A review by thecommonswings
Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits by Jack Cole, Chip Kidd, Art Spiegelman, Marc Witz

5.0

A pithy combination of biography, essay and celebration of the tragic life of Jack Cole. It’s beautifully judged, deftly moving between thoughtful consideration of Cole as an artist and writer and quite carefully dealing with the issues of his suicide without dipping into prurience. It’s also a genuine collaboration between Spiegelman and Kidd, a chaotic visual feast that celebrates the extraordinary kineticism of Cole’s greatest art whilst also nicely hinting at something of the turmoils simmering deeper under the surface. Cole is an extraordinary talent, the bridge - as the book rightly says - between Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner, but also kind of exhausting during the Plastic Man: that his Playboy cartoons were so melancholy and his daily comic strip so much of a wish fulfilment, Spiegelman and Kidd suggest very subtly that this inability to juggle all three may have been the cause of his tragic death. It’s telling they choose the word “snapped” to describe it, that constant sense of mutable joy finally. broken by causes we can never really know