Jack Ralph Cole (December 14, 1914 – August 13, 1958)[1] was an American cartoonist best known for birthing the comedic superhero Plastic Man, and his cartoons for Playboy magazine.

[3] Born in New Castle, Pennsylvania,[4] Cole—the third of six children of a dry goods-store owner and amateur-entertainer father and a former elementary school-teacher mother—was untrained in art except for the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course.

[citation needed] In 1936, having married childhood sweetheart Dorothy Mahoney soon after graduating high school, Cole moved with his wife to New York City's Greenwich Village.

After spending a year attempting to break in as a magazine/newspaper illustrator, Cole began drawing for the studio of Harry "A" Chesler, one of the first comic-book "packagers" who supplied outsourced stories to publishers entering the new medium.

Nagle), "Officer Clancy", "Ima Slooth", "Peewee Throttle", and "Burp the Twerp: The Super So-An'-So" (the latter two under the pseudonym Ralph Johns).

Lev Gleason Publications hired Cole in 1939 to edit Silver Streak Comics, where one of his first tasks was to revamp the newly created superhero Daredevil.

He worked with Will Eisner, assisting on the writer-artist's signature hero The Spirit—a masked crime-fighter created for a weekly syndicated newspaper Sunday supplement and reprinted in Quality Comics.

Midnight, the alter ego of radio announcer Dave Clark, wore a similar fedora hat and domino mask, and partnered with a talking monkey—questionably in place of the Spirit's young African-American sidekick, Ebony White.

As well, Cole's offbeat humor, combined with Plastic Man's ability to take any shape, gave the cartoonist opportunities to experiment with text and graphics in groundbreaking manner—helping to define the medium's visual vocabulary[citation needed], and making the idiosyncratic character one of the few to endure from the Golden Age to modern times.

[8] So popular was his work that the second item of merchandise ever licensed by Playboy (after cufflinks with the famous rabbit-head logo) was a cocktail-napkin set, "Females by Cole", featuring his cartoons.

"[9][10] Around the same time he started at Playboy, or possibly just before that, Jack Cole created a new comic strip for the faux army Sunday section The American Armed Forced Features, which was produced between 1955 and 1965 by the W.B.

Called Millie & Terry, it told the humorous adventures of two friends who move to an army town, where they are constantly pursued by the wolfish soldiers.

Wertham, author of the influential study Seduction of the Innocent, cited a particular panel of the story's dope-dealing narrator about to be stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle as an example of the "injury-to-the-eye" motif.