discover that his gang had driven off without him.

Fleeing on foot and suffering increasing disorientation from the gunshot wound and the exposure to the chemical, Eel eventually passed out on the foothills of a mountain near the city. He awoke to find himself in a bed in a mountain retreat, being tended to by a monk who had discovered him unconscious that morning. This monk, sensing a capacity for great good in O'Brian, turned away police officers who had trailed Eel to the monastery. This act of faith and kindness — combined with the realization that his gang had left him to be captured without a moment's hesitation — fanned Eel's longstanding dissatisfaction with his criminal life and his desire to reform.

During his short convalescence at the monastery, he discovered that the chemical had entered his bloodstream and caused a radical physical change. His body now had all of the properties of rubber, allowing him to stretch, bounce and mold himself into any shape. He immediately determined to use his new abilities on the side of law and order, donning a red, black and yellow (later red and yellow) rubber costume and capturing criminals as Plastic Man. He concealed his true identity with a pair of white goggles and by re-molding his face. As O'Brian, he maintained his career and connections with the underworld as a means of gathering information on criminal activity.

If you are unfamiliar with Jack Cole, I have included the briefest of bios on the great and tortured man who never thought he was good enough and even when he had reached the "success" of a daily syndicated comic strip, it did not seem to be enough.

This is really speculation on my part, but all we have is speculation, nobody's talking.  Jack Cole had a wife, a house, a new syndicated comic strip, a cartooning gig at Playboy magziine and Hugh Hefner considered the man, not only a friend, but an inspiration (Hefner  being a bit of an artist his own self).

The mysterious death of Jack Cole plagues us still.  The people who know ain't talking, and the rest of us are left holding the (plastic) bag

 Jack Cole

Jack Cole created Plastic Man for a backup feature in Quality's Police Comics No. 1 (Aug. 1941). While Timely Comics' quickly forgotten Flexo the Rubber Man had preceded "Plas" as comics' first stretching hero, Cole's character became an immediate hit, and Police Comics '​ lead feature with issue #5. As well, Cole's offbeat humor, combined with Plastic Man's ability to take any shape, gave the cartoonist opportunities to experiment with text and graphics in groundbreaking manner—helping to define the medium's visual vocabulary, and making the idiosyncratic character one of the few enduring classics from the Golden Age to modern times. Plastic Man gained his own title in 1943.

Cole killed himself on August 13, 1958. R. C. Harveydescribed it as "one of the most baffling events in the history of cartooning".^[10] Cole was living at 703 Silver Lake Road in Cary, Illinois, about 40 miles northwest of Chicago, and told his wife at about two in the afternoon that he was picking up the mail and the newspapers. Driving his Chevrolet station wagon to Dave Donner's Sport Shop in nearby Crystal Lake, he purchased a .22 caliber, single-shot Marlin rifle. He phoned a neighbor between 5:15 and 5:30 pm to say what he was doing, and for the neighbor to tell Dorothy. Parked on a gravel road west of the intersection of Illinois Routes 176 and 14, Cole was found by three boys at approximately 6 pm, shot in the head but still alive. A McHenry County sheriff's deputy arrived and called for an ambulance ten minutes later. Cole died at nearby Woodstock Hospital at 6:45 pm

That morning, he had mailed two suicide notes, one to Dorothy (who at a coroner's inquest testified that he had given his reasons) and one to his friend and boss, Playboyeditor-publisher Hugh Hefner. The letter to his wife was never made public and the reasons for Cole's suicide have remained unknown. Dorothy never again spoke with her late husband's family nor with Hefner, and remarried approximately a year later.

Legacy

Cole 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.^[

Cole's story "Murder, Morphine and Me", which he illustrated and possibly wrote for publisher Magazine Village's True Crime Comics No. 2 (May 1947), became a centerpiece of psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham's crusade against violent comic books. Wertham, author of the influential study Seduction of the Innocent, cited a particular panel of the story's dope-dealing narrator about to be stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle as an example of the "injury-to-the-eye" motif.