Art Spiegelman & Chip Kidd: Jack Cole And Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits!

Cartoonist Jack Cole ghosted for Will Eisner, was behind some of the most violent crime comics of the post-War era, painted one-panel gags for Playboy, and drew a syndicated comic strip for a few years in the '50s. Cole did virtually everything a person can do in the comics field in the time between his professional debut in 1936 and his 1958 suicide. He's best known, however, for creating the rubbery superhero Plastic Man, whose increasingly zany adventures Cole wrote and drew for the bulk of the '40s. Alternative-comics icon Art Spiegelman wrote about Cole's life and the significance of his work for The New Yorker in 1999, and the text of that article is reprinted in Jack Cole And Plastic Man, a slick paperback curio with packaging designed by art director Chip Kidd. Kidd has been earning a reputation for his stylish design of D.C. Comics' Superman and Batman coffee-table books, as well as his eye-grabbing collaborations with Chris Ware and Dan Clowes on the covers of their popular graphic novels. Working with the equally design-obsessed Spiegelman—who once individually ripped each issue of his anthology Raw, to give it a final personal stamp—Kidd indulges his avant-garde side. Jack Cole And Plastic Man reproduces complete comic-book stories alongside sketches and pertinent panels; in its closing pages, it becomes a lengthy collage of images that retell Cole's story in the abstract. The original text loses some pertinence in this orgy of visual deconstruction, but Spiegelman's original article had its shortcomings to begin with, with an abundance of biographical material and a shortage of analysis. He tantalizes with fleeting observations about Cole's boundary-stretching use of Plastic Man as the genderless, formless embodiment of artistic potential, but offers none of the sustained critical evaluation that should be expected from the creator of Maus. Spiegelman doesn't even dwell much on the personal kick that he, a superhero-hater, gets out of Cole's work. In spite of their failure to follow through on the promise of the book's title in the text, Spiegelman and Kidd have assembled an attractive and innovative package that uses multiple paper stocks to communicate the gloss of Cole's magazine illustrations and the dulling decay of his comic-book oeuvre. Jack Cole And Plastic Man is designed to be held, smelled, and felt as much as read. The words are mere graphics, included as another formal element for Kidd and Spiegelman to stretch.