The Classic Pin-up Art of Jack Cole

In the rarefied realm of classic cartoon pin-up art, nobody did itbetter than Jack Cole. With his quirky line drawings and sensualwatercolors, Cole, under Hugh Hefner's guiding hand, catapulted tostardom in the 1950s as Playboy's marquee cartoonist, aposition he held until his untimely death at the [...]
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In the rarefied realm of classic cartoon pin-up art, nobody did itbetter than Jack Cole. With his quirky line drawings and sensualwatercolors, Cole, under Hugh Hefner's guiding hand, catapulted tostardom in the 1950s as Playboy's marquee cartoonist, aposition he held until his untimely death at the age of 43.Jack Cole has been justly celebrated as the creator of Plastic Manand an innovative comic book artist of the 1940s (especially in ArtSpiegelman and Chip Kidd's Jack Cole and Plastic Man: FormsStretched to Their Limits). After finishing his 14-year run on PlasticMan, he found himself looking for something new. According toCole, his savior was the Humorama line of down-market digest magazines.This girls and gags magazine circuit proved to be the perfect trainingground to regain his footing and develop his craft at single panel "gag"cartoons. His ability to render the female form was already withoutpeer. Though he signed his cartoons "Jake," Cole's exquisite linedrawings and masterful use of ink-wash -- a skill he carried over to Playboy-- betrayed his pseudonym. In comparison to his contemporaries, however, Cole was probably Humorama's least prolific artist. Though his imageswere frequently used for covers, Cole's cartoons were few and farbetween, with scarcely a single drawing appearing every five issues.Along with a foreword by editor Alex Chun, this volume (originallyreleased in a now out-of-print hardcover edition that now fetches highprices on the secondhand market) collects the best of these hidden gems, including several shot from Cole's stunning original art. Most of thesedrawings have not seen print elsewhere since their originalpublication.