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Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits

By: Art Spiegelman Chip Kidd
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 0811831795
ISBN-13: 9780811831796
Released: 13 Sep 2001
RRP: £14.99
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Customer Reviews

Draft Portrait of the Artist - By: A. Ross, 25 Jun 2002
This biography/retrospective of cartoonist Jack Cole is certainly eye-catching with its chaotic design, popping full-bleed artwork, rounded corners, & varying paper stock, but as a portrait of the artist it never reallly amounts to more than a draft sketch. Spiegelman's text is slightly expanded from an article he wrote in 1999 for The New Yorker, & while it's a fairly decent biographical sketch of Cole's life & career as creator of Plastic Man, Playboy illustrator, & syndicated cartoonist, it never does more than skim the surface. Most indicative of this is the skimpy treatment Cole's unexpected & unexplained suicide is accorded. It's clear that Spiegelman (creator of the acclaimed Maus) loves Cole's work, but other than some generic plaudits that could apply to a number of cartoonists, it's never reallly clear why he considers Cole a genius (or for that matter, why the reader should).

A graphic tribute it's more successful, combining reproductions of complete strips & stories (including the True Crime Comics classic "Murder, Morphine, & Me"), pieces from Playboy, family photos, unpublished sketches, covers, & collages. Some people are bound to hate renowned book designer Kidd's treatment of the material (and indeed, some of the text is a strain to read), but it seems wholly suitable to Cole's own frantic graphic style from the Plastic Man series. In the end, the book is unlikely to appeal to those outside the world of comics.