Jack Kirby Collector #25 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Fully Authorized By The Kirby Estate

A 100-PAGE ISSUE SPOTLIGHTING SIMO N & KIRBY!

$5.95 T

ISSUE #25, AUG. 1999

In The US

Feature-Length Interview with

Joe Simon As he discusses the S&K Shop

Jack Kirby Talks about his Golden Age work With Joe Simon

Interview with

John Severin The Unpublished

Boy Explorers The Story Behind

Mainline Comics Special Art & Features:

Stuntman Sandman Captain America Kid Gangs Unpublished Art including published pages Befo re They Were Inked, And Much Mo re!!

1999 Eisner Awards Nominee for “Best Comics-Related Publication”

Captain America, Red Skull TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

And o thers

KIRBY

COLLECTOR

BULLETINS

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KIRBY

COLLECTOR

BULLETINS

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KIRBY

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BULLETINS

JUBILANT JUGGERNAUTS OF JARGON GERMANE TO JACK (AND JOE!) ITEM! Don’t miss your chance to own a copy of ARGOSY Vol. 2, #2, featuring Kirby’s 10-page autobiographical STREET CODE story (printed from his pencils!). Publisher RICHARD KYLE found a couple of forgotten boxes of copies, and we’re making them available to Kirby fans! But they’re going fast, so don’t wait! Only $12 each postpaid ($14 Canada, $17 elsewhere), from TwoMorrows! ITEM! Remember Kirby’s awesome LORD OF LIGHT conceptual drawings, which we spotlighted back in TJKC #11? All 14 plates are being made available in a limited edition (500 copies) set from Lord of Light producer BARRY GELLER! These are full-size (20” x 24”) black-&-white contact prints (NOT offset-printed), individually made directly from the original negatives of Jack’s art, on heavy archival photographic stock. The full set is $800, or individual plates are $75 each from Barry Ira Geller Productions, PO Box 4753, Sunland, CA 91041. Check out their web site at: www.lordoflight.com/kirbyart/ ITEM! Didja hear? TwoMorrows received TWO EISNER AWARD NOMINATIONS in the SAME CATEGORY this year! Both THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR and Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazines were nominated for “Best Comics-Related Periodical”, and the results (voted on by industry professionals) will be announced at this year’s COMICON INTERNATIONAL: SAN DIEGO. (As if the competition wasn’t tough enough in the past, now we’ve gotta compete against each other!) Our thanks to everyone who’s supported TwoMorrows’ publications in the past; we couldn’t do it without you! ITEM! Now shipping is the 176-page COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLUME THREE (our third TRADE PAPERBACK collection, reprinting TJKC #13-15 plus over 30 NEW pieces of Jack’s art)! It also features a heartfelt introduction by STEVE BISSETTE, a foreword by JIM AMASH, and a little something extra for folks who’ve been clamoring to see more of Kirby’s unpublished SOUL LOVE magazine from 1970! Plus, VOLUME ONE (240-pages, reprinting TJKC #1-9 plus new material) is only $21.95 postpaid ($24.95 Canada, $34.95 elsewhere), and the 160-page COLLECTED TJKC, VOLUME 2 (reprinting TJKC #10-12 plus new stuff) is only $14.95 postpaid ($16.95 Canada, $24.95 elsewhere).

ITEM! If you’d like to see just why COMIC BOOK ARTIST picked up an Eisner nomination its first year, check out CBA #5, which shipped in July! It’s the sequel to our top-selling first issue, DC COMICS: 1967-74. Behind a fabulous NICK CARDY cover you’ll find articles, interviews, and rare and unpublished art by the pros who made that era great, like CARDY, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, HOWIE POST, SAM GLANZMAN, DENNY O’NEIL, NEAL ADAMS, and more! Back issues of #1-5 are still available for $5.95 each, and you can subscribe for four issues for only $20! We’re always looking for rare art, and people to write for CBA, so if you’re interested, contact JON B. COOKE, PO Box 204, W. Kingston, RI 02892-0204, or e-mail him at: jonbcooke@aol.com And look for CBA #6 in September! ITEM! The first solo issue of Rascally ROY THOMAS’ classic comics ’zine ALTER EGO was released in late June to rave reviews! Ol’ Roy is pulling out all the stops to make A/E live up to its legendary reputation among fans, with rare art, new articles, features, and interviews with the greats of the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages. Fans and historians worldwide have spoken: No publication brings comics history to life like ALTER EGO, so look for it at your

JOHN’S JUKEBOX As I sit here wrapping up this 25th issue of TJKC, I find myself thinking back to all the hard work that’s gone into this ’zine—by myself, and also by our many contributors over the years. But when it comes to hard work, no one can touch the output of the #1 team in comics history, Simon & Kirby. When did Joe and Jack sleep? For nearly 25 years, they just kept cranking out one hit after another, from their early success on CAPTAIN AMERICA, through the DC war years (with my personal favorite, the NEWSBOY LEGION), their postwar triumphs with the introduction of Romance Comics, their superb work at Harvey, right up to their illfated self-publishing company, Mainline, and their encore with PRIVATE STRONG and THE FLY. Though this magazine’s focus is on things Kirby, you can’t discuss the first half of Jack’s career without talking about Joe Simon—so this issue, I wanted to spend more time on the OTHER member of the S&K team. Everywhere Joe went at last year’s SAN DIEGO CON, he was constantly mobbed by fans, and it’s nice to see him getting the recognition he deserves. Hopefully, this issue will further that trend, as we present transcripts of Joe’s lively panels from San Diego ’98. Joe’s comments—as well as the plethora of S&K art and articles our hard-working contributors rounded up for this issue—will hopefully give us all a clearer picture of what it was like in the S&K shop. It seems particularly appropriate to me that we celebrate that fabled group of creators with this, our first 100-page issue of TJKC. Long Live Simon & Kirby!

ITEM! By the time you read this, we will have just about wrapped up what CBA editor Jon B. Cooke has so delicately dubbed “The TwoMorrows Big Summer Push of Convention Hell.” After absolutely spectacular trips to WONDERCON in San Francisco in April, and the NEW YORK COMIC SPECTACULAR at Madison Square Garden in May (where Mighty MIKE GARTLAND was a constant source of encouragement, transportation, and assistance), we had a presence at the RAMAPO CON in New York (MIKE G. did that one solo for us—thanks again, Mike!), but had to bow out of HEROES CON to make time to get our Summer publications to the printer. Our journey to WIZARD WORLD in Chicago in July, and COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL in San Diego in August (where this issue of TJKC will debut) will be over by the time you read this. But if you haven’t seen enough of us, look for Jon B. Cooke at the SMALL PRESS EXPO (September 17-19 in Bethesda, MD)! Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booths to chat—it was great meeting y’all!

TWOMORROWS CHECKLIST For full descriptions of each issue, see page 99 SORRY, TJKC #1-6, 8-12, 14, and 15 ARE SOLD OUT!! THE COLLECTED TJKC, VOLUME ONE: 240-page trade paperback reprinting TJKC #1-9, plus new art! $21.95 ($24.95 Canada, $34.95 elsewhere) THE COLLECTED TJKC, VOLUME TWO: 160-page trade paperback, reprinting TJKC #10-12, plus new Kirby art! $14.95 ($16.95 Canada, $24.95 elsewhere) THE COLLECTED TJKC, VOLUME THREE: (NEW!) 176-page trade paperback, reprinting TJKC #13-15, plus new Kirby art! $16.95 ($19.95 Canada, $26.95 elsewhere) THE JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: (NEW!) 100 pages! $5.00 ($6.00 Canada, $8.00 elsewhere)

John Morrow, Editor TwoMorrows 1812 Park Dr. • Raleigh, NC 27605 • (919) 833-8092 FAX (919) 833-8023 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com local comics shop, or subscribe directly from TwoMorrows! (See the ad this issue for a peek at what’s coming in September in ALTER EGO #2!) ITEM! If you want more bang for your advertising dollar, consider running an ad in COMIC BOOK ARTIST or ALTER EGO! Current rates are: Full-page: $300, Half-page: $175, and Quarter-page: $100. But right now, when you prepay for two same-size ads in CBA, A/E, or a combination of the two, you’ll get an additional $100 discount on two full-pagers, $50 off two half-pagers, and $25 off two quarter-pagers! If you’re interested in advertising in either or both publications, contact John Morrow at TwoMorrows, and he’ll answer all your questions! (Sorry, display ads aren’t available for THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR.) ITEM! TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING is continually updating our Web Site (maintained by RANDY HOPPE) located at www.twomorrows.com which features sample art and articles from each issue of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and now, the new, solo ALTER EGO! There’s also ordering info for back issues and subscriptions, so check it out! And if you love getting tons of e-mail from fellow Kirby fans, join the KIRBY MAILING LIST by sending an e-mail request to Randy Hoppe at kirby-l@fantasty.com

BACK ISSUES: $4.95 ($6.00 Canada, $8.00 elsewhere) TJKC #7: 36-page KID GANGS theme issue! Few left! TJKC #13: 52-page SUPERNATURAL issue! Few left! TJKC #16: 52-page TOUGH GUYS theme issue! BACK ISSUES: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere) TJKC #17: 68-page DC theme issue! TJKC #18: 68-page MARVEL theme issue! TJKC #19: 56-page ART theme issue! TJKC #20: 68-page WOMEN theme issue! TJKC #21: 68-page issue on Jack’s WACKIEST WORK! TJKC #22: 68-page issue on Jack’s VILLAINS! TJKC #23: 68-page issue where ANYTHING GOES! TJKC #24: 68-page GREATEST BATTLES issue! COMIC BOOK ARTIST: $5.95 ($7 Can., $9 elsewhere) #1: (100-pages) DC Comics: 1967-74! ADAMS, INFANTINO, KIRBY, KUBERT, SEKOWSKY, CARDY, new ADAMS cover, and more! (Plus ALTER EGO!) #2: (100-pages) Marvel Comics: 1970-77! STAN LEE, KANE, STERANKO, WINDSOR-SMITH, STARLIN, PLOOG, new KANE cover, more! (Plus ALTER EGO!) #3: (100-pages) NEAL ADAMS: THE MARVEL YEARS! New ADAMS INTERVIEW, thumbnails, unused X-Men Graphic Novel pages, and more! (Plus ALTER EGO!) #4: (148-pages) WARREN issue! JIM WARREN interview, WRIGHTSON, FRAZETTA, CORBEN, WILLIAMSON, DAVIS, KURTZMAN, and more! (Plus ALTER EGO!) #5: (132-pages) DC COMICS: 1967-74! WRIGHTSON, KALUTA, CARDY, ADAMS, GLANZMAN, O’NEIL, WEIN, ARAGONES, and more! (Plus ALTER EGO!) ALTER EGO #1: (84-pages) STAN LEE, JULIE SCHWARTZ, JERRY ORDWAY, IRWIN HASEN, H.G. PETER, MR. MONSTER, FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA, new color Ordway cover and more!

