Lee Marrs' Plastic Man Syndicated Strip: From Pudge to Plop! to Plastic Man
Originally published in Back Issue #59 (September 2012).
By Any Stretch of the Imagination
With his conceived of Plastic Man in 1941, cartoonist Jack Cole caught mercury in a bottle. Comics’ Golden Age may have been a creative Oort Cloud shucking off countless characters into the comics universe, but there was far more quantity than quality being produced. In a time when the average page of comic book art could best be described as well intended but crude, written to service simple, disposable stories for ten year olds, Plastic Man was a step above the rest. Cole could not only out-cartoon most everybody, but his stories were smarter, snappier, and funnier than just about anybody else’s, as likely to bring a chuckle to the adult reader as a belly laugh from the kids.
It is no coincidence that Cole found a home for Plastic Man at Quality Comics, one of the more aptly named publishing companies of the era. His manic, malleable, bouncing, bounding stories were a perfect fit for the house that also served as home to Will Eisner, Lou Fine, Bob Powell, Alex Kotsky, Klaus Nordling, Chuck Cuidera and their creations, including the Spirit, Blackhawk, Black Condor, Uncle Sam, and Kid Eternity. Plastic Man’s run stretched across 127 issues of Police Comics (August 1941 - October 1953) and 64 issues of Plastic Man (Summer 1943 - November 1956), almost the lifetime of Quality Comics, which ceased publication in December of 1956.
But while Quality was gone, some of its characters were to live on; National Periodical Publications, the corporate forerunner to DC Comics, acquired had the failed Quality’s assets. The last issues of all Quality titles were dated December 1956. The first issues of DC’s pick-ups of Blackhawk (#108) and G.I. Combat (#44) debuted the following month, January 1957. The rest of the company’s long-running titles and characters, including Police Comics, Crack Comics, Plastic Man, Doll Man, Uncle Sam, and the rest, were relegated, it seemed, to history.
Plastic Man lay unused and alone in the memory of his fans for almost a decade—excluding three issues of unauthorized reprints by the small and marginally legit I.W. Publishing in 1963 and 1964—before DC, responding to changing trends in comic readership, resurrected the stretchable sleuth, first in the pages of the ‘60s kitsch favorite series, “Dial ‘H’ For Hero” in House of Mystery #160 (July 1966), and then in his own title, a ten-issue run that lasted from November-December 1966 through May-June 1968. This series, written by Arnold Drake, with art across the run by Gil Kane, Win Mortimer, and Jack Sparling resembled Cole’s Plastic Man the way a Yugo resembles a Rolls-Royce; both have four wheels and engines, but that’s where the similarities end.
It was enough to send Plas back into hibernation for another decade (except for a 1973 cameo on an episode of the animated Super Friends), returning briefly for a continuation (in numbering, at any rate) of the 1960s series, #11 - #20 (February-March 1976 - October-November 1977) by Steve Skeates, Elliot S! Maggin, John Albano, and Ramona Fradon.
A Cartoon Artist for a Cartoon Character
Though this take was closer than its predecessor to Cole’s concept, it seemed to underscore the problem with the previous attempt: Plastic Man was not a character that worked particularly well under the assembly-line process of modern comic books. Plastic Man was a character best approached by a single creator, and by a cartoonist instead of a comic book artist. Jack Cole was a cartoonist, a versatile illustrator who could make the absurd believable; indeed, at the end of his life (which ended, unfortunately, in suicide in 1958), he had made the jump from comics to sophisticated cartoonist for the newly launched Playboy magazine.
Fortunately, the editor assigned to the next Plastic Man project was himself a cartoonist. Joe Orlando (1927 - 1998) began his career in the late 1940s and by 1950 was an illustrator for Bill Gaines’ legendary line of E.C. Comics and Mad Magazine. He would later help create (and draw for) Jim Warren’s Creepy and Eerie magazines, illustrate the Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip, co-create the Inferior Five, revive the horror genre for DC, and serve a long, distinguished, and creative role in the upper management of the company and its sister publication, MAD.
In 1979, Joe was tasked with yet another Plastic Man revival, but not as a comic book. This time, he was coming back in a comic strip.
A year earlier, in April 1978, DC’s World’s Greatest Superheroes strip had premiered in newspapers nationwide, distributed by the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate. Written by veteran Superman writer Martin Pasko, with art by George Tuska and Vince Colletta, WGSH was essentially a Justice League of America strip with the primary focus on the world’s greatest superhero himself, Superman, all done in anticipation of the December 1978 debut of the big budget Superman: The Movie. Thanks to the upsurge in popularity from the film, WGSH had a strong start; by the time I assumed writing duties on the strip in January 1982, the Superman furor had been spent, and the strip had lost most of its major newspapers and all but a relative handful of its smaller subscribers.
But in 1979, at the height of the Man of Steelmania, the newspaper strip seemed a strong venue for DC’s character list. And, with all the big guns (Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Black Lightning et al) tied up in WGSH, the publisher looked to its second tier heroes for inspiration.
