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Plastic Man (aka Patrick “Eel” O’Brian)

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Jack Cole
(1914-58)

Okay, okay, okay…

So… he may have possessed plenty of gumshoe spirit, full of world-weary but snappy patter and he may have known plenty of those mean streets, but much beloved felon-turned-superhero PLASTIC MAN was never really a private eye (except for a brief, almost-glorious moment).

Still, you could say this much loved character has a history that stretches all over comic book history.

He made his debut in Police Comics #1, in the summer of 1941, as a six-page back-up feature. The cover star of that issue was Reed Crandall’s “Firebrand” (who?), but that wouldn’t last long.

That first installment was an origin story. Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, orphaned when he was ten or so, grows up rough and as a young man joins Skizzle Shanks and his gang of thieves, where his skills as a safecracker are much appreciated—until one fateful night when a planned robbery at the Crawford Chemical Works goes awry. As the gang try to flee from the police, Eel is shot and stumbles into a vat of acid. Abandoned by the rest of the crew, Eel manages to crawl away, eventually collapsing on a mountainside.

When he awakes, he discovers he’s been he’d been taken in by a kindly old monk at the Rest-Haven Monastery who hides the fugitive from the police and nurses him back to health.

But while recovering, Eel makes a shocking discovery— the acid has somehow imbued him with the incredible ability to stretch and mold his body into any shape. Astonished—and touched by the monk’s generosity—he vows to use his new-found powers for good, not evil.

The rest of the story follows Eel as he brings the gang that abandoned him to justice, dumping them off (literally) at the local precinct. The story introduced his ever-present shades and his infamous red rubber leotard which, using comic book logic, can stretch every which way he can.

It also introduced Plastic Man’s oddball, quirky and irreverent sense of humor, heavy on the wisecracks, and demonstrated some of his amazing abilities, like being able to stretch hundreds of feet and contorting his body, posing as a floor mat, and being able to bounce like a rubber ball.

Plastic Man was the arguably one sane man in a world gone increasingly bonkers, which is saying something, considering that the grinning, bendable doofus in his imminently stretchable red leotard and omnipresent sunglasses was the silliest-looking yahoo of the lot.

A year later, “Plas” acquired a dumb but funny sidekick named Woozy Winks. Perhaps not as annoying as Slam Bradley‘s Shorty Morgan, but close…

But more, much more, was to come. Already a regular back up feature in Police Comics, by the fifth issue (December 1941, for those keeping score), Plastic Man was starring on the cover,  where he was billed as the “New Comic Sensation!”

By December 1943, he had his own comic book, Plastic Man, which ran for a respectable 64 issues, and for the rest of his Quality Comics run, he was more or less the same crimefighting super-doofus he’d always been, whether he was a cop or an FBI agent or just a regular, if somewhat peculiar, superhero.

Under creator/writer/artist Jack Cole, the series flourished. Cole’s wacky absurdist humor brought a surreal energy to the proceedings. Other artists and writers took over eventually, though, and the stories just weren’t as funny. The tales were still full of yucks, but decidedly smaller ones.

But far more ominous things were around the corner. The superhero comic boom had started to wane by the late forties, and Quality Comics folded in 1956. DC Comics jumped in and snapped up the rights to most of their characters, including Plastic Man, although apparently DC editor Julius Schwarz didn’t get the memo. Just a few years later, he assigned John Broome and Carmine Infantino to create a comparable new character to be called  The Elongated Man, an almost complete rip-off of Plastic Man. Schwarz was apparently completely unaware DC Comics already owned the rights.

D’oh!

And so while The Elongated Man bent and stretched in various DC books, most notably as  a supporting character in The Flash series and as the star of a long-running series of backup features in Detective Comics, Plas sat in limbo.

It wasn’t until 1966 that DC finally brought him back, hoping to cash in on a possible television series. The stories lacked Cole’s anything-goes humor, and the comic lasted only a couple of  years. Still, DC kept the chaaracter around.