VISIT THE NEW TWOMORROWS WEB SITE: www.twomorrows.com 2

Issue #25 Contents Jack Kirby in the Golden Age .............4 (a revealing interview with the King) Sandman in All-Star Comics .............1 2 (S&K’s rare stories in the Justice Society) The Mystery of Jon Henri .................1 5 (who drew those masked men?) Prof. Reinstein, I Presume?...............1 6 (of Eugenics and super-heroes) Classic Kirby Text Illustrations..........1 9 (some little-known spot illos) The Best of S&K’s Golden Age..........2 1 (war, romance, red underwear, and werewolves!) Just For Laughs .................................2 7 (the humorous side of Joe and Jack) S&K’s Swipe File ...............................2 8 (we caught them red-handed!) John Severin Interview .....................30 (John tells us why “They were aces!”) Joe Simon Interview .........................3 3 (he’s more than your average Joe) Centerfold: Captain America.............5 0 (the oldest surviving S&K original art?) Sid Jacobson on Simon & Kirby .......5 2 (Captain 3-D’s editor speaks) Simon & Kirby and the Kid Gang ....5 4 (an overview of S&K’s kid groups) Re-Examining the Boy Explorers ......6 1 (a fresh look, plus an unfinished story!) The Edge of the World .....................7 2 (a complete 1946 Boy Explorers story) The Mainline Comics Story..............8 6 (an initial examination of S&K’s shortlived self-publishing company) Classifieds.........................................9 6 Collector Comments.........................9 7

ISSUE #25, AUG. 1999

THE ONLY ’ ZINE AUTHORIZED BY THE KIRBY ESTATE

Front cover inks: Dan Adkins Back cover inks: John Severin Cover color: Tom Ziuko Photocopies of Jack’s uninked pencils from published comics are reproduced here courtesy of the Kirby Estate, which has our thanks for their continued support. Our sincere thanks to Joe Simon for his cooperation and assistance with this issue! COPYRIGHTS: Boy Commandos (Brooklyn, Andre, Tex, Percy, Jan, Alfy, Rip Carter), Demon, Guardian, Jed, Jim Harper, Losers, Mister Miracle, Newsboy Legion (Gabby, Scrapper, Tommy, Big Words, Flippa Dippa), Orion, Sandman, Sandy, Starman, The Mist TM & © DC Comics, Inc. • Bucky, Captain America, Dr. Strange, Falcon, Ikaris, “Man From the Wrong Time Track”, Man-Thing, Red Skull, Silver Surfer, Sis-Neg, Sleepy Eyes, “Speed Will Be My Bride”, Thing, Vision, Yellow Claw TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • All the 1930s and ’40s early drawings are © Jack Kirby. • All Joe Simon solo drawings , The Fly, Private Strong, Silver Spider © Joe Simon. • Boy Explorers (Commodore Sindbad, Gadget, Mr. Zero, Smiley, Gashouse), Boys’ Ranch (Dandy, Wabash, Angel, Clay Duncan), Bullseye, Captain 3-D Tigra, Don Daring, Fighting American, Foxhole, In Love, Inky, Invisible Irving, Jack McGregor’s Bluff, Nancy Hale, Night Fighter, Panda, Police Trap, Round Robin, Speedboy, Stuntman, Vagabond Prince, Young Brides, Young Love, Young Romance © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby. • Headline Comics, Justice Traps the Guilty © Prize Publications. • Champ Comics, Champion Comics, Front-Page Comics, Speed Comics © Harvey Publications. • Crime SuspenStories © EC Comics. • Popeye © King Features. • The Duel © Gilberton Publications. • Cockeyed © Whitestone Publications. • Real Clue Crime Stories © Hillman Periodicals. • Green Hornet © The Green Hornet. • Sick Magazine © Headline Publications. • Blue Bolt, Green Sorceress © Novelty Press. • Blue Beetle © Fox Publications. • Crazy, Man, Crazy, From Here To Insanity, I Love You © Charlton Publications.

In 1977, Steve Robertson bought this unused cover for Justice Traps the Guilty #1 from Jack. Jack felt bad that it wasn’t finished, and offered to finish it up. Steve declined, since he wanted to preserve it as it was, so Jack sold it for the princely sum of $20! Jack signed and dated it 1977, but then changed the date to ’57, saying, “That’s when I did this!” (It should’ve been ’47!) The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 6, No. 25, Aug. 1999. Published bi-monthly by & © TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor. Jon B. Cooke, Assoc. Editor. Single issues: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $24.00 US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, $44.00 outside North America. First printing. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Jack Kirby In The Golden Age Interviewed by James Van Hise, and originally published in Golden Age of Comics #6, November 1983. © James Van Hise. (Our thanks to James for permission to reprint the text of this interview.) JAMES VAN HISE: Before you worked in comic books, some of your earliest work was doing newspaper strips, wasn’t it?

of course, nobody knew anything about. VAN HISE: Did you have a special liking for the Solar Legion? Because in the late Thirties you’d revive it whenever you had a new forum. KIRBY: Yes I did, because first of all, The Solar Legion involved a lot of characters. I grew up among a lot of people and being born in New York’s lower East Side, which was a crowded section, there were people everywhere—and so I think it was natural for me to think in terms of groups, and of course I’d be included somewhere. My recollections of different types of people would be reflected in different themes in the comic strips. So if I did The Solar Legion, I might include different types of people that I knew. They’d have that kind of temperament. Some of them would be cool. Some of them would be hot-tempered, and they’d be people in conflict and people who’d (above, below, help each other.

JACK KIRBY: I did work for a small syndicate which had about four hundred papers called the Lincoln Newspaper Features Syndicate. I did a variety of work there and I was grateful for that because it prepared me for doing a variety of comics. I did editorial cartoons. I did a cartoon called Your Health Comes First where I gave ordinary prescriptions, and I did comic strips.

and following pages) Early Kirby pencil drawings, circa the 1930s.

VAN HISE: This is where you used different styles drawn under different names? KIRBY: No, the styles looked different because the theme was different, but actually I didn’t disguise my style, I just changed the name on the strip. One strip would be done by Jack Curtiss and another strip would be done under another name. That gave the syndicate the aura of having a larger staff.

VAN HISE: How much of your own writing were you doing then? KIRBY: All of it. I’ve always done my own writing.

VAN HISE: What were the big influences on your work at the time? The adventure strips? The pulps? KIRBY: The adventure strips were only just beginning at the time. Dick Tracy was, of course, the first real adventure strip, and Buck Rogers was one of the early ones. So having been an admirer of that type of thing, I felt that I’d like to do that as well. I picked themes along those lines, but I did them with a sciencefiction flavor which most of the others didn’t have. I would do a story about an airplane which went back into time.... VAN HISE: That was the Solar Legion, wasn’t it? KIRBY: Oh yes. I had an atomic cannon which was fairy tale stuff at that time. This was a time when there weren’t even jets. No one could even conceive of jets, so if you did an atomic cannon you were sort of an avant garde, far-out type of writer. I began doing things that people would speculate about, but which, 4

Early comic strip attempt by Kirby (signed “Jack Curtiss”), done in 1931 at age 14.

When I got into comic books I began needing people like Joe Simon, and finally Joe and I got together to do Captain America. We were both professionals and we were both capable of writing the stuff, but Joe did most of the business. He was a big guy, six foot three, very impressive, and he had college experience which I didn’t have— but I had a unique storytelling ability, so although he was quite capable of doing so, he never had to write the stories. I’d write the stories on Captain America or whatever we’d be working on and Joe did business with the publisher because he could meet the publisher on an equal footing. I was younger and I was the kid with the turtleneck sweater who was always working. VAN HISE: What was the actual breakdown of work between you and Joe Simon on Captain America as far as penciling, inking, etc.? KIRBY: Well, I did most of it and Joe did some of it, but I did most of it because I had the time. I was constantly working. Joe had duties as an editor and he might be an editor in the publishing house and he’d be having contacts with the publisher that I didn’t. VAN HISE: Stan Lee was at Timely already by then, wasn’t he? KIRBY: Yes, he was a young boy then and he was a member of the publisher’s family so he got a job there. I don’t know what his duties were but from time to time he’d come into the office and play a flute or the clarinet while he was working and that was the extent of it. VAN HISE: So Joe Simon edited Captain America himself? KIRBY: Joe Simon edited all the [Timely] books. It wasn’t called Marvel yet at that time, but the publisher was the same. At any rate, we left [Timely] and we

Newsboy Legion page from Star-Spangled Comics #19 (April 1943).

went to DC where we did “The Boy Commandos,” “Sandman,” and “Manhunter” and created the kinds of things that DC wanted. After we created those features we were drafted. Joe went into the Coast Guard and I went into the Army. VAN HISE: Where did some of the other early characters come from, like the Black Owl and Cyclone Burke? KIRBY: The Black Owl and Cyclone Burke were mine. Like I said, I was constantly at work and I created what was real. Creating characters is the kind of atmosphere in which I was raised, so whatever I created was accepted and it sold very well. You’ll find that I was forever writing and drawing; that I had no other duties, and I’m still doing it. That’s my forté. I was never an editor, but I was a publisher with Joe Simon. Joe and I published a few magazines together under the name of Mainline Publications, so we knew each other a long time. Our partnership went on over a period of years. VAN HISE: What was it like working in comics in the Golden Age as compared to what it is today? KIRBY: Everybody tried to help each other. All the fellows had a good working relationship, but there was a rigid caste system between the editors and the fellows who turn the magazines out, and the publisher. There was no such thing as an artist or a writer dealing with the publisher. The structure was rigid. That’s why I say that Joe was valuable in his respect because he was able to deal with the publishers. We were the first team to get a percentage. VAN HISE: On which books were those?

Detail panel from Fighting American #1 (April 1954), before the strip went to broad humor.

KIRBY: When we worked for Kressler [Crestwood?–Ed.] Publications, we got a percentage, but up until that time nobody had been able to break that rigid structure between the artist, the writer, and the publisher. It wasn’t like legitimate publishing where you make a deal. It was a loose arrangement where we could leave anyone. VAN HISE: What titles were those percentages on? KIRBY: Black Magic, Justice Traps The Guilty, and others. This was during the years of EC in the early Fifties. EC was doing extremely well; they had a talented bunch and Joe and I worked extra hard to put out the types of magazines that could keep up with them, and we did. We worked very hard and turned out some terrific stuff. We had wonderful stories. VAN HISE: Did you ever consider doing anything for EC?

Another early Kirby drawing from the 1930s, showing Jack’s early propensity for humorous work.

KIRBY: No. Joe and I had gotten into the habit of working with each other and somehow we just didn’t consider taking off individually and working anywhere. It was like a habit, you know? That’s the way we operated and wherever we operated we made a lot of money for the publishers. All of our books sold well over six hundred

thousand to eight hundred thousand a month. That’s why Joe and I were successful, because we could produce that kind of product. VAN HISE: On Captain America you had various inkers working from time to time doing a little work, and I understand that Reed Crandall was one. KIRBY: There was Reed Crandall, Al Gabriele, and that was good because I personally like to see a variety of inking on my work just to see what it would look like in a different style. An inker like Joe Sinnott is very, very graceful and makes the art look graceful and beautiful. An inker like Dick Ayers would be bold and stark and you’d find the style in a bold and stark attitude, and of course that’s interesting. For instance, if you went now to change into a tuxedo, you would look different but very, very interesting, and that’s the way it is with inkers. Each inker has his own individual style and so I didn’t mind at all as long as he was professional and knew what he was doing. VAN HISE: What inkers do you feel complemented your work the most? KIRBY: All of them, because each man was unique and original and I felt that they did a fine job. Now that I’m doing Captain Victory, I like Mike Thibodeaux as my inker and he has a very strong line and I like the kind of dressing he gives my style, which is an inker’s job. An inker dresses up what you’ve drawn. I never give an inker layouts. I give him the full drawing. He doesn’t have to think about where to put a line—it’s all there for him. I facilitate production, and that’s how I meet a deadline. I complete my drawing and it’s fully complete; they’re very tight and if the inker goes over that, why then the drawing is complete.

S&K revamped Sandman twice; in 1942, and again in their final collaboration in 1974. Here are Jack’s pencils from Sandman #4.

VAN HISE: Why don’t you ink your work now the way you did in the early days?

VAN HISE: Back to the subject of your Golden Age inkers, did you know Reed Crandall well at all?