And there was Plastic Man, the clear frontrunner thanks to his starring role every Saturday morning on ABC’s The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show, a Ruby-Spears Production. The show was not very good (it included Hula-Hula, Plastic Man’s bumbling Hawaiian sidekick, Plas’ hot wife, and even a Baby Plas), but it was exposure for the character, and DC knew that would be a major selling point to the newspaper syndicates.
The job of interpreting Plastic Man for the strip format was given to underground cartoonist and DC Comics contributor, Lee Marrs. Lee had begun her comics career in the strips, as assistant to Little Orphan Annie artist Philip “Tex” Blaisdell (1920-1999), himself a veteran of 22 syndicated strips, before becoming one of the first women underground comic creators, a founding mother of the Wimmen’s Comix Collective, and contributor to titles including Wet Satin, El Perfecto, and Gates of Heaven, as well as The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973 - 1978) and Lee Marrs’ The Compleat Fart and Other Body Emissions (1976).
Lee and editor Orlando were not strangers to one another in 1979. “During the 1970s, I did work for Joe Orlando,” Lee said in a recent interview. “I started out doing inking and backgrounds for Tex Blaisdell on weekends, sort of. I was living in Washington DC and was going to college, and I got to know his daughter, who was going to American University with me. So, I did backgrounds for just about all his work. He worked on Hi & Lois and Little Orphan Annie, all kinds of things.
“Tex took me around and introduced ne to all the people he knew in the business. I had not thought of doing comic book work at all but, Joe Orlando, then a DC editor, was interested in me anyway. I did a lot of work for Joe for (the humor comic) Plop!, Weird Mystery Tales, and House of Secrets. I did both stories and art for him.”
Making Gold Out of Plastic
Joe Orlando was an innovative editor, one of the “new breed” DC began hiring in the 1960s in response to Stan Lee’s more sophisticated Marvel Comics. Julie Schwartz and Murray Boltinoff were still selling plenty of comic books, but Joe Orlando and Dick Giordano were helping to create and mentor the company’s next creative generation of comics and creators.
“Joe and I got to know each other working on those Plop! stories and he started to think of me for projects outside of the usual DC stories. The first thing I was offered was Little Orphan Annie, which Joe was sort of managing for the (Chicago Tribune/New York News) syndicate. In 1973, Tex was leaving the strip to teach at the Joe Kubert School, so Joe Orlando offered Annie to me. I would have just been the artist on it. They had someone else writing it.
“After due consideration, from everything I had seen about how syndication worked and the way they ran the strips, I figured I would be trapped. You know, they didn’t give you your art back, you never received any royalties, blah blah blah. All the reasons I was an underground cartoonist to begin with. I turned down Joe’s offer (Mary Perkins, On Stage creator Leonard Starr accepted the assignment and did the strip until 2000), but later, when they were thinking of reviving Plastic Man, Joe called me again.”
Talks with DC commenced in the fall of 1979, Lee said. “Contracts went back and forth in October and November, and we were ready to get going pretty fast. I think DC had big plans for Plastic Man and were in a hurry to get the strip in the works. They had all kinds of ideas about leveraging all the characters into comic strips. Up to then, all they had was a Superman strip.”
DC had, in fact, a fairly long and successful history of leveraging its two most well-known characters into syndicated strips. Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 in June of 1938; the Superman newspaper strip debuted on January 16, 1939. A Superman daily and Sunday strip ran more or less continuously until 1966, appearing during its peak in over 300 daily and ninety Sunday papers with a readership of more than twenty million. Batman first swung into action in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939; the first Batman and Robin daily and Sunday strip ran from 1942 - 1946, with a second, short-lived Sunday strip in 1953, and another run from 1966-1974. But the era of the great newspaper adventure strips was gasping its last, and what were left were suffering from shrinking newspaper comic strip pages, not to mention the reduction in the physical size of the printed strips themselves.
Stretching the Editorial Boundaries
Despite the odds, Lee was anxious to tackle the Plastic Man strip, coming to the character well-versed in Jack Cole’s peerless creation. “I was a fan of the Jack Cole Plastic Man as a kid, so it was easy to get my head into that place. Joe knew I could handle the humor, so other than having to have a new arch-villain for every story arc, I wasn’t given a lot of editorial direction or suggestions. There was no real editorial supervision at all, which was a relief,” Lee recalled with a laugh. Coming from the self-supervising world of the undergrounds, she was accustomed to working without an editorial net.
The reasons for the lack of editorial interference was twofold, the first having to do with her relationship with Orlando.
“Joe enjoyed Plastic Man also, so we spent a lot of time on the phone chortling about our favorite episodes and all that kind of stuff,” Lee said. “Joe knew my work, so he’d already done all his editing and critiquing of my work with the Plop! stories, and he knew which no-nos I would go for and warned me away from them in advance. When you and an editor you like have worked together long enough, you learn how each other thinks and it’s like a shorthand going forward. Considering the volume of work, you have to do that in order to be able to ever get home and have supper.”
