CR Review: Betsy and Me



Creator: Jack Cole
Publishing Information: Fantagraphics, soft cover, 104 pages, November 2007, $14.95
Ordering Numbers: 9781560978787 (ISBN13)

A book like Betsy & Me couldn't have come out at any time in the history of comics than the one we're in right now. It would have been too obscure to consider before higher end strip reprints exploded as a market force the last few years, and its presentation as art and history and biography would have been deemed too difficult for all but a handful of hardcore enthusiasts. Thankfully, Fantagraphics has embraced as full and as rigorous a printing as possible in the service of the former and a slightly melancholy, multi-faceted approach as a nod to the latter. The result is a must-have book that leaves a complex impression.

The first is that of a strip as an echo of Jack Cole's life and a final, considered shot at fame and success after two wonderful contributions that offered limited reward: creating one of the best five superhero comic books, the "Plastic Man" feature in Police Comics, and pioneering an approach to cheesecake cartooning in that phenomenon of print, Playboy. Jack Cole committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound almost three months after Betsy & Me began syndication, as puzzling and tragic a decision any prominent cartoonist has ever made. With its long introduction by RC Harvey emphasizing this well-known history, it's hard to not to see this book as a document by which we might suss out some clue as to the cartoonists' final fate. That reading may lead one to see the marriage of the Tibbits as a mirror of the Coles' -- daily cartoonists have so many comics to make nearly all of them draw from life to some extent -- their courtship as at least a testament to the affection friends knew Cole felt for his wife, and the genius son Farley as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the son they never had. Like most documents one can attach to someone who takes their own life, it's easier to see everything else than the one clue or insight that might explain the unexplainable. A lot of it pierces your heart anyway.

The second reading, one which I think might be downplayed, is the strip itself. Betsy & Me came at a somewhat chaotic time for the newspaper comics. Formats were changing to favor smaller papers, favorites from a golden age two decades were definitely now fading in influence a bit simply by virtue of being veteran rather than youthful features, the syndication business had begun to implode. It was a time when a strip could still make a man's fortune but no one really knew what was going to hit and why. Betsy & Me offers flashes of brilliance. Despite its surface simplicity as a domestic comedy, Cole provides a relatively complex series of visual ideas: the big-head design and its utility in showing folks head to floor, swirling perspectives, stylized representations of real-world tableaux, and maybe most ingeniously multiple verbal tracks differentiated by type size and lines drawn from one place to another. Cole's cartooning is of such a high quality that it's hard not to enjoy every single frame on a sensual level, the way you would a piece of chocolate cake despite having a cold. It's an absolute treat to be able to read more Jack Cole.

However, what Betsy & Me doesn't offer is the feel of a long-term hit as much as it does a strip that's dying to be one. In its brief life it switches focus several times: from Chet Tibbit's way of seeing reality in slightly more idealized terms, to the kid-genius strips, to a focus on the marriage and courtship leading up to same, to a look at the mores and foibles of suburban living. None of these points hit very hard, to the point that even though the boy genius elements are the most outsized, it's almost like you can't describe the strip that way. Combined with such a restless and relatively complex way of presenting its world, Betsy & Me seemed a bit too smart and urbane on one hand, to unfocused on the other, to have become a big hit. Considering his hopes for the feature, hopes that everyone has for such an endeavor but made grander for the level of his talent and the lack of bottom-line approbation and reward he had deserved twice over, this may be the most enjoyable strip ever to feel like a punch to the stomach.



 
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