A Stretch of the Imagination

Plastic Man Archives Volume 7: written and illustrated by Jack Cole (1946-47; collected 2006): Another jolly, anarchic, cleanly rendered volume of Golden Age Plastic Man adventures, written and illustrated by the stretchable hero's creator Jack Cole and members of Cole's studio. Plastic Man is one of the few Golden Age comic books that holds up today, not just as a historic curiosity, but as an exemplar of the form and of the superhero genre.

Plastic Man's adventures are funny and fun without being weightless (the death count is surprisingly high). Cole's imagination found wings with a hero who could look like pretty much anything, battling crooks who were comic grotesques. While Plas works for the FBI (the first superhero to work for a government agency, so far as I recall), he remains a curiously liminal figure -- a bringer of chaos and anarchy in the cause of law and order.

While Cole would 'cut loose' on the splash pages of Plastic Man's adventures (taking a cue from the Will Eisner studio's Spirit, upon which Cole worked briefly), he primarily worked his narrative magic within a fairly conventional panel layout. It's inside the panels that everything cuts loose, and within which little jokes and sub-stories play out in the background in a manner which anyone who's read the later Mad magazine would recognize, though I think Cole was taking his inspiration from great comic strips that include Bringing Up Father (aka Maggie and Jiggs), Krazy Kat and E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre (aka Popeye) when it came to the dense shenanigans occurring around and behind the main action of a strip.

The product of a true visionary and artist, Plastic Man is one of those rare Golden-Age comic-book creations who has never been improved upon by writers and artists other than his creator. Lovely, lovely stuff. Highly recommended.

Sgt. Rock Will Save Me

Sgt. Rock Archives Volume 2; written by Robert Kanigher and Bob Haney; illustrated by Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, Irv Novick and Jerry Grandinetti (1960-61; collected 2003): Second volume of the adventures of DC's Sgt. Rock and Easy Company in various WWII theatres of war sees Joe Kubert become Rock's primary artist and Robert Kanigher the primary writer.

War stories meant for children and early teens portray war as violent but bloodless, though Kubert's evocative, gritty art nonetheless makes war look pretty hellish. Sgt. Rock's adventures always tended to have a fabulistic quality, in part because like superheroes, Easy Company had far more adventures than could reasonably be accounted for in the chronology of the 'real' world. Instead, the reader gets bracing fables about courage, teamwork, and heroic death.

All of this is narrated by Rock, who sprinkles lessons-learned throughout that narration, explaining why and how he does certain things. Kubert's art is really the star here (ably replaced by Irv Novick, Jerry Grandinetti, and Russ Heath in a few issues).

Kubert was already the comic-book master of suggestion by the time the early 1960's rolled around, the art stripped down to lines and spot blacks, nothing fussy, nothing busy. The faces of the soldiers are distinct, unique, and careworn in places. The backgrounds are detailed when they need to be and suggestive when they don't. The machinery of war looks, for the most part, realistic without drawing attention to itself with too much wanky detail. The overall effect is smooth and memorable, almost soothing -- a textbook example of a comic book meant for children that could be enjoyed by adults, something we see almost nothing of today. Highly recommended.

When Men Were Superheroes and Women Were Secretaries

All-Star Comics Archives Volume 2; written by Gardner F. Fox and Sheldon Mayer; illustrated by Jack Burnley, Bernard Baily, Sheldon Moldoff and others (1941-42; collected 1992): In the 1940's, the Justice Society of America was what would later be DC Comics's first group of superheroes, created in part to boost interest in the lesser-known characters of the infant DC superhero community (Superman and Batman were honourary members who didn't really participate in the adventures, while other characters that included the Flash and Green Lantern would also become honourary members once they became popular enough, though both those heroes would eventually return to active status as the superhero boom of the early 1940's started to bust at the end of World War Two).

The first few appearances of the JSA involved members meeting to tell stories about recent cases. Quickly, though, All-Star Comics would showcase the evolution of the superhero group, with members first doing solo duty in individual stories oriented around a common quest and then members actually fighting together against a common foe.

The main JSA members at work here include Johnny Thunder, Dr. Mid-nite, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, the Atom, the Flash, the Spectre, and Green Lantern. We also get the first 'bonus' insert story in superhero history, as Wonder Woman gets introduced in a solo story in one issue. Eventually, the JSA would deign to make her their recording secretary, a skill I'm pretty sure life as an Amazon didn't prepare her for.

In this second archive edition, the stories are firmly in the second mode, with the heroes teaming up at the end for the sake of closure. Gardner Fox and editor Shelly Mayer were inventing a sub-generic form on the fly, with no real antecedents unless you want to get goofy and claim Jason and the Argonauts as the first superhero group. Wartime concerns form the motivation for the cases in this book, as the heroes seek to raise money for European war orphans, bust saboteur rings, and secure America from aerial attack with a super-secret 'bomb shield.'

This last quest -- and the last story in the book -- sees Fox finally start to write stories with a certain amount of fanciful 'oomph' to them. The JSA gets dispatched singly through a time-portal in order to retrieve plans for the bomb shield from several hundred years in the future. This allows Fox to finally play with exotic locales (cities in the sky and beneath the sea) and a certain amount of humble-pie for the JSA members, who discover that the average man of the future can mop up the floor with all but the most powerful of them.

Comic-book art in the 1940's could often be pretty awful (the page rates of the time didn't exactly make for a rewarding work situation), though the craftsmanship of the artists would increase as the months flew by. Jack Burnley, a longtime 'ghost' on the Superman comics, draws the Starman episodes here with skill and a certain degree of professional slickness, while Bernard Baily on the Spectre remains one of the more idiosyncratic artists of the early Golden Age. Recommended for superhero fans.