DC Finest - Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man

by Jack Cole

Patrick “Eel” O’Brian’s life of crime just became a whole lot stranger! After an unfortunate accident leaves Eel’s body transformed to have the properties of rubber, Plastic Man is born! But can Eel overcome his worst impulses and use his new abilities for good?

DC Finest continues, a major publishing initiative presenting comprehensive collections of the most in-demand and celebrated periods in DC Comics history, spanning genres, characters, and eras!

Uncover the origin of one of DC’s wackiest heroes in this collection spanning the early days of Plastic Man! He can bounce, stretch, and crack wise, but can he save the day? And, more importantly, does he even want to? What business does a petty crook have playing superhero anyway?

This volume collects Police Comics #1-36; Plastic Man #1-2.

Genres: Comics, Dc Comics, Superheroes, Fiction

584 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2025

About the author

Jack Ralph Cole was an American cartoonist best known for creating the comedic superhero Plastic Man, and his cartoons for Playboy Magazine.

Reviews

[Little Timmy]

While Plastic man has never been one of my favorite DC heroes these are good fun reads. Recommended

[Benji's Books]

Some of the best comics to come out of the Golden Age, this reads wicked smoothly and the humor still holds up very well. Comics from this time are often a chore to get through, but Jack Cole had a real talent. It's a shame he left us the way he did. To think about how many more great stories and artwork we could have gotten from him...

[Tim Schneider]

Most Golden Age comics are a major slog with bad art, bad writing and repetitive stories. Let's face it...nobody thought anyone would be reading these things in eighty years, much less reading the stories back to back. Of course there are exceptions to the rule and there were great creators like Will Eisner, Carl Barks and Basil Wolverton putting out both great stories and great art. And you can add Jack Cole's name to that list as well.

This book covers Plas' career over the first thirty-six issues of Police Comics and the first two issues of his own comic book spanning mid 1941 to late 1944. Along the way Plas grows from a five page back-up strip (behind cover feature Firebrand by Reed Crandall) to six, then eight, then fifteen pages as he wrested the cover away from Firebrand, and ultimately became that rare feature that graduated to his own sixty page comic. And while I haven't read the other features that were in Police at the time, and have the utmost respect for Crandall as an artist, it's not really surprising. Plastic Man and Jack Cole were special.

The strip walked the line between humor and superheroics perfectly. And Cole was capable of throwing in a little bit of suspense or horror or sheer crime drama when the story called for it, and still have it work within the somewhat surrealistic world of Plastic Man. And that world got progressively more surrealistic as Cole became more comfortable with the character and has more pages with which to play in Plas' world. His art became looser and simultaneously more expressive and cartoony. And he had enough pages to show that he was second only to Will Eisner when it came to the art of the splash page.

It's interesting to read these pre-code comics. While Cole doesn't give us anything approaching the extremes that would come from the crime and horror comics, people do die in these stories, sometimes pretty violently. And there's quite a bit of drug mention, particularly in the earlier stories. Comics at this point weren't just for kids, but were aiming for a lot of the same market as the pulps.

This was probably the most stories I've ever read with Woozy Winks and I have to say that he's not a terrible character. Yeah...he's comic relief. But in the world of Plastic Man almost everything is comic relief, so it's not as jarring as, say, Percival Popp in Spectre or Doiby Dickles in Green Lantern.

Ultimately, this is very close to as good as Golden Age comics could get. Not on par, in my opinion, with the best of Eisner's Spirit, Walt Kelly, or Barks. But a long stretch ahead of the standard fare of the time.

[Kris Shaw]

I read the first two Archives a long time ago and didn't think too much of them. This material covers both of those books and one more issue, and on the reread some years later these are some fine Golden Age comics.

Jack Cole goes for the whimsical and surreal, and it works. Plastic Man is a joy to read.

I love the DC's Finest format. 540+ pages, reasonably priced, nice paper.

[Doug Duncan]

I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting to, and it was pretty fun in general. I started to find the sidekick pretty annoying as the book went on, but there was some genuinely smart writing and stories in here for the most part that balanced that out for me.

[Philip]

These stories hold up much better than most of the other Golden Ages stories I’ve read. Funny stuff, and the splash pages are fantastic.

