Written and drawn by Cole, Plastic Man could stretch himself into any shape or to any extremity at will. Extending his legs, he could stride across town in a few steps; he could infiltrate the criminal's lair by contorting into any form. Part of the fun for the reader lay in discovering which of the accoutrements in the crook's hideout was Plas in disguise, lying in wait for his prey. His rubber costume was a dead giveaway, of course: bright red long-sleeved tank suit with a wide yellow-and-black-striped belt. So all you had to do was to find the carpet or door or Oriental vase or easy chair that was red with yellow and black stripes, and, sure enough, the bad guy would get stuck in the carpet or couldn't open the door or flee or be grabbed by the vase or enveloped by the chair while sitting in it, and then Plastic Man would then resume his normal shape and arrest the culprit.
Cole's device's were both ingenious and humorous, but the chief hilarity of the stories lay in the profusion of sight gags with which Cole infected virtually every page. To add to the fun, the underworld itself seemed populated entirely by fugitives from animated cartoons, but - and this was Cole's great secret - Plastic Man was never a figure of fun or a comedian. Surrounded by burlesque comedy and accompanied by a fat comic sidekick named Woozy Winks, Plas nonetheless took his crime-fighting seriously, and the combination gave the series its distinctive ambiance.
REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from an article in The New Yorker, 19 April 1999)
If the going rate for pictures is still only a thousand words per, most Plastic Man panels are worth at least two or three pictures. Each panel seems to swallow several separate instants of time whole, as if the page were made up of small screens with different, though related, films whizzing by at forty-eight frames a second. Cole’s is an amphetamine-riddled art: Tex Avery on speed! And it’s not just Plastic Man who bounces and twists; any one of Cole’s incidental figures would seem as kinetic as Plastic Man if it were transplanted into someone else’s comic book. Each page is intuitively visualized to form a coherent whole, even though the individual panels form a narrative flood of run-on sentences that breathlessly jump from one page to the next. The art ricochets like a racquetball slammed full force in a closet. Your eye, however, is guided as if it were a skillfully controlled pinball, often by Plastic Man himself acting as a compositional device. His distended body is an arrow pointing out the sights as it hurtles through time. In just a single panel, our hero chases along a footpath in a park, trailing a mugger. Running from the rear of the picture, Plastic Man’s S-curved body echoes the path itself as he loops around one pedestrian in the distance and extends between two lovers about to kiss - lipstick traces are on his elongated neck as he passes them - to swoop up between an old man’s legs like an enormous penis wearing sunglasses and stare into his startled face. Plastic Man had all the crackling intensity of the life force transferred to paper. Pulpier than James Cameron’s Terminator, more frantic than Jim Carrey in The Mask, and less self-conscious than Woody Allen’s Zelig, Plastic Man literally embodied the comic-book form: its exuberant energy, its flexibility, its boyishness, and its only partially sublimated sexuality. Cole’s infinitely malleable hero, Clinton-like in his ability to change shape and squeeze through tiny loopholes, just oozed sex. It was never made explicit - the idea of a hard-core version of Plastic Man boggles the mind - but there was a polymorphously perverse quality to a character who personified Georges Bataille’s notion of the body on the brink of dissolving its borders. Cole let it all hang out as Plastic Man slithered from panel to panel - sometimes shifting from male to female, and freely mutating from erect and hardboiled to soft as a Dali clock. [Read the full article here...]
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