Jack Cole and Plastic Man Retro Review: The Mad Genius Who Stretched Comics Until They Screamed

WEEPPAAAA! Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits is not some sleepy museum catalog wearing white gloves and whispering about “important artwork.” Nah, fam. This 2001 Chronicle Books release kicks open the archives, spreads Jack Cole’s madness across the table, and lets Art Spiegelman and designer Chip Kidd show us exactly why Plastic Man remains one of the wildest creations in comic-book history.

Calling Plastic Man “a stretchy superhero” is like calling salsa tomato juice with confidence. Technically, words were spoken, but the whole point got mugged in the hallway. Plastic Man is movement, rhythm, slapstick, danger, sexuality, and raw cartooning energy poured into a red rubber suit. Cole did not simply draw a man bending. He bent the entire language of comics around him.

Spiegelman understands that completely. His writing approaches Cole not as a spotless legend but as a complicated cartoonist whose humor, anxiety, imagination, and personal darkness spilled into every distorted face and elastic transformation. Plastic Man began as Eel O’Brian, a criminal given a second chance, and that origin gives the character more emotional meat than people remember. His body changes because his life has changed. He cannot return to what he was, physically or morally. That is deep. It is also hysterical.

Cole’s stories explode with crooks, monsters, femme fatales, grotesque villains, absurd machinery, and visual jokes packed into nearly every available inch. His pages are dense without becoming unreadable. A stretched arm directs your eye. A ridiculous facial expression controls the rhythm. A transformation becomes the action, the punchline, and the panel composition all at once. Cole was doing visual choreography before anybody started charging convention-panel money to explain visual choreography.

Woozy Winks brings another level of glorious foolishness. He is greedy, confused, oddly lovable, and always two bad decisions away from catastrophe. His relationship with Plastic Man gives the stories a vaudeville bounce, with Plas trying to maintain some form of order while Woozy crashes through reality like he owes it rent.

What makes Cole’s comedy slap so damn hard is that the joke always got a switchblade hiding behind its back. One second you are laughing, the next somebody’s face is folding like a busted lawn chair and the whole panel has turned into glorious cartoon nightmare fuel. The crooks do not just get punished either. Nah, Cole serves them consequences with extra hot sauce. Meanwhile, the women enter the frame looking glamorous, dangerous, vulnerable, and fully aware they can wreck the room before Woozy even finds the exit. Spiegelman also catches something deeper: Plastic Man was never trapped inside that stiff, chest-out superhero macho nonsense. Plas could turn masculine, feminine, mechanical, domestic, monstrous, sexy, stupid, or completely unhinged whenever the moment demanded it. No permission slip. No identity crisis. Just pure elastic freedom, baby. WEPA!

Chip Kidd’s design work is the book’s secret weapon. Vintage pages, photographs, sketches, enlarged panels, aged paper, bold typography, and archival fragments collide across the spreads with the same restless attitude Cole brought to his comics. The design occasionally throws chronology into a pretzel, but it never feels lifeless. This book moves like Plastic Man moves: stretching, folding, interrupting itself, and changing direction whenever it damn well pleases.

Even better, Spiegelman and Kidd give readers complete stories and substantial artwork instead of tossing out tiny samples like breadcrumbs. They do not merely tell us Jack Cole was brilliant. They put the receipts right there on the page. You can see his command of panel flow, grotesque comedy, action, lettering, and expression without needing an academic tour guide standing nearby with a laser pointer.

The book also carries unavoidable sadness. Cole died by suicide in 1958, and Spiegelman examines the contrast between the cheerful public cartoonist and the emotional volatility burning beneath his work. That psychological approach is fascinating, although it occasionally reaches a little too hard, as if every distorted drawing must secretly predict Cole’s ending. Sometimes a crazy cartoon is also just a crazy cartoon, papi!

Thankfully, the tragedy never overwhelms the achievement. Jack Cole deserves to stand beside the greatest innovators in comic history because he understood that comics are not illustrated movie scripts. The panel is not merely a frozen camera shot. Borders, lettering, bodies, color, motion, and page design can all become active storytelling tools, and Cole played every instrument like the rent was due.

More than two decades after its original publication, Jack Cole and Plastic Man remains essential reading for cartoonists, designers, historians, and fans who want to understand what this medium can really do. Spiegelman brings intelligence and unease. Kidd brings fearless design. Cole brings the thunder.

This is not merely a book about Plastic Man. It is proof that comics can be funny, grotesque, sexy, childish, sophisticated, unsettling, and brilliant all at the same time. Jack Cole stretched the medium. This book makes sure we feel the snap. A visually explosive and emotionally complicated retrospective that gives Jack Cole’s genius the showcase it deserves. The psychological interpretation occasionally overreaches, and the design can get chaotic, but the total package remains magnificent, inventive, and historically indispensable.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Creative Team:
Art Spiegelman, Writer and Critical Essay
Chip Kidd, Graphic Designer and Cover Designer
Jack Cole, Plastic Man creator and original cartoonist
Chin-Yee Lai, Design Assistance
Marc Witz, Photography
Madeleine Blaustein, Digital Restoration

Publisher: Chronicle Books
Original Publication: 2001