KIRBY: Because I find that if I get involved in all phases of it, that I’ll never get it done. In other words, I might be late with deadlines and so I’ll give it to an inker and we get the story out that way. We create our own system and being a professional, I like to meet a deadline. I’m the kind of guy who feels that that’s what’s demanded of him in the field, so I meet my deadlines right on the nose and sometimes before it’s expected.

KIRBY: I remember Reed, but I didn’t know him real well. Few of us knew each other real well back then. It was more like fellas who meet at a social club and I didn’t feel that it was my right to know him real well. I think that the other fellows felt the same way. I felt that everybody’s entitled to his own life and unless he invited me, if he had a problem and he felt that my advice might help him, then I would go deeper 7

(above and below) Kirby sketches Army life in these 1940s drawings. (bottom right) A quick Popeye sketch for a fan.

into his problems; otherwise we would just be like ordinary fellows who met somewhere every day at a social club and had a great time.

just take off. VAN HISE: Did Timely have a counter-offer, or did they just say, “Well, this is the best we can do”?

VAN HISE: Did DC actually lure you away from Timely in the early Forties?

KIRBY: Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. It depended on the circumstance. Of course I relied on Joe because he knew more about business than I did, and he knew more about what the publisher wanted than I did—he had closer ties with them. So Joe would give me the entire problem and I would say, “Well, it looks like we’d get a better offer there than we are.” And Joe would take my advice and I would take his advice.

KIRBY: Oh, yes. They would offer us more and at that time we would

VAN HISE: Was it your idea to take an already established DC character, The Sandman, and revamp him into something totally different? KIRBY: Yes. I felt that each man has a right to innovate and to guess at what the character really represents and The Sandman would represent something entirely different to me than he would to another guy. VAN HISE: The character originally wore a gas mask and was more like Batman. KIRBY: To me he represented something entirely different, and I’d get him into dreams and into nightmares, and to me that’s what he meant. I might make a slight change of costume but I never really changed the image of the character. It’s incumbent on every artist to keep the image intact. For instance, in the second Superman movie, there was a scene where the President of the United States was humiliated and I somehow couldn’t stand this. It was something that I would never do in a comic strip. Oh yes, the White House might be in danger and the villain is getting closer to it, but I would have Superman stop him just in time. Remember, you’re a different generation, and the feeling was at that time that, “You can’t do that to an American! And you can’t do that to the President!” And you just can’t come in and lounge around the White House. You’ve got to protect it; that’s what you represent. Superman is that kind of character. He represents us in a very wholesome way. He fights for us, and my characters would 8

do the same thing. Captain America represents us and he’ll fight for us. He’ll put his body across the line for us and the other super-heroes are the same way. They see us in a protective attitude because it’s an unfair situation between us and super-heroes, so in all fairness superheroes have to come to our aid because we’re the underdog and we can’t possibly fight in their league. But in this fantasy, they represent us. They’re us. They do the things that we feel that we’d like to do. Captain America was really an acrobat with wonderful reflexes. He could fight ten guys at a time and I’m sure most of us wonder what we could do in the same situation. Suppose ten guys corner you? But I’d arrange it in Captain America that a wonderful fight scene would come out of that, almost like a ballet, and it wouldn’t be the kind of fight that we’d ordinarily see.

instance, is that some people love barbarians and they won’t read or write or draw any other thing but a barbarian—but I’m a variety storyteller. It could be a war story, a romance, a western, crime, as well as a super-hero. I think that a storyteller has to be ready to make a story out of any of those things and entertain you in that respect. I believe that’s the ultimate professional, a man who can do that. I had the privilege of doing “The Losers” for DC, a war story, and I put some real elements in there, some elements that I’d experienced,

VAN HISE: A lot of your images in comics seem to be drawn more from movies than from other comics. KIRBY: Our generation was a movie generation. I saw myself as a camera; that’s why I do a lot of foreshortening. I’ve developed a kind of three-dimensional style. Comics used to have a kind of sameness to them. For instance, the Egyptians had their hieroglyphics, and you’ll find they had a sameness to them. But suppose one Egyptian suddenly said, “I don’t like drawing things sideways. I’ll make a front view, and I’ll shove his arm out and it’ll add strength to the picture.” And that’s what I did. I had a fighter on my hands and I had to make him look like a fighter. You have to see a player from all angles, and having had animation experience, that helped a lot because I put a lot of movement into my figures. VAN HISE: You worked on Popeye, didn’t you? KIRBY: Oh yes. Popeye, Betty Boop. I did a little bit of Gulliver’s Travels. That was a big help in the kind of work that I’m doing. It made my figures move. It set a style for me which everybody recognized. VAN HISE: Were there any specific films you saw at that time which had a greater impact on your work? KIRBY: I liked all films. Hollywood was turning out many great films then. Essentially I’m a storyteller. One particular theme I notice for

Jack’s pencils from the Losers story in Our Fighting Forces #159.

and of course that facilitated the realism for the story, which made it acceptable. It wasn’t a fantasy war story. It was the “Real McCoy.” But the characters had color, and they had a reason for being there. It was their story but their surroundings were real, and they were accepted by the reader. I won’t tell you any lies. I might fantasize. I might dramatize, and I might make my characters with a little more flourish, but they’ll never lie to you. They’ll always be the truth. You’ll find that element in them and you’ll accept them. If a guy’s a PFC in one of my stories, he’s going to act like a PFC, and if he’s a businessman, he’s going to be the kind of businessman that I know.

going after twenty-some years. VAN HISE: When you came to DC and you revamped the Sandman and you created the Newsboy Legion, why did you do those characters as opposed to picking up some of the more well-known characters DC was doing and doing them your way, like Batman, Superman...? KIRBY: Because I didn’t like taking away a job from another guy. I felt that they should do that job and I wanted to do my own job. In other

VAN HISE: How did you feel that Captain America was handled after you left the book in the early Forties? KIRBY: I didn’t watch it. I just paid attention to what I was doing. I let the other guy be himself. He had to find his own visions while I still go looking for mine. Maybe that’s the kind of ego I have, but I’m interested in what I’m thinking. I feel that I’m an individual and that what I’m thinking is very, very important. And I believe that what you’re thinking is very, very important. I get an impression of what the other guys are doing but I just don’t absorb it fully. I’m professional enough to tell you whether they’re doing a good job or a bad job, but I’m not going to give you a treatise on it. I’m not going to give you a lecture on it because I don’t study it that deeply. VAN HISE: Obviously, when you came up with Captain America you created a character which had a lot of impact in that it was able to continue on long after you had left the book. KIRBY: Good characters do. Of course Superman is still around, too, as well as Captain America, and you’ll find that all the characters from the Golden Age still have that strength and validity that they’ve always had, and that’s why they’ve survived. You’ll find them still doing the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. The Fantastic Four are still

Unfinished page intended for “The Evil Sons of M. LeBlanc” in Stuntman #3.

words, if another man was working on a character that they had, that was great with me because it would be easy enough for me to create my own character and compete with them. I’m a competitor. I made up my mind to beat five guys, ten guys, because I was a little guy and you’ll find that little guys are cantankerous, independent, and they want to be themselves. Of course you’ll find that among big guys too, but more so, I think, among the smaller people because they have to fight to be noticed.

Age Captain America, did you change the shield from the triangle in the first issue to the circular version in the second so that it could be more of a tool for him? KIRBY: I changed the shield from a triangle because I felt that it was the kind of thing that you couldn’t do much with, except puncture a wall like a spear. But with a circular shield you could be tricky and there were wider uses for a circular shield, and therefore it was better for the character.

VAN HISE: Did you try to do anything different with your strips at Harvey when you did Stuntman and Boy Explorers?

VAN HISE: Was that full-page drawing in Captain America #4 actually the first fullpage drawing done in a comic book continuity strip at that time?

KIRBY: Yes. I was trying to do a different kind of ship strip, of boys on a ship and I had them going over the edge of the world and finding places that people had never thought of—and if I did a western, it would be a different type of western, with a different type of cowboy. I didn’t do the average cowboy. Doing any theme is kind of a challenge to me. I don’t want to work like the next guy. I want to work how I see it. My type of cowboy. My type of knight. If I did a barbarian strip, it would be my type of barbarian. I did a strip called Atlas for DC which got a mountain of mail and it only ran for a couple of issues but I got a lot of mail on it because for the type of character it was—it was a Hercules-type of character—it was different. So I was gratified by that.

KIRBY: Yes, we were always innovating. We did the first double-page splash and there were none done before Simon & Kirby created it. We felt that the format of the comic book had to have a little balance. A doublesplash added to the dramatization of what we were doing. It created a greater impact and therefore the double-spread stayed. To this very day the double-spread is very effective because it’s big and explosive and it dramatizes what you want to say. Like I say, I didn’t want to work like the next guy. I wanted to do things the way I saw them and I still do that to this day. ★

VAN HISE: Were there any types of characters that you wanted to do in the Forties but you never had a chance to do because the trend shifted in the late Forties from super-heroes into horror and crime?

(top left) 1980s Captain America sketch.

KIRBY: No. There was nothing. I felt that I could do whatever was thrown at me. In other words, to me a job is a job. I’m a thorough professional, and I’m more interested in being a professional than being an immortal artist of some kind. I built up my job to sell magazines and that’s what I did. So it didn’t matter to me what they had or what they were doing. If they said, “Do a job, this kind of a job,” I would get it done.

(top right and bottom) More early Kirby drawings from the 1930s.

VAN HISE: Wasn’t Mercury, a character you did briefly for Timely, similar to the Thor which Marvel would do many years later? KIRBY: Yes, and I also did a version of Thor for DC in the Fifties before I did him for Marvel. He had a red beard but he was a legendary figure, which I liked. I liked the figure of Thor at DC and I created Thor at Marvel because I was forever enamored of legends and I knew all about these legends, which is why I knew about Balder and Heimdall and Odin. I tried to update Thor and put him in a super-hero costume, and he looked great in it and everybody loved him, but he was still Thor. VAN HISE: On your Golden 11

S&K’s Sandman in All-Star Comics by John Fallon any of the Kirby stories that have been touched upon by the contributing writers to TJKC have dealt with the impact and legacy of his art. One of the least noted features that Jack contributed to over the course of his career is Simon & Kirby’s work on the Justice Society of America. During the first 12 issues of All-Star Comics which featured the JSA, Sandman’s involvement was little more than a story that was drawn to tie the other features of the overall storyline together. When Joe and Jack got ahold of Sandman beginning in issue #14, Sandman’s overall tone changed drastically. Here now, we see Simon & Kirby’s contribution to Sandman and the JSA.

All Star #14: “Food For Starving Patriots” JSA opening plot: During a regularly scheduled meeting of the JSA, Hawkman brings to the table that “the liberty loving peoples of Europe must be fed.” The problem with this mission is that it must be done without the enemy’s knowledge. With the assignments being made, our heroes embark on their missions. Drawing Greece as his assignment, Sandman’s chapter begins. Sandman plot: Having the same effect on the Germans as he does on criminals, our chapter opens to see the Golden Gladiator battling the German Captain in charge of an area of Greece. When he awakes, he is informed that a troop train has been destroyed and they believe that Sandman is responsible. We next see Sandman and Sandy leading a group of guerrillas as they destroy yet another troop train. After talking with the leader of the guerrillas, Sandman comes to the conclusion that Hitler is setting the scene to take over the oil fields of Iran by way of Turkey. With a plan in mind, Sandman and Sandy storm Gestapo headquarters and convince the Gestapo commander that they have become friends with Hitler. At Sandman’s request, the Commander sends the following message from the Propaganda Broadcasting office via short wave: “The Nazis do not plan to invade Turkey! Be sure and tell it to Sweeney!” With the Allies informed, they set into motion plans that will stop Hitler in his tracks. Meanwhile, Sandman and Sandy pay their final call on the Germans in Greece and give them a strong reminder to stop breaking into the Greek homes and stealing their food. The last panel shows Hitler eating a bowl of rice while knowing that the peoples of the oppressed lands are now eating steak.

