A week ago I showed the Jack Cole story, “Murder, Morphine and Me” from
True Crime #2. It featured the “injury to the eye motif” panel in Fredric Wertham’s anti-comics screed,
Seduction of the Innocent. A week later I’m showing you more Jack Cole, and one other injury to the eye panel.
Above is the cover of
Police Comics #24, which is yet another example. Kids saw this sort of thing every time they saw a Three Stooges film short. Did Jack Cole have a thing about attacking eyeballs? I don’t know, but if you know of any similar panels in other stories of his let me know.
Eyeball attacks notwithstanding, this is a totally screwball story, which has to be read to be appreciated. You know you’re in the middle of something bizarre when you see a panel where the top of a man’s head is blown off and on the ground nearby lies a waiting brain.
From
Police Comics #11 (1942):
5 comments:
Wow!! Awesome/gruesome story! Thanks!!
This is probably one of the most panels per page stories I've ever seen, and Cole didn't skimp on a single one.
It does have that strange 40s storytelling where there's a lot of additional elements that could be parred out. Why the mob involvement? It made no difference to the story.
Still, a great read!
Many of Cole's earliest comic-book stories seem thrown-together haphazardly; his later stories tend to be tightly constructed. I guess that this is a mid-point in that evolution; but maybe he just felt like writing something utterly goofy.
When Cole wants to depict a woman as attractive, and especially as dangerously attractve, he tends to give her very wide-set eyes. We see that with Shirley, but especially note what happens with Valda's eyes. In the final panels of the sixth page, they are wide-set; in the second panel of the seventh page, they are (amongst other things) no longer so.
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Debbie, you do this old guy a kindness. Thank you.
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