Plastic Man Archives 2

I don’t suppose many would argue against this being the greatest comic book work of the 1940s, given that The Spirit ran as a newspaper insert. But on the other hand, is even this still worth reading over 65 years on (these stories are from 1843-44)? I reviewed the Simon & Kirby Sandman recently, and there wouldn’t be a lot of series better than that from then, and Sandman‘s entertainment value was honestly pretty limited, so is this really so great, in the wider scheme of things?

Yes it fucking is. Very much so. They knew it at Quality Comics, too, giving Plastic Man 15-page stories in Police Comics, a length Ron Goulart’s intro says was then matched only by Captain Marvel in Whiz. Don’t forget that Quality also had work by Will Eisner, Lou Fine and others, including a young Wally Wood, so it’s not that they were short of other talents.

Maybe the first thing you notice is the covers and more especially the splash pages: often brilliantly devised and designed, working in the logo in much the same way that Eisner did on The Spirit (which Cole had ghosted for a while in 1942). Cole almost never sought the atmosphere and mood of The Spirit, of course: Plastic Man was a comedy superhero strip, with a gaudy stretching hero inclined to deform his body into furniture or sexy women or animals. Cole always made fabulous use of these deformations, which obviously offered unique compositional opportunities.

The strip is still finding its tone in some of these stories (I have the next three volumes, and they are probably the peak period for the strip). There’s a surprising amount of brutality in some of the stories – there was never a shortage of shootings and stabbings and so on, plus one here where someone gets a bear trap snapped around his throat, but a story where a boy is disfigured by being tarred and feathered is especially shocking.

And really, there isn’t so much humour in a lot of them – companion Woozy Winks provides some, both by being genuinely funny to look at (his movements are a particular delight) and by screwing up regularly, but there aren’t so many gags in a lot of the stories here. What there is is astonishing inventiveness, especially in the use of Plas’s powers – I think this was probably only matched by Kirby’s use of the Human Torch (and Kirby was surely inhibited on Mr Fantastic by Plastic Man) – but also in the stories, which without featuring any supervillainous opponents, or without much engaging with the war (there is one story with stereotyped Jap spies), range widely, through all sorts of crimes and plots, and across various settings.

There is some clumsy art here and there – the odd poor face early on, several moments of hacked inking. I’m not sure how much this is to do with Cole’s notorious deadline difficulties, and how much it’s down to his still being a beginner at this point. Most of the art is wonderful, some of the best you’ll ever see, spectacular, exciting, energetic, magnificently composed and hugely imaginative, telling the stories with bounce and pace.

To be honest, if you want to try buying one of these expensive volumes, I’d recommend 3 or 4, but all five I own are full of wonderful material and a total joy. In an ideal world, DC would collect them in cheaper volumes, but no Showcases have reached back to the Golden Age yet, and I don’t think they’ve published anything in that series that wasn’t originally DC, so I wouldn’t hold your breath for this – and I guess if they did change those practices, we’d expect to see The Spirit first.