The second reason was the choice of DC Comics editor Len Wein as the project’s hands-on editor. “I dealt directly with Len, but he just said ‘whatever!’ to everything. Len didn’t feel comedy was his long suit, so he left me to do pretty much what I wanted.”
Lee continued, “I did a sample page, like a regular comic book size. I have sketches here showing every single thing that you could imagine I could turn Plastic Man into, trying to figure out where to put the stripes and that sort of thing.” And for her first storyline, Lee went after the roller disco fad. “Roller disco was the thing at the time,” she said. “A pretty easy target for the kind of stories I wanted to do.”
While creating the strip for the newspapers, the production of Plastic Man was very much comic-book-business-as-usual, according to Lee. This was, after all, a work-made-for-hire arrangement between a property’s copyright holder and a freelance contractor creating a piece of work to the publisher’s specifications, if not specific instructions.
“They ran this just like a regular comic book factory sort of business. DC was paying me a page rate instead of the royalty or profit-sharing I would have had for a strip I created directly for the syndicate. I had to draw it so there were two daily strips on every page, and that kind of stuff.” A week’s worth of strips, Sunday included, was treated as four pages of comic book art, a method of calculating payment that DC retained through my run as writer of the Superman strip in the early-80s, and my later editorial involvement with the 1989 - 1991 Batman strip.
Boogie Down
Lee’s sample storyline ran six weeks in daily and Sunday continuity and featured Roller Derby, an unctuous derby-wearing skating instrument who kidnapped patrons of a roller disco for his boss, a minute Mr. Big named Nez Pierce. Nez--who is apparently already known to Plastic Man and Woozy Winks--uses the kidnapped skaters as slave laborers (which he describes as “the ultimate in job security!”) to manufacture roller skates in his illegal factory. Plastic Man is almost impressed by the villain’s scheme, proclaiming it “much more ambitious than your Grand Canyon rollercoaster swindle”
“I sent them the script, and Joe asked me if I could tone the humor down,” Lee said. “I had gone back to the Jack Cole version, which could be very strange and untamed. My first draft had a very wild, wacky tone. But Joe pointed out that I was doing a comic strip geared towards a general readership, so I had to make changes, like in the things Plastic Man would transform himself into, not that I remember what those things were after all these years. But I understood his changes, so I made the revisions, which were approved, and then drew and lettered the strip.”
More important than creating the Plastic Man strip was the sale of the Plastic Man strip to a newspaper syndicate. DC already had a relationship with a syndicate through the Superman strip, but Lee found out that the publisher did not have any idea how to actually market the Plastic Man strip to them. “I had no clue how dumb they would be trying to sell Plastic Man,” she said. “The strip was being sold as an adventure strip. The minute I heard that, I nearly lost my mind; this was not an adventure strip! No one was going to believe this was an adventure strip! I still have all kinds of correspondence with Paul Levitz, who was the company’s Manager of Business Affairs in those days, about the subject, which he blamed on the sales people. I don’t know who they had selling the strip, but they totally missed the boat. As it was, they sent it out to the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate, the New York Times Syndicate, and the Fields Syndicate.”
Despite—or maybe because—of the incompetent sales force, Plastic Man was sold to some seventy-plus newspapers.
Which unfortunately wasn’t nearly enough papers to sustain the strip.
“They got about seventy-something papers that expressed interest in Plastic Man, but I think only one big newspaper, and I can’t remember which one, was interested in taking it. But the way the economics worked, to be successful, DC needed at least three large circulation newspapers, newspapers in major markets like New York, Chicago, or L.A. to run the strip. Even though they had lined up something like 73 small papers, that still wouldn’t have earned them any profit.”
What a newspaper pays a syndicate to run an individual comic strip depends on its circulation. In 1980, a small circulation paper may have had to pay as little as $10 a week for a strip like Plastic Man; a large paper such as New York’s Daily News or the Chicago Tribune might pay as much as $600. Thus, a syndicate could gross about as much from a single major metropolitan newspaper as from several dozen small town papers and, with creative expenses alone likely running at more than that, the numbers just didn’t add up.
“DC decided they couldn’t make money off of the strip, so that was the end of Plastic Man,” Lee said with a sigh.
The failure of the Plastic Man strip seemed to be the end DC’s dreams of syndicated grandeur as well. “Plastic Man was DC’s one shot at syndication at the time,” Lee said. “I was sorry it fell through. It would have been really fun to work on Plastic Man. You get into a character when you first start on it and you’re making up all kinds of things every other minute of the day with just the possibility of working on the character, so it really comes alive for you. I really admired the old Plastic Man, and it would have been nice to carry him on into the 1980s.”
And it would have been nice had Lee Marrs’ sample six-week story line been allowed to continue, offering us more than the tantalizingly brief glimpse of how a talented cartoonist might have changed the fate of the versatile and malleable Plastic Man.
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