Splash page from the Sandman story in All-Star Comics #15.

them with their boyfriend’s costumes. Informing the girlfriends that the individual cases that the JSA members are working on are in reality caused by one man, they quickly depart to capture that man: Brainwave. Sandman plot: In the letter that Sandman sent to Wonder Woman the stage is set for the opening with the patented nightmare sequence found in many of his Adventure Comics tales. We see wealthy businessman Stanley Cord dreaming of being manhandled by Sandman and Sandy. When he awakes, Cord is greeted by a phony Sandman who threatens to reveal Cord’s shady business dealings to the police if he doesn’t give him money. The next victim that night turns out to be Wesley Dodds, who sends “Sandman” packing. After the bogus Sandman

All Star #15: “The Man Who Created Images” JSA opening plot: As Wonder Woman opens letters addressed to her from her fellow JSA members, they all tell her that they can’t come to the meeting because they are working on cases. Not to waste an opportunity, Wonder Woman quickly contacts the girlfriends of the JSA and outfits 12

pulls a disappearing act, the real Sandman is on the case. While at a socialite club the next morning, Wesley Dodds overhears Cord relating his tale to a friend. Armed with the location of Cord’s dropoff point for the blackmail, Sandman and Sandy await the pick-up. As they battle an army of thugs at the drop-off point, the thugs suddenly disappear. Deducing that they were apparitions to keep them busy while the real thugs made off with the ransom, Hitler eats rice in All-Star Comics #14. they follow the crooks back to their hideout. As they break into the hideout, they overhear the name of the true mastermind: Brainwave. After making short work of the crooks, Sandman speeds off to SharkTooth Bay to capture Brainwave with the JSA.

All Star #17: “Brainwave Goes Berserk” JSA beginning plot: As the regularly-scheduled meeting proceeds, Wonder Woman announces that the minutes to the JSA meetings have been stolen. Next we see a shadowed figure reading the minutes, and the death of Brainwave from All-Star #15 is recounted, but with a new ending: We discover Brainwave survived, and has stolen the minutes. While the JSA is looking everywhere in the headquarters for the missing minutes, a strange glow shrinks all the members as Brainwave enters their headquarters and captures them. Now trapped in small cages, the JSA overhears Brainwave’s fantastic plot. Hawkman summons his hawks, which then carry all of the tiny, caged JSA members away to freedom. Sandman plot: Finding himself flying deep over a nearby forest, Sandman is suddenly deposited atop what appears to be a money tree! In his small size, Sandman spots a tiny set of instructions written on a dollar bill in the tree. Without sufficient light, Sandman is unable to read the entire message. His only chance is to replace the bill and wait for whoever comes for it. Hours later; gangster Silk O’Mara arrives

All Star #16: “The Justice Society Fights for a United America” JSA opening plot: Enemy agents in the US are spreading seeds of hatred and intolerance. Hawkman had stumbled across a plan where eight of Germany’s top agents were sent to the US to stir up problems with the population by using various forms of hate. Hawkman divides the US into sections and assigns each member their own area and instructs them to get the aid of the local Junior Justice Society members. Sandman plot: After being attacked by Sandman in his nightmare, hatred-spreading Fifth Columnist Henry Overman (alias Hans Emil Obermeyer) awakes to begin his day anew, spreading Nazi propaganda in his pro-Nazi newspaper The New Way. Sandman contacts paperboy Ted Worth and informs him that he is working for a Nazi agent. Being a member of the JJSA, Ted is convinced by Sandman to have him and his friends boycott the selling of those papers. With this passive resistance in place, Sandman tracks down the home of Henry Overman by the discovery of an antenna on his roof. Sandman now listens in to Overman’s communication with the Fuehrer. Finally discovering Hitler’s methods and procedure, Sandman brings down the Nazi agent and his band of spies. As the spies are captured, another group of spies happens upon the boycotting newsboys. With Sandman’s help, the newsboys rout the remaining spies and Sandman proclaims, “Yes, we may be of different nationalities, and religions— Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish—but together we’re all red-blooded, clean, healthy, free Americans! You can’t beat that combination, Adolf. It’s too strong!!” Joe and Jack played up the “Master of Dreams” motif, as evidenced in this splash from All-Star Comics #16.

Side of town hired them to do the job, Sandman turns the thugs over to the police and heads towards Hawkman’s rescue. Within these 29 pages of previously unexplored Simon & Kirby work, we find some of their best artwork, comparable to their stint on Sandman in Adventure Comics. Both demonstrate the Kirby qualities that we’ve all come to expect and love. It’s always a treasure to discover an old Kirby piece that one has never seen before. It makes me long for the days of my youth. If you are fortunate enough (and have enough money) to be able to add these books to your collection, go for it. You won’t be sorry and you’ll also be able to see how each story ends. If you don’t have the money, try checking out the All-Star Comics Archives Volumes 3 and 4, which are already out, and Volume 5, which will be out later this year. Happy Hunting!! ★ to pick up his stash of dollar bills with instructions from Brainwave. As Sandman gives pursuit, he follows the crooks outside of the forest and “borrows” a nearby car. Driving himself into the city, he follows the crooks to the assignment given by Brainwave. Still in his diminutive form, Sandman enters the jewelry store—breaks up the hoods’ job—and slows them down enough that the police can capture them. (All of the JSA-ers were later restored to normal size by Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt.)

All Star #19: “The Crimes Set To Music” JSA beginning plot: The JSA members all receive a message from one of Hawkman’s hawks, each containing a musical note. Once they all meet in a deserted house in the country, the notes that they received are played on the piano located in the house. Attached to each piano hammer is another note containing their assignments. With the assignments made, the case begins. Sandman plot: The plot opens with a dream, as we find two “spirits of song” relating the tale of pianist Theodor Korowski. As the pianist is practicing, a red-robed figure enters the room intent on using his scissors to cut off the fingers of the great pianist. As he is ready to strike, Sandman intervenes from nowhere. As the pianist awakes from his nightmare and begins to play Ave Maria, we see suspended high above the piano a guillotine poised to sever his hands. Sandman quickly makes his entrance and rescues the pianist with the aid of Sandy. Outside, crooks waiting for the results of their work suspect that Sandman has entered the home. From outside the home, they spot the silhouettes of the Sandman and Sandy at the window. Using a machine gun, they blast the window. Rushing into the home to check their work, the gang is greeted by the Golden Duo who make short work of the thugs. Discovering that an “old guy” who lives on the West

(top) A tiny Sandman drives off in All-Star Comics #17. (above) All-Star Comics #19, featuring a narrow escape for Sandman and Sandy.

The Mystery of Jon Henri! by Jeff Gelb hen I began to collect Golden Age comics in earnest in the early 1970s, I was already a big Jack Kirby fan. So naturally, I gravitated toward his Golden Age books that were affordable at the time. Along the way, though, I was also interested in picking up representative samplings of super-hero comics from all the WWII publishers, to compare and contrast their quality. I found the Harvey line of comics especially exciting, because they appeared to have a consistent level of quality from issue to issue, book to book. They were also chock-full of fun—if secondary—super-hero types, including their Captain America/ Guardian take-off, Captain Freedom. It was obvious that Harvey, as most publishers, paid attention to Jack Kirby. So imagine my surprise when I began to notice a mini-trend in my Harvey collecting: Covers that were quite reminiscent of Jack Kirby’s style. There was a run of Champ, Green Hornet, and Speed comics that looked suspiciously like the work of the King, but when they were signed, they were by “Jon Henri.” I bought as many of those issues as I could find, and found them all just as exciting as the work Kirby was doing at that time; but I never saw any Jon Henri work inside the comics, and, as much as I assumed it was a Kirby pseudonym, that proof didn’t come till a few years later. After all, those were the days long prior to The Jack Kirby Collector, or even price guides complete enough to list pseudonyms. In my spare time, I used to create 3-D comic book cover art by buying six copies of comics, then cutting out their figures and creating layers with balsa wood and glue, ending up with a framed 3-D representation of that cover. I even sold some of these little gems at an early San Diego Comic Convention. In any case, one of the thrills of living in San Diego is that I got to join fellow San Diego fans for periodic visits to Jack Kirby’s house in Thousand Oaks. In preparation for one of those visits, I made a 3-D version of the cover of one of Kirby’s then-current DC titles as a gift. When I saw his studio, my eye was drawn to a framed comics cover already on his wall: Green Hornet #9, a Jon Henri issue! He confirmed, at long last, that he was Henri, a pseudonym he’d used when working for Harvey while still employed full-time elsewhere. Jack was thrilled with my 3-D cover (I wonder if it ever made his wall?). I was gratified to solve the mystery of Jon Henri, and even more thrilled when Jack returned my gift by drawing a Captain America sketch that I treasure to this day. ★

(left) Two classic Jon Henri covers, from Speed #23 (top) and #20 (bottom), Oct. and July 1942, respectively. Shown above is the back cover of Speed #20, a rare company ad for three comics, all sporting Henri covers!

Englishman Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term Eugenics (from a Greek stem meaning ‘good in birth’) in 1883. He concluded in his studies that natural ability, intelligence, and talent were bestowed by heredity. “Could not,” he pondered, “the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?” He saw the encouragement of good marriages as the best way of accomplishing this end. Interest in eugenics grew when an obscure Austrian monk’s experiments in breeding peas became widely known. Another mystery of human heredity was seemingly revealed when Gregor Mendel discovered genetically-transmitted dominant and recessive traits. In the US, Charles Davenport established a center for research in human evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, NY. Davenport believed that socalled single-unit genes caused such traits as feeblemindedness and alcoholism. He thought that by keeping their carriers from reproducing the world could eradicate the problem. Advancing Galton’s theory, Davenport wished for human matings to be placed on the same plane as horse breeding. For prostitutes and their “innate eroticism,” as he called it, he advocated eugenic castrations. Historian Daniel J. Kevles’ In the Name of Eugenics (1985) covered the various philosophies found in the nineteenth-century fervor surrounding the strange movement. The early eugenicists identified human worth with the qualities needed to pass through schools, universities, and professional training. They were not alone. On both sides of the Atlantic, people (in the ruling class) felt themselves and

A solo drawing of Captain America, by Joe Simon.

Prof. Reinstein, I Presume? Eugenics, Simon, and Kirby, by Jerry Boyd their children’s future to be threatened. Some of America’s WASP ascendancy felt the country was taking a wrong turn by admitting so many Italians, Poles, etc. In Britain, members of the upper class felt they would be swamped and overly-taxed by the overbreeding of the lower orders. The ‘superior’ man had to assert himself while there still was time! He would have to establish new laws and re-invent himself— through science if necessary.

aptain America Comics #1: Two men step into a room of astonishinglysophisticated scientific machinery. The room is partitioned off by plate-glass windows behind which an eager group of intelligence agents and scientists shuffle anxiously in their seats while waiting to view “the fruits of their experiment.” The two men standing before them do not introduce themselves to their audience. One man is short, stocky, and his dark, long hair is streaked with white. He addresses the small crowd and his frail young charge, gently reassuring the volunteer and explaining his serum’s effects to the stunned onlookers as it takes hold. The Army-rejected volunteer literally grows before their eyes. His arms and shoulders grow heavy and thicken. Power surges through his growing muscles and his intelligence is immediately heightened. Somewhat taken aback himself by his success, the scientist recovers enough to issue a godlike “Behold! The crowning achievement of all my years of hard work!” Now he names his “Adam.” “We shall call you Captain America, son! Because, like you, America shall gain the strength and the will to safeguard our shores!” Whether the then-new team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby knew it or not, the very pivotal character of Prof. Reinstein was more than just a throwaway catalyst for a new character’s origin. He was actually part of a socio-scientific movement that had taken root prior in the consciousness of many nations.

