What does comics legend Jack Cole's best-known creation look like without Jack Cole?
Like this never-reprinted cover by Quality Comics stablemate Blackhawk's Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera, and the following never-reprinted story by scripter Dick Wood and illustrator Charles Nicholas!
This tale from Quality's Plastic Man #50 (1954) was typical of the direction the book took after Jack Cole left.
Plas and sidekick Woozy battled Commies (as we also showed HERE), monsters, and aliens in the lead stories by a plethora of writers and illustrators while the rest of the book was filled with reprints of Jack Cole's earlier tales.
A couple of issues later the book went entirely reprint (except for new covers and one-pagers) until it was cancelled with #64 when Quality closed its' doors and sold its' inventory (both published and unpublished) to DC in 1956.
DC continued publishing Blackhawk, G.I. Combat, Heart Throbs and the short-lived Robin Hood Tales and left the other characters and strips unused until the mid-1960s when Plas was revived in 1966 in all-new stories in a short-lived series!
(Note: around the same time, IW/Super Comics reprinted several issues of Plas's Golden Age book since they had purchased the actual printing plates from a printer where they had been abandoned by Quality. The timing appears to have been a coincidence.)
Since then, he's been revived and revamped several times in the humorous spirit of Jack Cole by a variety of creatives including Kyle Baker and Phil Foglio, and eventually incorporated into the DC mainstream universe...whatever its' current incarnation is as of this year! Please Support Hero Histories
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Featuring classic tales from each of his eras (Golden Age/Silver Age/Bronze Age)
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