JACK COLE AND PLASTIC MAN: FORMS STRETCHED TO THEIR LIMITS (2008)

True to its subtitle -- Forms Stretched to Their Limits -- this plastic-bound volume tests the critical bounds of graphics, oozing from the zany to the surreally sublime. The text, by noted cartoonist Spiegelman, explores the mind of comic-book artist Cole and waxes ecstatic about the singular weirdness of his famed creation, the super-elastic crime fighter in the red rubber leotard. ''Plas,'' Spiegelman writes, ''literally embodied the comic-book form: its exuberant energy, its flexibility, its boyishness, and its only partially sublimated sexuality.'' Kidd's layout is not a complement to the analysis but an extension of it -- ''a portfolio of polymorphously perverse plasticity'' designed to bend the mind around revealingly strange substructures.