Forgotten Northwest Corner artists cling to their legacies

The McDonald’s fast-food chain this summer has included with its Happy Meals moveable superhero figures including Plastic Man. Children play with the figures without knowing the Northwest Corner’s claim to his creator, Jack Cole, a one-time resident of Falls Village.

Jack Ralph Cole (1914-58) was born in New Castle, Pa. He was one of the “Coles from New Castle,� he told friends. The son of a song-and-dance entertainer and a school teacher, he displayed an early talent for drawing and enrolled in the Landon School of Cartooning. He quit school to take a 7,000-mile bicycle trip across the country in 1932. Then he eloped with childhood sweetheart, Dorothy Mahoney.

Cole plied his art wherever he could. He did jobs for American Can Co. He painted signs and posters. He circulated cartoons to publishers, hoping to get a start in publishing. Boys’ Life magazine sent him a small check for one of his cartoons.

He found work in 1940 helping draw the adventures of Silver Streak at Everett “Busy� Arnold’s Quality comics group, based in Stamford, Conn. Cole drew adventures of Quicksilver for National Comics, Death Patrol for Military and Midnight for Smash Comics.

In 1941, Cole created his own hero, Plastic Man. The character was really a gangland figure, Eel O’Brian, who, fleeing cops after a payroll robbery, ran into an old factory, and accidentally fell against a vat of acid. Some of the caustic liquid spilled onto a wound. Escaping into a swamp, O’Brian fell unconscious. When he awoke, he discovered the acid had somehow entered his bloodstream. He could stretch his limbs and twist them into pretzel shapes. O’Brian decided to make his rubberiness a tool for good, rather than evil.

Plas, as he was called by his chubby sidekick Woozy Winks, went on to appear in 102 issues of Police Comics and 64 issues of his own title. They are prized by collectors today.

The Coles left Falls Village for a rental in Great Barrington, then lived in Southfield.  

Cole wrote and drew Plastic Man through the early 1950s. He ghosted Will Eisner’s  Spirit daily newspaper adventures. He also sold single-panel cartoons to Colliers, Judge and a fledgling periodical, Playboy. The Coles moved to Chicago in 1955 when assignments from the last publication became steady.

In Chicago in 1958 Cole landed the goal of his career: a contract with the Chicago Sun-Times syndicate to produce a regular newspaper comic strip. Cole’s career came to an abrupt end, however. He inexplicably took his own life.

But Plastic Man lives on. Although the original publisher is long gone, DC, home of Superman and Batman, acquired the rights to Plastic Man (even though it already had a developed its own competing character, Elongated Man) and keeps him busy fighting evildoers today.

Norton: chickens, oxen, art

Henry L. Norton’s artwork is very visible to motorists in Massachusetts. If only he’d  signed it.

Norton (1873-1932) was born in North Canaan and grew up in West Springfield. He worked for the R.F. Hawkins Iron Works as a young man, and later organized his own firm of bridge engineers, Collins & Norton.

He was wounded seven times in action during World War I, in the five years he served in the Canadian Army in Flanders and France. After the war, he operated his own bronze tablet foundry in Boston for three decades.

The foundry is why Norton became an artist. Clients sometimes needed designs for their commemorative plaques.

Norton’s foundry received a big commission in 1926 for 26 bronze figures to be mounted on granite pillars that would be installed the width of Massachusetts, from Alford and North Egremont all the way to Cambridge.

Norton came up with a rough depiction of a team of oxen pulling a sledge through the snow.

The monuments commemmorate the 1776 Henry Knox caravan of cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, to help chase the British out of the city. (Another 30 monuments with art by another artist run from Hillsdale, N.Y., north to Lake Champlain.)

Norton also designed the Monument to All Wars on the Ellington Town Green in Connecticut and the Rhode Island Red Monument. This last is a bronze relief of a fowl, commissioned by the Rhode Island Red Club of America in 1925 for installation in Little Compton, R.I., where the breed was first developed. Chickens and oxen. The artists took commissions where they found them.

Norton, like Cole, suffered late-life depression. He died in Winthrop, on the steps of the cemetery chapel, of a self-inflicted gunshot.

George Cox’s Ethan Allen

There’s no biographical material about Norton on the Internet. Nor does George R. Cox show up, beyond a web page put together by his grandson, Topher Cox.

A WPA-era artist, Cox painted “Ethan Allen in Forge Making Cannon Balls,� which graces the wall of the Lakeville Post Office. It was an assignment from the Section of Fine Arts of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1942.

According to the younger Cox, “When my father was about 12, he and his father drove up to Lakeville. My grandfather had forgotten to sign his work. So around 1952 they drove up with a small can of paint and a brush. My grandfather met with the postmaster, who gave him a small stool. My grandfather stood on the stool and signed the mural.�

Until then, postal patrons had no clue as to the painting’s originator.

Enjoy a Happy Meal, buy stamps in Lakeville and stop to read the inscription on the Knox marker at the corner of routes 7 and 23 (north) in Great Barrington — and remember the trio of forgotten Northwest Corner artists who yet struggle for a lasting identity.