[Jedi Master Nate Lightray]

There’s a strange charm on these old comics. The 40s were more likable (for me) than the 60s. However, it’s a product of it’s time. There’s some questionable material about race and sexism. Still, Plastic Man’s the hero, and acts it, and these stories are so much fun.

[Rachel]

3.5, some of this ages poorly, but there are a lot of really fun completely bizarre plots here.

[Ángel Javier]

Jack Cole es impresionante: como dibujante, parece un cruce entre Will Eisner y Basil Wolverton, y como guionista... pues está realmente bien; sus historias tienen un punto de misterio muy curioso que las lleva más allá de la farsa lisérgica que, sin embargo, es el tono predominante en ellas. Desde luego, queda claro que son cómics pre-code, porque el número de criminales (y de no criminales, muchas veces) que mueren en cada cómic de las maneras más absurdas es elevadísimo, en tanto que Plas, y sobre todo su compinche Woozy, distan mucho de ser héroes al uso. La práctica invulnerabilidad de Woozy, lejos de limitar las tramas, hacen que lleguen a girar en torno a él y a su estupidez, casi tan infalible como su resistencia y suerte. De hecho, llega a robarle el protagonismo en numerosas ocasiones a Plas, haciendo que el grado de comicidad absurda de las historias aumente bastantes grados.

En fin, súper recomendable. Cole era un genio que murió prematuramente y que nunca ha sido olvidado, pero su obra es difícil de encontrar, y esta reedición de las primeras aventuras de Eel O'Brian y su descerebrado compinche Woozy Winks es más que bienvenida. ¡Que sigan rulando!

[Jonathan]

Jack Cole's art here is absolutely outstanding- so expressive and stylish and full of character. The title splash pages are particularly creative and have an aesthetic sensibility that seems really ahead of its time. Plastic Man as a character is really fun, perfectly blending golden age superhero crime fighting with classic humor comics. Even some of the elements I thought I would find annoying, like his supernaturally-lucky blundering sidekick Woozy Winks, I ended up finding pretty charming and often genuinely really funny. Some of the best stuff in here is firmly set in the 40's: plots to sell bootleg butter on the black market; Dick Tracy gangsters running a racket to mutilate people to get them out of the draft, etc. Some of the worst stuff in here is also firmly set in the 40's: wartime anti-Japanese racism, uncomfortable caricatures of Black background characters, and a whole host of offensive stereotypes in a story of fifth-columnist Native Americans. But most of the stories hold up really well!

I'm really liking these DC Finest books, but I do wish there was some back matter to put these stories in context.

[Joe Santoro]

I had always regretted not getting the hardback collections of these a while back when some stores were clearancing them, but happily DC finally started putting out their equilivalent of the Epic line.

These are really great... much better than the usual Golden Age fare. The splashes to start each story are amazing, and you'd think fighting just regular crooks the stories would get boring, but they manage to do fun stuff so that they don't feel like the same story over and over.

There is a small bit of 4th wall breaking, which I don't usually like but it works here in its small doses. Really great stuff!

[Erik Wirfs-Brock]

Jack Cole deserves his reputation as one of the best artists of the first few years of the American comics industry, some of the writing of the plastic man tales was repetitive but I found myself grinning at some of the cartooning nearly every other page. Superhero comics lost something when they jettisoned this kind of whimsy. The Splash pages that open every story are exceptionally weird and grotesque. For those hesitant to check this out, it gave me the feeling of like early loony tune cartoons.

[Ruz El]

I loved this. Typically reading golden age books can be a little dull since the super-hero end is usually some sort of gangster plot. That's the case here, but Cole keeps things moving with some amazing cartooning and really fun plots. The best of this reminded me of Tezuka, and that is about the highest praise once can heap. I don't know if I'll buy more volumes if they come out, but this was gold.

[Jamie]

The 1940s were a crazy and relatively ignorant and naive era, but at least people were having fun, I guess. There was a lot of charm to be found in this collection, but for me it got to be a bit much all at once. Probably better read in short bursts than straight through.

[Matt Fuller]

Might be the best Golden Age content the comedy is actually funny. Covers 1941-1944.