[1] Cartoonist Jack Cole had enjoyed considerable success in the comic book industry in the 1940s, scripting and drawing the exploits of such characters as The Claw, Daredevil, The Comet, Midnight, and Plastic Man, as well as (under the pen name Ralph Johns) producing humorous fillers featuring the detective Wun Cloo and the superheroic Burp the Twerp, among others.
[2][3] Then, in the fifties, he broke into the lucrative "slick" magazine market, turning out highly regarded cartoons for Hugh Hefner's Playboy, and some of that work was either collected into a book or separately merchandised.
Finally, in early 1958, he sold Betsy and Me to Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate, which had distributed Invisible Scarlet O'Neil and Claire Voyant nationwide[2] and whose primary strip was Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon.
[7] Then, on August 13, the "pleasant, easygoing" Cole, whose forty-three-year-old life was described by pop-culture historian Ron Goulart as "outwardly the stuff of which Jimmy Stewart movies are made," shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber pistol.
Readers experienced the Tibbits' sudden "need" for their first car (a 1945 "Huppmobile") after realizing that everyone else already had one ("We were the last of a dying race"), and then their plan to move to a new tract house in suburban Sunken Hills.
"[11] Rick Klaw of The Austin Chronicle felt that Cole was demonstrating "his artistic prowess" when he used "a sparse ultramodern abstract style,"[7] which blogger Josh Shalek considered "understated and well executed.
"Betsy and Me is formulaic, conventional and drawn in a fad style of the day unworthy of Cole's talents," stated Allan Holtz before elaborating that it "rehashes the most overdone subject matter in comic strips" with "a cast of characters straight off the assembly line" while replacing actual humor with the narrator's commentary motif, which makes "the strip far too type-dense," resulting in a product that "is unattractive and uninviting.
"[4] Blog to Comm's Christopher Stigliano described the strip as an "inspired misfire" that "ultimately tumbles into a chasm of boring respectibility with only a scant few guffaws to make anything redeeming.
"[16] Robert C. Harvey would seem to support this theory by suggesting that "the basic comedy of the strip" lay in "confront[ing] the laughable difference between appearance and reality," something the cartoonist had to do daily by presenting a happy fictional family while he and his wife had no children of their own.
[10] Ron Goulart cautioned that the strip can be seen as autobiographical "if you don't get too serious about it,"[3] but others, such as Chris Mautner of Comic Book Resources, have expressed doubts that it "can bear the weight of such a theory.
Whether working on genre comics, Playboy gag cartoons, or a family syndicated strip, Cole produced a superior product with wit, charm, and formal mastery, but without anything that could be called personal investment.
"[5] R. C. Harvey's "excellent, informative" 21-page introduction[7] includes a generously illustrated biographical sketch of Jack Cole the veratile artist,[14] and it also explores the mystery of his suicide.