Alas, what with DC’s affection for canon tinkering (Pre-Crisis! Post-Crisis! Earth-One! Earth-Two!, Earth-Three! Old Earth! New Earth! The New 52!, The Newer 52! The Newest 52! Poterzebie 2.0!), Plas was in for a hard go of it.

He flitted in and out of storylines, both solo, in one-shot team-ups with other DC characters (Batman thought highly of him) and as a usually back row member of the Justice League of America, the All-Star Squadron and who the hell knows what else? By the early eighties, Plastic Man was appearing semi-regularly in various DC titles, with writers like Martin Pasko, and artists like Joe Staton and Bob Smith handling the chores, pretty much your standard — if occasionally offbeat —superhero, but amidst all the permutations, he also became, for a brief but glorious time, a private eye.

It took a while, though.

Released in 1988, the four-issue Plastic Man was a welcome return to form, cutting him loose from his spear carrier status in the JLA, reviving Cole’s over-the-top humor with a burst of unexpected exuberance that recalled the antics of early MAD Magazine, Tex Avery and The Marx Brothers. The first issue recounted—and rewrote—Plastic Man’s origins, with his suicide attempt interrupted by recently released (thanks to “something called Reaganomics”) mental patient Woozy. After a few mini-escapades, they decide to flip a coin to decide  whether they should criminals or set up a detective agency in New York City. They chose the latter, and ended up with an office where Woozy’s name is misspelled (of course) on the obligatory frosted glass door.

Still, there’s very little actual private-eying going on here—it’s mostly the pair stumbling into more madcap misadventures, tackling the Ooze Brothers (a trio of gelatinous bank robbers), a Messianic cult based in California (where else?)  and a gang of aliens intent on stealing New York City. But it was nice while it lasted.

And so it went, Plastic Man’s story proving to be as malleable as his body. Girlfriends came and went. He even marries at one point, and has a kid. He’s in and out of various superhero teams. There were Plastic Man comic series in 2004 and 2018, with Plas back in his superhero-for-the-FBI status, and he had popped up on television in 1979 as a Saturday morning cartoon, where he finally earned some much-deserved popularity.

Even today, he turns up occasionally as a guest star in various DC comics, and is currently serving as comedy relief in the latest incarnation of the Justice League of America. They’re all fun but none have really captured Cole’s completely bonkers mojo.

More recently, and in a private eye vein, even if Plas isn’t a private eye, is 2024’s Plastic Man No More, which was billed as “Hard-boiled Plastic Man Noir.” It was a surprisingly engaging combo of goofiness, black humor and sheer body horror as Plas discovers he’s dying, thanks to “rapid depolymerization.”

Oddly effective, if disturbing, and despite a downer ending, there’s a gotcha! hint that Plas may be back.

And so it goes…

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

American comic book artist and writer Jack Cole drew cartoons for The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy, but it was his oddball sense of humor, layout and design that was such a perfect match for his most revered creation: the wisecracking, malleable and eternally elastic Plastic Man. The character was never really a commercial hit, but both Cole and Plastic Man are almost legendary among comic fans, which may explain why, years after he had shuffled off this mortal coil, he was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry’s Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991,  and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999. Although the character has never been a significant commercial success, Plastic Man has been a favorite character of many modern comic book creators, including writer Grant Morrison, Art Spiegelman, Alex Ross, Kyle Baker, and Frank Miller.

HEY, WAIT! WHAT ABOUT THIS ELONGATED MAN?

Ralph Dibny, better known as The Elongated Man, was a Plastic Man knock-off, created  by John Broome and Carmine Infantino in 1960. He was also a private eye for a few ticks, and a long-time member of the Justice League of America. But his condition wasn’t permanent—he got his powers from regularly consuming a special potion. Unfortunately, the stories lacked the screwball wackiness and off-the-wall charm of the Plas stories (especially those written and drawn by Jack Cole). Apparently nobody involved, including DC editor Julius Schwarz, was aware that DC already owned the rights to Plastic Man.

COMICS

OTHER COMIC APPEARANCES

Plas got around. sometimes as a key character, sometimes little more than a cameo.

COLLECTIONS

TELEVISION

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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