With a talking monkey, Jack Cole comes into his own

From the first L-shaped panel to the ironic return of the clock tower on the last page, this may be the first fully realized Jack Cole story. The art may not be as polished as his comics of the late Forties or his Playboy cartoons of the Fifties but in terms of visual ideas and using the medium, this is a stunning piece of work.

To illustrate my point, I had intended to pull some panels but it just didn't work. Not that some of the individual panels aren't good enough to stand on their own, they certainly are, but all lose something when excerpted. You can only fully appreciate what Cole is doing in context. I suspect that, at the time, only Eisner had a better grasp of sequential art as a story-telling medium.








From Smash Comics #21

Update: Click here for Paul Tumey's loving detailed analysis of this story.