RAPT IN PLASTIC

In SUPERHUMAN ALL TOO SUPERHUMAN I used the William Moulton Marston WONDER WOMAN as my exemplar of the use of "dynamic violence," with attention to the fact that what makes the violence in WONDER WOMAN "dynamic" is that the characters possess some degree of interiority, of a capacity for transformation that has consequences for the way conflict and violence play out in the story's structure.

For my example of the opposite use of violence, the "static" kind, I offer up Jack Cole's Sadean PLASTIC MAN.

To say that the Cole PLASTIC MAN is esteemed over the Marston WONDER WOMAN would be putting it mildly. There are some good reasons for this, for though the art of H.G. Peter has been dismissed unfairly by many critics, there can be no doubt that Jack Cole was the more innovative of the two artists. Consequently, it's Cole's eyeball-stretching depictions of his "India Rubber Man" that caused a highbrow type like Art Spiegelman to co-author a book on Cole's creativity with collaborator Chip Kidd.

Nevertheless, the exceptional nature of Cole's artwork is of secondary consideration to this essay, which deals with the nature of violence in Cole's work.

Now when I say that I find Cole's work-- both on PLASTIC MAN and other creations-- to be "Sadean," I don't mean that I believe that Cole was literally turned on by his own images of death, torture and mayhem, as the Marquis de Sade reputedly was by his own autopornography. I do however think that Cole was personally fascinated by violent and transgressive materials. I'm sure that on one level he *may* have viewed the labor of grossing out the kiddies as just another aspect of a job, but even so Cole doesn't seem as distanced with such material as, say, his contemporaries Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Around the same time PLASTIC MAN got started, Simon and Kirby could ladle out bucketsfuls of juvenile-appropriate gore and grue in Timely's CAPTAIN AMERICA. And yet the two of them could, without muss or fuss, transition to a "clean" style of violence the moment they started working on features like NEWSBOY LEGION for DC Comics, while Cole continually pursued transgressive images throughout his 14 years in comic books and on into his work for PLAYBOY, in which Paul Tumey of COLE'S COMICS finds "themes of virility and impotence, wholeness and fragmentation."

In support of Tumey's analysis, one finds that even in the first year of PLASTIC MAN, when Cole was still finding his way with the new genre of the superhero, images of violence, death and grotesquerie abound, next to which even the grim BATMAN stories seem rather tame. Plastic Man's first major villain-- a very butch (and implicitly lesbian) woman named "Madame Brawn"-- appears first in PC #4 and makes her first and last comeback in #5, where she dies when she takes a fall and hits her head on a spike. PC #6 includes a victim whose hands are cut off and then used by evildoers for malicious mischief; PC #9 features a villain named "Hairy Arms," who appears to have a shrunken torso out of proportion with the rest of his body. And

then there's POLICE COMICS #11. The cover at left suggests playful fantasy-slapstick, but inside is neck-breaking, bodies blown apart, brain transplantation, and a giant who (a) walks on his hands because he can't walk on his useless legs, and (b) tries to eat Plastic Man alive.

Now, pound for pound Marston's WONDER WOMAN may be no less violent, but as with my comparison of STAR WARS and ALIEN in this essay, WONDER WOMAN never seems as transgressive because the violence is of the *clean* variety. (And if anyone cares, with respect to the other category mentioned in said essay, both works belong to the "spectacular" rather than "functional" category in terms of whether the violence is a means or an end in the story.) But an additional reason as to why WONDER WOMAN might appear less transgressive is precisely because the feature so frequently focuses on the interiority of the characters, with their melodramatic miracles of personal transformation, their better living through the chains of lovingkindness.

There's nearly no interiority in the stories of Jack Cole. Cole gives Plastic Man a couple of stories where the hero expresses his guilt over his antisocial acts as Eel O'Brien, but those are soon forgotten, and, as Paul Tumey points out, the very identity of Eel O'Brien disappears in time as well. Both villains and victims know themselves but slenderly, and so have barely any rational motive for getting involved with criminal doings. The non-body aspect of symbolism only occasionally appears in Cole: often it seems like nothing but body, body, body. Bodies hit, bodies stab, bodies kill or get killed (though Plastic Man seems to stay above the carnage, his unique physique in its way as invulnerable as that of Superman).

Of course that invulnerability is certainly key to understanding the Sadean meaning of PLASTIC MAN. Physically the hero is as above the sufferings of victims and villains, loosely in the same way that a Sade protagonist's money and aristocratic standing put him above those he debauches. The curse of ordinary mortality is what Tumey calls "fragmentation:" only a fantasy-body can be absolutely above it.

Given the unique viewpoints of Marston and Cole respectively, it's not surprising that later iterations of their most famous characters have failed to duplicate the complex symbolisms at their heart. However, of the two WONDER WOMAN has been treated somewhat better. Even when latter-day raconteurs abjure following Marston's specific programs, often the essence of gender-conflict still informs their stories, and invariably some aspects of the Marston mythology are used, with whatever success.

Cole's PLASTIC MAN suffers a more peculiar form of erasure, for with that character latter-day raconteurs labor to imitate only the aforementioned formal aspects of the artwork-- how many crazy shapes can Plastic Man assume-- and the elements of goofy slapstick. It's almost as if they never read the actual Cole stories, but only looked at the pictures. It seems odd that in these days of superhero decadence and the dawning of adult pulp comics, even Kyle Baker's PLASTIC MAN should resemble LOONEY TUNES more than the violent and Sadean world of Jack Cole.