The Reign of the Supermen Some people have said that truly great creators have the gift of prophecy. I wonder if Siegel and Shuster had heard that when they were shopping the incredible concept of a character with supernatural abilities about. (Professors Reinstein and Horton were just around the corner. Joe Simon’s Red Raven is trained and made into a super-being by an advanced race of winged beings in Red Raven #1. Billy Batson, a superior boy, is selected by Shazam to hold superior powers. And it went on.) Shortly before comics exploded with a reign of their supermen, Aldous Huxley, in his 1932 novel Brave New World, imagined future childbirth as a very systematic process in which state-sponsored brainwashing would create a better social efficiency. (Huxley’s sociopolitical statement was obvious: If the government didn’t control the eugenics business, then a laissez-faire eugenics would emerge from the millions of parents making free choices and things might go crazy.) Huxley’s scenario made some sense then. Some American states were forcibly sterilizing the “feebleminded,” and Adolf Hitler had praised these policies in his book, Mein Kampf. (Hitler actually followed a list of distinguished individuals who gave eugenics their support: Darwin, Teddy Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, the young Winston Churchill, and Calvin Coolidge, who declared during his vice-presidency that “Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”) In the littered minds of the Nazi hierarchy, eugenics became a cause célèbre. The people they deemed ‘inferior’ became answerable to state policy and part of an intolerable situation the Nazis felt “raciallybound” to correct. They killed or jailed them. The mentally retarded

The Roots of Eugenics In centuries past, the ‘national or tribal superman’ began with an almost-mythical notion of what the superior man was all about. In almost all instances, he was highly intelligent, innately noble, articulate, loyal, and heroic. Physically, he was tall, lean, sinewy, possessed of animal-like quickness, and always superb in face and physique. The Germans had Siegfried, the ancient Israelites had King David and Samson, the English held Galahad and King Arthur in high esteem, and there were enough warriors, braves, shoguns, and others (real or imagined) for all the peoples in the world. “But how to increase the numbers of superior individuals?”, some came to ask. 16

were sent away to special facilities to be put to death. Many of the parents Goering, Himmler, and Hitler would’ve victimized embraced their new country and so did their children. Boys by the names of Eisner, Kane, Siegel, Shuster, Simon, and Kirby created “All-American heroes” named Colt, Wayne, Kent, and Rogers (among others). While Hitler was imagining his army of blond super-soldiers conquering the world, Jack and Joe embodied all Americans into one Private Steve Rogers as created, not by a mandated sociopolitical doctrine, but by a brilliant (Jewish?) European immigrant doctor who had embraced democratic freedoms and felt a need to contribute to his adopted land.

Steve Rogers took over the new Avengers and moved into the moreestablished Iron Man’s book, Tales of Suspense. The Marvel Comics Group hung in there with him and he began to grow on the readership again, thanks to the House of Ideas’ policy of getting their characters noticed in as many of their titles as possible. Cap showed up in the FF, X-Men, Spider-Man, and Sgt. Fury. The icing on the cake was Fantasy Masterpieces, which introduced younger Marvelites to Cap and Bucky’s Golden Age exploits by Simon & Kirby. (Someone at Marvel may have been nursing a grudge against Joe because the credits were never present on the reprinted stories.) To young comic enthusiasts of my generation, the Forties represented a vague notion of what WWII was all about, Three Stooges and Little Rascals comedies, and Universal horror movies that came on TV Saturday afternoons. Cap was the tie-in; the great legacy that linked the early days of graphic excitement to the present. The stories also showed the crude, yet passionate energy of Jack Kirby. This was where the genius began. Though FM was an all-reprint book, the stunning new cover art by Kirby and Giacoia, the comic relief of the blustering Sgt. Duffy, the tough Betty Ross, and the plucky heroism of Bucky Barnes made the title a must-have. Two years after the shield-slinger’s return, he was in complete acceptance by fandom and the earlier successes of Simon & Kirby were largely responsible. The old origin expanded during the Kirby-Lee years. The Red Skull even explained his beginnings to his captured nemesis on one occasion. “Super-heroes with super-problems” took over slowly from the old stern-jawed, ridiculously capable crimebusters of yore. Cap was among them, looking within and often. Stan renamed the good doctor “Erskine” for the ’60s. Doc didn’t get the introspection treatment but he got more lines and Cap finally got his powers outlined in a short but exciting novel from Bantam Books. Dr. Erskine was a

“Captain America represents us and he’ll fight for us. He’ll put his body across the line for us and the other super-heroes are the same way. They see us in a protective attitude because it’s an unfair situation between us and super-heroes, so in all fairness super-heroes have to come to our aid because we’re the underdog and we can’t possibly fight in their league. But in this fantasy, they represent us. They’re us. They do the things that we feel that we’d like to do.” Jack Kirby, 1983

Cap & His Doctor Golden Age characters always retain a certain charm. They’re always ready for anything as soon as they put on their outfits. S&K’s Manhunter, Rip Kirby, Sandman, Stuntman, and Captain America are all from the same mold. Stern-jawed, powerful, righteous in judgment, confident, they all have great deductive reasoning (making them fabulous detectives) and incredible fighting skills. (No one shows frail, unfit-for-duty Steve Rogers how to throw a punch but seconds after he receives that serum, he’s knocking out an armed spy.) Cap instantly becomes a fighting machine. Jim Harper, the Golden Guardian, never got close to a “magic elixir” in his origin but it’s tough to see Cap and him not fighting to a draw. They’re from the same mold. It was a great mold, though, and the team’s success reflected it. S&K’s characters (just like Batman, Dr. Fate, the Destroyer, and all the others) were never introspective. (That idea would come with a guy named Lee some two decades later.) Evil was present and they had to defeat it. “Safeguarding America’s shores” was how Reinstein put it and Winghead and his masked kid ally never veered from that purpose. Timely’s unwillingness to make the hot, young team a more profitable deal sent them over to National, and Cap—under Al Avison, Syd Shores, Don Rico, Stan, and others—continued to do well. The stories were still entertaining but it was clear that Jack and Joe’s followers were working from their blueprint. Cap continued to make short, stirring (Simon-like) speeches just before he and Bucky lowered the boom on their enemies. In a well-executed tale by Stan Lee and Al Avison (Captain America Comics #16) in which Cap and Bucky had been beaten, humiliated, and tortured(!) by the Red Skull, Cap declared near the story’s end (in a reference to Pearl Harbor), “I’m just like my country, Skull... I won’t be caught napping again!” The fast-producing team of Simon & Kirby (Jack estimated that sometimes they turned out as much as 6-10 finished pages in a day) were charting out new territories over at DC and the people ghosting their strips followed their unique brand of storytelling in much the same way Timely did. Despite ol’ Winghead’s popularity (and the legion of other super-patriots he inspired), he became just another crimebuster at the war’s end. Revived by Kirby and Lee in ’64, the starspangled Avenger wasn’t altogether popular at first. Older comics fans were thrilled by his return but younger readers felt the old boy just gummed up the Avengers. Complaints continued to mount when

Captain America by Kirby.

“dabbler in chemicals” in The Great Gold Steal, a 1968 book by budding writer and comics fan Ted White. Erskine had done work with the mind-controlling LSD-25(!), the endocrine system, and chemical body control. (Like the Human Torch’s Professor Horton, his work was way beyond that of his colleagues.) Operation Rebirth had several goals in the story, but White wisely kept to the attributes soldiers would need in a global conflict. Rogers’ powers helped him control his metabolism and breathing, heal quickly from wounds, strengthen his immune system against diseases, and function easily in extreme heat and intense cold. (The far-flung battlefields of WWII would claim many casualties in the freezing snows of Russia, the humid jungles of Asia, and the burning deserts of North Africa, to name just a few.) The super-soldiers of Reinstein/Erskine would be able to maintain their incredible energies in combat. Their powerful bodies, heightened senses, and increased intellects would work perfectly in unison to successfully defeat any regular fighting force. Steve Rogers could even adapt quickly to night-fighting because his eyes would adapt much more quickly to the loss of light than the average man’s. Rogers was what the Spartans tried to breed, what the Romans attempted to institute, what Siegfried and Hiawatha embodied, and what Hitler wanted—but Reinstein actually created him and Kirby and Simon delivered him.

It’s to their credit that they did two amazing things in that short, dramatic origin tale nearly sixty years ago. They disposed of the (ridiculous) notion that European immigrants had little or nothing to offer their adopted land by offering Reinstein (who could use an origin tale of his own), and they gave us an enduring American icon of myth, scientific eugenics, and patriotism—our beloved nemesis of tyranny, Captain America. ★ Sources include the Jan. 11, 1999 issue of Time Magazine, The Golden Age of Marvel Comics, Vol. 2, and Captain America, the Classic Years.

Reinstein Today At this moment in time, we’re on the verge of having an actual Captain America. Genetic tinkering has taken the ‘Frankenstein idea’ many steps farther and ‘designer babies’ with good looks and high IQs can easily be produced. (Already, some wealthy British parents have traveled to Saudi Arabia to choose their baby’s sex in-vitro, a process illegal in their homeland.) In the 19th century, the well-educated did it by marrying among those of their own station. Now, the affluent can afford expensive genetic technologies. There are downsides, however, and the debates concerning all points will continue: “Who gets the good genes?” “Only those who can afford it and are willing to chance it should have it!” “Give them to the poor also, so they’ll be able to raise themselves up!” “No, because that’ll mean government subsidizing of eugenics and that’s wrong.” “We’ll use the processing to get rid of health and mental problems—that’ll solve everything!” “Sure, help the disabilities—but distribute the wealth, also. Then you’ll have real change!” The debates will go on. Jack Kirby was the King of Bio-tinkering. He created stimuloids, androids, synthozoids, LMDs, and more, but it’s his brief association with Professor Reinstein that looms, arguably, in a larger fashion with us today. Opponents of bio-tampering say it mocks American values. The shield-slinger was created to stand for American values. What’ll happen in the next thrill-packed chapter?! Not even Simon & Kirby could answer that.

Cover pencils from Kirby’s 1970s return to Cap in Captain America #193.

