As a kid, I pushed away all my Superman and Batman comic books to the side to make room for my older Plastic Man comics.
What a treat to read something that s-t-r-e-a-t-c-h-e-d the imagination.
As I reached my teens and Plastic Man comics took on new artists and writers - yet - I still poured over what I could find from the times when Martin Block and Arthur Godfrey ruled the AM radio airways.
Tom Shapira gives us this insight into Jack Cole and Plastic Man:
"Plastic Man wasn't a character made and liked for his rich inner world and iconic symbolism – he was made as a vehicle for the skills of a particular artist, the character’s creator Jack Cole. Cole has long been admired among his golden-age comic-book artist brethren; said to own artistic skills on par with the more renowned newspaper artist of the period (Cole actually left the comic-book industry for a lucrative illustration job in Playboy, which showed his more illustrative qualities). Indeed, one of the alleged reasons Cole left monthly comic-books was the pace they required; for Cole, sacrificing the quality of his work wasn't an acceptable compromise."
Some of us here at Facebook may have some feint remembrances of Plasti and his friend Wuzi Winks from the some 20 years ago DC re-instituted series penned by Kyle Baker who - as he has so declared ..."saw the malleable character as a chance to experiment and try different techniques."
Admirable intention - in the sense of how creative Jack Cole was in devising Plastic Man - but in the re-inventing of Plastic Man something is missing...
As was noted in Shapira`s Comics Journal:
"The mistake made by creators following Jack Cole, and I include Kyle Baker in this bunch, is to miss that seriousness of the character is essential part of the gag. A good straight-man can make or break a comic-routine. Instead, the minute he bounced into the DC universe Plastic Man became ‘the funny one’ often written by people who don’t really know how to write good gags and artists whose style fails to convoy the right sort of energy."
The origin of Plastic Man can be found in Quality's Police Comics #1 (Aug. 1941).
You can grab a PDF copy here:
https://www.mediafire.com/.../Police_Comics_001.cbr/file