The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole

Jack Cole has been justly celebrated as the creator of Plastic Man and an innovative comic-book artist of the 1940s (especially in Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd's Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits). However, after finishing his 14-year run on the title, he found himself looking for something new and decided to develop his craft at single panel “gag” cartoons, which led work for the Humorama line of “girls and gags” magazines. His ability to render the female form was already without peer, and exquisite line drawings and a mastery of ink-wash soon appeared. The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, now in softcover, collects the rare '50s pin-ups that led to the artist's gig as Playboy's marquee cartoonist. Along with a foreword by editor Alex Chun, this volume (originally released in a now out-of-print hardcover edition that fetches high prices in the secondhand market) collects the best of these hidden gems, including several shot from Cole's stunning original art. Most of these drawings had not seen print elsewhere since their original publication.