Uncanny, Thrilling, Classic Kirby Text Illustrations A by Tom Morehouse

recent purchase brought to mind one of the extra joys that comes with having collected anything for a long period of time: That exhilarating feeling of discovering a previously unknown treasure. In my case, that can only mean uncredited/unlisted Jack Kirby artwork. The purchase in question was a copy of Thrills of Tomorrow #20, a repackaging by Simon & Kirby in 1955 of the (Stuntman only) stories from Stuntman #2 originally put out nine years earlier. From copies I’d seen over the years I knew the cover had been slightly altered (the “damsel in distress” was removed to meet CCA standards) but I’d never taken a good look inside. The last two pages are text stories, “Guns on the Chisolm Trail” and “Jack McGregor’s Bluff,” [example at left] both illustrated (if not written) by Jack! This got me thinking. Since I’ve been spending enormous amounts of time and energy of late on The Jack Kirby Checklist, I wondered how many other unlisted text illos by Kirby I could dig up. With only a modest search I turned up three. From Timely’s 1941 pulp Uncanny Stories Vol. 1, #1 comes “The Man from the Wrong Time Track” (shown at right). In the lower right corner is the signature “J. Kirby.” Jack also did the next story in the book “Speed Will Be My Bride” (shown below) using some of the wash techniques he learned while working at Lincoln Syndicate. In addition to these two the book contains a double-page spread by Alex Schomburg as well as one by Kirby for the cover story “Coming of the Giant Germs.” Late 1960 saw Jack, unsure of continued assignments from Stan Lee, doing work for the Gilberton group. His initial published pieces were cover previews of Classics Illustrated #161 (“Cleopatra”) and Classics Illustrated Jr. #571 (“How Fire Came To The Indians”) found on the inside front covers of the preceeding issues. At the same time he produced the opening splash, an informational page and text illustrations (“The Duel” by Guy de Maupassant, shown at right) for World Around Us #30. By all accounts the painstaking demand for accuracy and tight editorial control frustrated Kirby. “Those guys were crazy with details... Even the fingernails had to look right!” he’d said. ★ 19

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War & Romance & Red Underwear & Werewolves! I Presenting the Best of S&K’s Golden Age, by R. J. Vitone

what to expect. (I “won” a Superman #2 by bid once, and spent long hours on the phone trying to explain to the mope I got it from that it was Superman ANNUAL #2!) As a result, I almost never saw any of that early Kirby work in Crash, Mystery Men, and Science Comics. By the time these books were referenced, I was really unwilling to shell out over $100 each for only a random cover or a 5-page story. Blue Bolt, from Novelty (a company that bought work from Bill Everett and Carl Burgos), was another case. It was fairly easy to pick up the first ten issues in a short time at low prices. When I got them all, I looked them over, then got rid of them! Looking at them now, they show a wide range of the style—the first collaboration, a melding of different art and storytelling. Crude, rough at first, then a sure, steady progression. By issue #7, you could have slapped little wings on Blue Bolt’s head and given him a shield, because the art looked just like the early Cap strip; but back then, I was disappointed by the short stories in each issue, and the Flash Gordon look. I never did warm up to the thing.

n 1972, my new wife asked me why I was wasting $20 of my/our hard-earned money on a copy of Captain America #6. I tried to explain that even though I had taken the mature step of matrimony, the kid in me still screamed out to collect Golden Age comics—especially Kirby comics. She just didn’t understand. Five years later, when she left me, she still didn’t get it; but I had built up a nice collection by then to keep me warm. (No real comfort, believe me.) Depressed, I quit my job, and went into partnership in a comic book store, one of the first in the city. I figured, what the hell, waste a couple of years, maybe pick up a few neat Kirby books, then move on to real life. Now, over 20 years later, it’s me that finally understands! I’ve spent half of my adult life collecting Kirby comics, and I’ve seen, held, traded, owned, and sold just about everything that Jack ever did. Was I surprised to find out that this is unusual! Many times, I’d mention a favorite story to other fans, and get blank “You’ve seen that?” stares in return. Slowly, I came to realize how lucky I was. Owning a comics store had landed me in just the right place at just the right time to feed my Kirby collecting impulses. At our stores in the late ’70s/early ’80s, people actually brought in old comics from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s for us to buy. One of the best was over 100 DCs from 1935 to 1941, including all of the most legendary key issues you could name! Great, right? Except the art teacher we bought them from had years ago razored out every page that had any animal on it! (Of course I didn’t want any of ’em... no Kirby... ‘DUH’!) There was not much of an organized fandom in those days, so conventions were usually badlyorganized flea markets. Price guides were used more for reference than to price (“What!? $5 for an FF #1—Are you insane?!”). Once I decided I was stuck as a full-time comics retailer, I made up a list of Golden Age books I “needed” and started looking. By networking, bidding, advertising, trading, and Blue Bolt #3, the cover that started it all. sometimes begging, I did amass most of what I felt I wanted, even though I had to trade some of the books I had acquired in order to get others I’d never seen. We’re looking at over two decades of searching, and the accumulation of more than just books. A lot of knowledge came as well. So as a service to any of you collectors out there, here’s the benefit of my experience: An overview of each Golden Age title—with highlights, low points, and other info you may find interesting.

BEST EARLY COVER: Champion #10, (shown above) hands down. Nice example of what the Golden Age was. Try and find one, though. BEST BLUE BOLT COVER: #3. An easy choice, since Novelty’s editors featured their long-forgotten stars on most of the run. I’ll argue with anyone that this is a Kirby layout, or at least Kirby inks over Simon art! THE ONE BLUE BOLT TO OWN: #6. Nice blend of art and action, classic Jack touches, and a weird, positively creepy big-headed villain. Pops up in the Comic Buyer’s Guide sometimes. BEST “I KNOW SHE’S GREEN, BUT WHAT AN OUTFIT” COSTUME: The Green Sorceress! (shown below)

Blue Bolt and the Early Partnership Period Oddball early super-hero comics rarely turned up where I could see them, and I hated to buy a comic through the mail without knowing 21

AVOID AT ANY COST (EXCEPT FREE): Blue Bolt #1 and 2. Very, very bad. No Kirby in #1.

HARDEST MARVEL MYSTERY WITH S&K ART TO FIND: These days, all of ’em! Back in the “old days,” #12 and #13 almost never The Vision, from Marvel Mystery #13. were offered for sale, and #17 (with an epic Torch/Subby team-up) was superscarce. I actually found a copy of #19 in an attic!

From a sheer collecting point of view, these early books are frustrating; not enough material to justify the cost and time to track them down. Unless you’re extremely anal about this stuff, be content with reprints, or find low-grade copies!

The Timely Years A fun period! Collecting Timelys was a happy job for me. Usually, I’d discount-buy a group of ten or so from a dealer, then trade off ones I didn’t care for to another dealer. I got to see dozens of Golden Age comics this way, and stubbornly hung onto many Kirbys. As time passed, I found it harder to justify paying higher prices. Once, I passed on a VF copy of Cap #1 priced at $200, because my wife was staring at me. I was content with a coverless copy until the late, great Phil Seuling wheedled me into buying a high grade one for more than $2000, and I finally had to let go of that one too! Now, the prices are prohibitive (“Hmmmm. Let’s see. Buy an All-Winners #1 or a new car...”), and even if you have the money to spend, just try to find some of this stuff! Whoever’s got ’em is holding on to them, folks; and the few people who want to sell them only know three words: “Over Guide” and “Auction.” Anyway, here’s what I found out:

BEST TIMELY WAR-THEME COVER: Captain America #1 and #2— Hitler, Nazis, and guns! BEST CAP COVER: #6. My first Golden Age Cap! BEST CAP STORY: “The Phantom Hound Of Cardiff Moor” (Cap #10). I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan, and this “old dark house” murder mystery really hooks me. RUNNER UP: “Return of the Red Skull” (Cap #3). The Skull at his vile worst!

OBVIOUS KEYS TO FIND IN A BASEMENT: Cap #1, All-Winners #1 and Marvel Mystery #13 (first Vision).

THE ONLY CAP STORY THAT MAY NEVER BE REPRINTED: AllWinners #2. Issued months after the team left Timely for DC, this is the last Golden Age Cap strip. And all I’ll say is this: Captain America, the “symbol of liberty” has some harsh things to say to the natives of a Pacific island! This book turns up often, isn’t super-expensive, and is worth a look.

ONLY COVER ON MARVEL MYSTERY: #12, of The Angel, no less. MOST OBSCURE TIMELY COVER: USA Comics #1 (Aug. ’41). A Schomberg-style horror as a wizened Nazi ghoul pours molten metal over a General. Never saw it, never knew of it!

BEST TIMELY VILLAIN: C’mon, you know—The Red Skull!

MOST OVER-ROMANTICIZED: Red Raven #1. For years, one of the rarest key issues. A nice cover and two leftover Kirby stories just ain’t worth it.

DID YOU KNOW...?: Cap #4 has a Cap/Bucky pin-up on the back cover. HARDEST CAP ISSUE TO FIND: Always had trouble finding a decent copy of #4, and #7 remains scarce. #3, 5, and 8 used to be common.

THE “IS THAT ALL?” COMIC: Young Allies #1—a cover and a few splashes! I paid $5 for a coverless copy in 1982 and felt cheated. By the way, Jack’s original unused cover was terrific.

“HEY! THAT LOOKS LIKE JACK ART!”: Splash page in a Cap #11 story. THE ONE ISSUE OF CAP TO OWN: If you’re pinned down, and want only one, go with #7—great art, the Red Skull and the Black Toad, topped off by a nice Kirby cover. The team’s Timely period fascinated me ever since I first got a copy of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes in 1965. This was the first time I’d ever seen the Golden Age Cap origin story, and felt the simple uncomplicated fun that ran through it. Kirby’s 1941 art struck me as especially powerful. As I grew older and collected more issues, I came to realize how simple and formulaic those books were— but that remains part of the charm! (It may seem funny to you, but reprints of Golden Age books just do not carry the “feel” of age and wonder with them.) As far as I was concerned, there was no other Golden Age stuff for me to collect... but:

BEST VISION STRIP IN MARVEL MYSTERY: #16. Dinosaurs, dynamite, and nice if not top Kirby art. One of the best Vision stories, although my personal favorite is their final one, where the devil shows up! (MM #27)

The DC War Years It wouldn’t be a Golden Age Timely book without killer zombies, like these from the Cap story in All-Winners #1.

Who could have guessed how much high quality material would roll off the line after the move to

stuck to the Robert Bell bag that’s been holding it together since about 1968!) BEST THING ABOUT THE WARTIME DC RUN: There’s so much to choose from if you want to collect a representative few! WORST THING ABOUT THE SAME RUN: No drooling, gruesome, blood-soaked villains to enjoy like in the Timelys! BEST SANDMAN COVER: Adventure #76. Odd foes, dynamic heroes, and the Sandman motto on the wall. RUNNERUP: Adventure #93. BEST SANDMAN STORY IN ADVENTURE: The very first one, from Adventure #72. Never reprinted, great Cap-style art! RUNNER-UP: “The Villain From Valhalla” (Adventure #75), everyone’s favorite! BEST SANDMAN IN WORLD’S FINEST: “Adventure of the Magic Forest” in issue #6. Almost as good as the best! AIN’T THAT IRONIC?: Sandman by S&K in five All-Star Comics. First, try and find ’em. Next, try to pay for ’em—and only six pages each! Was I glad when DC reprinted the books in their Archives editions. BEST MANHUNTER COVER: His last one, Adventure #79. A cover always regarded as a classic and a good story, too. Only seen about half a dozen copies. ONLY HERO “TEAM-UP” COVER: Adventure #78. Sandman, Sandy, and Manhunter man the guns to blast the Axis.

Page 9 from the never-reprinted Sandman story in Adventure Comics #86 (May 1943).

DC? It was sheer hell tracking down some of these issues! (I got really lucky once, buying the entire Adventure Comics run from the Plazak Collection, one of the largest uncataloged Golden Age collections ever assembled!) Even so, that remains only a part of the large volume of work the team produced at DC. Who could collect it all? Who could find it all? Star-Spangled? Never heard of it! Boy Commandos? Even though it was almost always signed “by Simon & Kirby,” it usually was not. Why waste money on a hope? Detective? One of the juiciest Robinson Batman periods. Just try and track those down. I never did own all of them, and am still convinced there are a few “unverified” stories to be found! Adventure? Well, I got lucky... Along with All-Star Comics, Adventure has always been one of the top DC collectable titles. With so many heroes, so many “key” origins, the run that begins in #72 was frosting on the cake. Some of the “peak” issues, with both Sandman and Manhunter by Simon & Kirby, turn up just about never, almost always at over-guide prices. (True, some of my copies bring new meaning to the term “poor.” One is actually

If you’re looking to pick up a few issues of Adventure, keep in mind that after a strong start, wartime inventory stories turn up fast. The early issues (#72-80) are by far the best. Good covers, strong Kirby art. After the team left the Manhunter strip, there’s a slow deflation in quality (#81-91). Before you buy any of these, it’s a good idea to check out the reprinted stories first. (Refer to your Kirby Checklist for reprint reference!) If you can pick one out, start looking over auction lists.

