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This biography/retrospective of cartoonist Jack Cole is certainly eye-catching with its chaotic design, popping full-bleed artwork, rounded corners, and varying paper stock, but as a portrait of the artist it never really amounts to more than a draft sketch. Spiegelman's text is slightly expanded from an article he wrote in 1999 for The New Yorker, and while it's a fairly decent biographical sketch of Cole's life and career as creator of Plastic Man, Playboy illustrator, and syndicated cartoonist, it never does more than skim the surface. Most indicative of this is the skimpy treatment Cole's unexpected and unexplained suicide is accorded. It's clear that Spiegelman (creator of the acclaimed Maus) loves Cole's work, but other than some generic plaudits that could apply to a number of cartoonists, it's never really clear why he considers Cole a genius (or for that matter, why the reader should). A graphic tribute it's more successful, combining reproductions of complete strips and stories (including the True Crime Comics classic "Murder, Morphine, and Me"), pieces from Playboy, family photos, unpublished sketches, covers, and collages. Some people are bound to hate renowned book designer Kidd's treatment of the material (and indeed, some of the text is a strain to read), but it seems wholly suitable to Cole's own frantic graphic style from the Plastic Man series. In the end, the book is unlikely to appeal to those outside the world of comics.
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