BEST BOY COMMANDOS STORY IN DETECTIVE: “The Invasion of America” in #76. The Kirby heroes team up. BEST BOY COMMANDOS STORY IN WORLD’S FINEST: Close! A wacky, zoot-suited Hitler in #15 (“Iss Ve Not Der Supermen?”) wins out over a dead-serious war story in #10 (“Message to Murmansk”). BEST BOY COMMANDOS COVER: The classic “Hitler gets the bum’s rush” cover on #2 is always mentioned, but I’ll go with #5, a great parachute jump shot. BEST BOY COMMANDOS STORY: With so many to pick from, a tough choice. “Satan To See You” in BC #5 is my pick. BEST OVERALL ISSUE OF BOY COMMANDOS: Easy! #23—Agent Axis/13, and three beautiful Kirby stories! It turns up a lot in CBG, too. Collecting the various Boy Commandos stories and issues was my passion for years. I can’t tell you how many times I’d get a book, then 23

find zero Kirby art, or only a cover. I gave up at one point for about five years—then decided to get them all. Guess what? I still need a couple! Anyhow, random issues with the strip are always around. Just about every Golden Age dealer’s list or convention table usually will have a couple. So should you. The first six issues have excellent S&K in them. Jack’s return issues (#15, 17, 19, 21) vary in quality, while #23 is my own favorite in terms of stories and art; and #24 has a great Superman parody cover. While it’s fairly easy to collect the Boy Commandos book, the stories in Detective are a royal pain. In the “old days,” you could always find one or two issues, but usually with stories not produced by S&K. Their run covers issues #64 through about #85, then picks up sporadically with #110. The first dozen strips are sharp, then the next halfdozen or so suffer greatly from the strain of the wartime inventory rush. The post-war stories (after #110) are done in another art style, similar to the team’s crime/romance output of the late ’40s. So set your sights on one or two from the earlier part of the run, or track down one of the post-1947 issues if you want a good example of the strip. As for the Boy Commandos (and Sandman) strips by S&K in World’s Finest, almost all of them are worth a look, and do turn up quite often for sale. Just stay away from the last few issues with the Boy Commandos. Really weak stuff! CHARACTERS SEPARATED AT BIRTH: Brooklyn (Boy Commandos), Gabby (Newsboy Legion), and Gashouse (Boy Explorers). BEST NEWSBOY LEGION STORY IN STARSPANGLED: “The Education of Iron Fist Gookin” (SS #18). A great example of the series. RUNNER UP: “The Fuhrer of Suicide Slum” (SS #19). Nazis invade the mean streets. BEST COVER ON STAR-SPANGLED: A harder choice than you’d think—Jack drew or at least laid out more than thirty of ’em! I’ll go with #8, a good representation of the series. Also take a good look at #28, a sharp warthemed cover!

Page 3 of the unpublished story “Terror Island” (featuring the villainous Panda) intended for Stuntman #3.

BEST STUNTMAN STORY: “Rescue of Robin Hood” in #2. S&K at their best.

By the time I got around to being interested in the Newsboy Legion, the price had far exceeded my own idea of their value. (Years ago at a convention, a dealer had thirty or forty different issues of StarSpangled sitting unbagged on top of a cardboard box, with a handmade sign taped to the top book. The sign said, “$5 each, 5 for $20.” I think I bought one.) Time passed and #7 became a hot “key,” and the meat of the Kirby run (#7-30) shot up. Since I was no big fan of the “Boys Town” theme, I passed up many of those issues, and to this day don’t really care all that much. I always got the feeling that Jack and Joe saved their best efforts for Boy Commandos and Sandman.

“TAKE THE KID GANG OUT OF THE SLUMS & ARMY & TAKE AWAY THEIR GUNS AND YOU’VE GOT...”: The Boy Explorers! I never saw any sign of these Harvey Comics until around 1977. The original issues and later reprints were published during a boom period for the comics industry, so these few books got lost in the rush. I picked up both Thrills of Tomorrows with Stuntman reprints in the late ’70s, then went looking for the “real thing.” Unfortunately, they remain elusive and expensive. (Boy Explorers #1 walked into my store one day, and I got it for almost nothing. It’s in great shape, but as brittle as a mummy!) As for the b-&-w final issue, reprints are just fine.

Short Stop at Harvey Publications BEST POST-WAR SUPER-HERO CREATION: Stuntman (I cheated! Stuntman is their only post-war super-hero. The next one would be Captain 3-D in ’53!)

Over To Hillman THE BEST “NON-ARCHIE” ARCHIE COMIC: My Date. Four issues of zany, out-dated (even for the ’40s) sheer S&K fun. Get ’em if you ever

BEST STUNTMAN COVER: #2. Always liked Kirby cars. 24

see them. MOST OBSCURE SERIES: “Link Thorne, The Flying Fool” ran in seven issues of Airboy Comics in 1947. An airborne soldier-of-fortune strip set in the Far East, done in top style! These turn up, so watch for them. JACK AND JOE TURN TO CRIME: Clue Comics becomes Real Clue Crime Comics (1947) and features crime stories of varied lengths. BEST REAL CLUE CRIME COVER: #18 (Vol. 2, #6) sums up the whole genre. BEST REAL CLUE SINGLE STORY: “Mother of Crime” (#16—Vol. 2, #4) tells the bloody story of Ma Barker and her family of killers. Tough stuff, and hard to find. Like their stay at Harvey, Jack and Joe’s time at Hillman was fairly short. Again, these books are frustrating to track down, and usually are overpriced. On the plus side, this era marks the beginning of the richest period of the Simon & Kirby team in terms of art, storytelling, and inventiveness. No deadline dashes, no chaos in terms of direction—just write, draw, ink, pack, and ship! Both men were now seasoned pros, and Jack’s art reached a new level of power. And while the next few years (’48-’50) would see an impressive number of pages, covers, and stories produced, hardly any super-hero material was included. This is my own favorite period of Jack’s art, and how the “fan” in me wished the team had returned to Timely to run off a series of

Cover to Real Clue Crime Stories.

Captain America stories, or a few issues of AllWinners—or even taken over a DC strip full-time, instead of just doing sporadic Boy Commandos stories. Oh well....

Crestwood/Prize and a Piece of the Pie BEST PREMISE FOR A SERIES THAT NEVER WAS: Charlie Chan (’48). Always had the feeling that Jack & Joe were going to do the whole series, but wound up doing just six covers and a couple of splashes. BEST HEADLINE COMICS COVER: #37. A photo cover of a thief (Jack) caught in the act by a cop (Joe). You’ve got to admit, they had fun in those days. BEST HEADLINE COMICS STORY: “Public Enemy #1” (Headline #26). The story of John Dillinger. WORST NARRATOR IN CRIME COMICS: “Red-Hot” Blaze in Headline. BEST OVERALL ISSUE OF HEADLINE: Issue #23 (’47). 40 pages of pure crime, thugs, and murder. Murder to find, too. BEST JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY COVER: #1 (’47). Powerful art, powerful message. The electric chair was crime’s reward. BEST JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY STORY: “The Case Against Scarface” (#1). Hard-hitting Al Capone story. RUNNER-UP: “Queen of the Speed-Ball Mob” (#4). Young girl gets in with the wrong crowd. DON’T FORGET: Issue #56 shows Jack, Joe, and other Prize staffers in a “Usual Suspects” line-up!

Proposed S&K cover for Front Page Comics, which was advertised in Harvey’s house ads with Boy Explorers, Stuntman, and the never-realized Boy Heroes Comics. Only one issue of Front Page was published, in 1945, prior to S&K’s work on Stuntman #1. 25

The crime titles were always easy to find in the “old days.” Most collectors seemed to pass them up in favor of other books by the team that featured super-heroes. Their prices stayed low for years, then rose as time passed. I never chased

after them much, and realized too late just how good they really are! Don’t make the same mistake. If they interest you at all, pick a few up! BEST REASON TO BUY YOUNG LOVE AND YOUNG ROMANCE COMICS: Actual, real storytelling with great use of dialogue and tons of Kirby background details. BEST YOUNG LOVE COVER: Issue #1. Not all that many to chose from, because they sported lots of posed photo covers. BEST YOUNG LOVE STORY: “Too Wise For Romance” (issue #2). BEST YOUNG ROMANCE COVER: Issue #7 (’48). Fine representation of the entire series. BEST YOUNG ROMANCE STORY: “Disgrace” (issue #6). A girl’s love is torn between two boxers. Nice old movie style blend of melodrama and great Kirby action. “OF COURSE I LOVE MY HORSE”: Jack & Joe contributed several strips to Western Love Comics and Real West Romances in ’49-’50. It’s a strange mix of genres that produces blurbs like, “She was dangerous to any man, whether lovin’ or feudin’!” At early ’80s cons, these titles were fillers for almost every dealer’s “Misc. Golden Age” boxes, at an average price of about $2! Oh, did I avoid them for years! (“Love comics! By Kirby? What a waste!”) Was I wrong! Most of the love Unused S&K crime cover, complete with Jack’s hard-hitting, gritty dialogue. (below) Headline #27 cover. output is well-written, nicely paced, and beautifully rendered. The art is routinely excellent, A rough tale of a woman who torments her husband by sticking pins and the dialogue is thick and descriptive. At worst, these stories are in a doll. (The story ends with a conclusion reminiscent of FF #8’s old-fashioned morality plays—but at best, they approach the best climax.) RUNNER UP: “The Thing in the Fog” (Vol. 2, #1). A way-outwork the team did anywhere! at-sea ghost-ship story, featuring a visit by a favorite Kirby character— BEST BLACK MAGIC COVER: Vol. 2, #5, “The 13th Floor.” An elevator the Devil. done up as a coffin waits for a frightened couple. BEST REASON TO BUY BLACK MAGIC: Again, great, with the added BEST STORY IN BLACK MAGIC: “Voodoo on 10th Avenue” (issue #4). contributions of Mort Meskin. “BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS BLACK MAGIC”: Strange World of Your Dreams closes out the cycle in late ’52 with 4 issues. These mystic titles were also fairly common, and to this day are not all that hard to get, turning up in CBG and at cons. Their overall “look” is similar to the crime and romance books, and are worth searching for. I was always pleased whenever I picked up a new one— nice art (what else?) and solid stories. Somehow, Jack and Joe found the time during the midst of their Prize/Crestwood run to produce Boys’ Ranch for Harvey (mid-’50 through late-’51). This six-issue series stands as one of the most renowned the team ever produced, and justly so. The strip also marks the virtual end of the Golden Age. S&K’s next few years (’51-’54) would be spent maintaining the crime/mystic/romance lines. New concepts, new series, lay ahead in the early Silver Age. My own Golden Age never seems to end. Like most collectors, there’s always more out there that I want to obtain. Again, I’m lucky, because S&K produced so much, I still haven’t seen it all, and Jack went on to produce thousands more pages after the team split. He left an amazing legacy behind, and I’ve spent many long hours enjoying that legacy. In the end, who can ask for more out of life? ★ (This has been one collector’s story. We realize that a “Best of” list covering SO MUCH material is bound to provoke reactions. Send in your own “Best of” choices. There’s always room for more!) 26

Just For Laughs S&K’s Humor Art, submitted by Pat Hilger and Tom Morehouse hen it comes to Simon & Kirby’s humor work, many fans immediately think of Lockjaw the Alligator or My Date, and little else. But besides a brief encounter with From Here To Insanity (one of the many Mad rip-offs; shown at left is an unpublished page for it), Joe and Jack had occasion to do a bit for other humor mags that were all the rage in the 1950s. Shown at right is a panel from Crazy, Man, Crazy Vol. 2, #2 (June 1956), done on Craftint board, and satiring a John Wayne/Lauren Bacall film. Below is a two-page spread from Cockeyed Magazine (April 1956), showing S&K’s takeoff on the film version of Guys and Dolls, spoofing

Brando and Sinatra (ol’ Blue Eyes was awful skinny in those days!). Anyone who’s seen these movies can attest that the likenesses are pretty good, and while topical humor like this may not stand the test of time, it’s still fun to look at the art all these years later. ★

Simon & Kirby’s Swipe File by Randy Fox was recently reading the Fighting American stories for the first time, and I really enjoyed them. Overall, they’re definitely some of the best of Simon & Kirby’s collaborations. But I discovered something that really struck me as odd. As soon as I started reading the story “Invisible Irving” (Fighting American #5), I recognized it. Sure enough, a short search of my back issues turned up a classic Jack Burnley Starman story from Adventure Comics #77 (July 1942, reprinted in Wanted: The World’s Most Dangerous Villains #6, Feb. 1973, for those of us that don’t have the means to own the originals). There’s no doubt that the first four and one-half pages of “Invisible Irving” are an almost direct swipe from the Starman story. [Editor’s Note: It’s quite likely there was a copy of Adventure #77 around the S&K shop, since it also contained both a Sandman and a Manhunter story by Simon & Kirby.] I realize comics artists and writers often cannibalized old stories with the attitude that readers wouldn’t remember the original, but I was surprised at the idea of Simon & Kirby pulling such an obvious swipe from somebody else’s work. The art on “Invisible Irving” seems a little cruder and not as dynamic as on some of the other Fighting American stories. Were Jack and Joe using other writers and artists on the book? Take a look and see for yourself. ★

Compare Jack Burnley’s Starman (above) with Simon & Kirby’s Fighting American (below).

Burnley’s Starman (left) vs. S&K’s Fighting American (right).

Burnley Starman

S&K Fighting American

This art looks a little like Will Elder might’ve inked it. And we could swear we’ve seen the figure in panel 5 in an Eisner Spirit section. Anybody remember it?

Burnley’s Starman (left side) vs. S&K’s Fighting American (right side). They even lifted some of the Starman dialogue!

More Burnley Starman (left side) vs. S&K Fighting American (right side).

They Were Aces! John Severin interviewed—by mail—by Jim Amash THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: When did you first become aware of Simon & Kirby’s comic book work? Did they influence you in any way? JOHN SEVERIN: One of the first, or in this case two of the first comic artists I heard of when I got into the business were Simon & Kirby. I was a late bloomer in comics—it wasn’t till late ’47 that I entered the field and there seemed to be a hundred aces who I was encouraged to emulate, to swipe from or at the very least admire for their work. Simon & Kirby were two of the more outstanding aces of that group. TJKC: How did you get work at Crestwood and Prize? JOHN: There were quite a number of publishers in New York at that time, albeit their production was small. In those days the prospective artist lugged his portfolio of samples from company to company looking for work. One of the publishers I encountered during this routine was Crestwood—and there I met the two stars of comics, Simon & Kirby. TJKC: Was Will Elder working with you from the beginning or did he come aboard later? Who was the editor and what was your first work there? JOHN: We—Bill Elder and I were partners at that time—were lucky enough to be given a script for one of the crime comics. The story was about two children—a young girl and her brother who murdered their mean stepfather. Soon we were doing westerns for Crestwood’s sister company, Prize Western—“The Black Bull” and “The Lazo Kid” were two of the series we did before the editor, Nevin Fidler, spoke to me about a new character they were creating called “American Eagle.” I agreed to take it on and that ended our work with Simon & Kirby. They had been very helpful with their constructive criticism to two novices in the business. TJKC: Who do you recall being at Prize at the time? JOHN: M.R. Reese was the Head Honcho—Joe and Jack took care of the crime and romance books. After Nevin Fidler left, Joe Genalo took over; and of course Ben Oda was there, lettering away to beat the band. Marv Stein was there mostly doing work under Jack and Joe’s wing. TJKC: Did you ever socialize with Joe & Jack? JOHN: Even though I no longer worked directly with Simon & Kirby, our relationship was always friendly. TJKC: Who wrote the American Eagle stories? JOHN: They started out with Jay Alexander, but when I began packaging the Eagle, I got Colin Dawkins to come in with me. We would work out the storyline together and at times collaborated on the final script. TJKC: Did you do much work on the romance books? JOHN: As to the romance stories for S&K, my mind is a blank. I don’t remember whether or not I ever did any for Crestwood.

(these pages) Severin inks over Kirby pencils, from Yellow Claw #4.

TJKC: Why did you quit working for Prize and/ or Simon & Kirby? JOHN: The work I was receiving from EC caused

me to give the secondary Eagle stories to Joe Gevanter. There were times when I had to enlist the help of Al Williamson. We might even stay up all night in order to meet my deadline. Eventually I had to turn the whole magazine over to Gevanter and leave Crestwood. TJKC: How did you get the job inking Kirby on The Yellow Claw for Stan Lee? Was that the first time you inked Kirby? JOHN: I believe The Yellow Claw was the first time I inked Jack Kirby’s pencils. I never asked Stan Lee how I came by that particular assignment and I didn’t really care; it was such a pleasure. TJKC: In the 1960s, you went back to work for Stan doing finishes on Kirby’s “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D..” What led you back to Marvel? JOHN: Again in the ’60s I was working for Marvel. Kirby’s “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” came my way (good ol’ Stan). Jack’s pencils were always complete, so again I was enjoying the inking on the ace. TJKC: Did you talk to Kirby much during this period? JOHN: Though Jack and I rarely saw one another whilst “S.H.I.E.L.D.” was being produced, I do recall a bit earlier when he and I were at a business conference near Columbus Circle. When it was concluded, we—Jack and I—adjourned to a coffee house, nearby where Anastasia was shot down. Jack wanted to know if I’d be interested in syndication. He said we could be partners on a script idea he had. The story would be set in Europe during WWII; the hero would be a tough, cigar-smoking Sergeant with a squad of oddball G.I.s—sort of an adult Boy Commandos. Like so many other grand decisions I have made in comics, I peered through the cigar smoke and told him I really wasn’t interested John graciously agreed to ink these pencils from the Kirby Unleashed portfolio for this issue’s back cover. Thanks, John!

in newspaper strips. We finished cigars and coffee and Jack left, heading towards Marvel and Stan Lee. Oddly enough, later on at Marvel I ended up working on Sgt. Fury and then “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D..” TJKC: Was there any difference between working for Stan Lee in the 1960s as compared to the 1950s? JOHN: Working for Marvel was always amusing (I don’t mean “funny”). Stan Lee seemed to make every project exciting and colorful. He never changed from the time I first worked for him at the Empire State Building to the last on Madison Avenue. TJKC: When did you quit working for Marvel during this time and why? JOHN: During the ’70s, other commitments such as Warren and Cracked Magazine consumed most of my time. Consequently it left me only working off and on for Marvel. TJKC: How do you view Simon & Kirby’s role in comic book history? JOHN: It would be very difficult for me to give you my view of Simon & Kirby’s role in comic book history. So much has already been said and much of it by those more qualified than I. All that I can say is, again, “They were aces!” ★ 31

More Than Your Average Joe Excerpts from Joe Simon’s panels at the 1998 Comicon International: San Diego Transcribed by Glen Musial, and edited by John Morrow (The following are combined excerpts from last year’s Joe Simon Panel and the Kirby Tribute Panel at Comicon International. Both panels were moderated by Mark Evanier.) MARK EVANIER: We are delighted to have Joe Simon at the convention this year. When I first met Jack, I started asking questions about Joe Simon. At that time, I didn’t know much about Joe—other than he was the other name on all those comics I loved. And the very first thing Jack said to me about Joe was, “Joe could do everything! Joe could write ’em, he could pencil ’em, he could ink ’em, he could letter ’em.” But the thing that he was most impressed about with Joe was that Joe could do the best covers—either he could draw them or he could just lay them out—and Jack felt that was what sold all those books—that the covers were the best-designed covers. That Simon & Kirby had a reputation for the best covers in the business and that Joe deserved 90% of the credit for the covers, even if he didn’t do the finished art. It was his sense of design, his layout that made those books sell—and Jack enormously respected Joe through the years. Now, as we all know Jack was not the greatest interview in the world and once or twice when he was interviewed people would get him mad—y’know you could push his hot buttons occasionally and make him mad about something; and sometimes he didn’t know the value of what he was getting mad at. He gave some quoted interviews where he said some things about Joe that he regretted; and he said to me—one of the last times I saw him—that he wanted to call Joe and apologize to him or interview someplace else and make up for it. He passed away before that could happen. A couple of days after Jack passed away, I was with Roz and she asked me to please try to tidy up a couple of those little things that had not been done before Jack passed away—a couple of legal matters and a couple of things— outreach to people that I’m in touch with. I got in touch with Joe and it was really one of the most wonderful things in my life to know this man. There are a few people in this world that we treasure their friendship, and we treasure the fact that somebody that has that kind of talent and influence in the business is your friend. And the more I learn about what Joe did for Jack in his career, the more I learn about what he did for Jack during all the years they were together; when, later on, Joe protected the rights to a lot of things that Simon & Kirby co-owned, he gave Jack his share—things a lot of people wouldn’t touch at the time. He voluntarily took the expense and the trouble to legally protect those things. I just—that’s why I really love this man. I want to tell you all that I am happier to have Joe Simon here than anybody who could be here this year except for Roz. Thank you, Joe! (applause) Joe, I know this is a tough question—can you remember the first time you met Jack?

Vagabond Prince page from Black Cat Comics #8 (Oct. ’47). Kirby supposedly penciled the odd-numbered pages of this story. (above) Joe Simon in 1998.

JOE SIMON: It was at Fox Comics. I guess you all know about Victor Fox. He was a little chubby guy. He was an accountant for DC Comics. He was doing the sales figures and he liked what he saw. So, he moved downstairs and started his own company called Fox Comics, Fox Publications, Fox Features Syndicate, Fox Radio, Fox this, Fox that—and he didn’t have a staff there, but Eisner and Iger were supplying art and editorial material. I happened to get a job; I went over to Fox and became editor there, which was just an impossible job, because as I said there were no artists, no writers, no editors, no

letterers—nothing there. Everything came out of the Eisner and Iger shop. Fox had a character called Wonder Man; he just took the DC character Superman and made him Wonder Man and took Batman and made him Bat-something. (laughter) He started, and he got bigger offices there in the same building— more impressive offices than DC. He was a very strange character. He had kind of a British accent; he was like 5'2"—told us he was a former ballroom dancer. He was very loud, menacing, and really a scary little guy. (laughter) He used to say, “I’m the King of the Comics. I’m the King of the Comics. I’m the King of the Comics.” (laughter) We couldn’t stop him. So that’s the task I had when Kirby’s Blue Beetle strips, from a 1980s French reprint volume. I went in to start that job. and me for like 15 years and I still don’t know if that was the original Anyway, they did have a bullpen there, doing corrections and Charles Nicholas. Anyway, that was the byline he used. whiting-out and pasting-up. They had Jack Kirby and a young guy Jack was getting $15 a week—he came from, we all came from named Charles Nicholas in the bullpen—that was the whole bullpen. very poor families—but I had a suit and Jack thought that was really They were doing a syndicate strip called Blue Beetle—I get Blue Beetle nice. (laughter) He’d never seen a comic book artist with a suit before. and Blue Bolt mixed up. (laughter) Anyway, Jack was doing the artwork The reason I had a suit was that my father was a tailor. Jack’s father on it and Charles Nicholas had the byline on it—I could never figure was a tailor too, but he made pants! (laughter) Anyway, I was doing that one out. There was another Charles Nicholas that worked for Jack freelance work and I had a little office in New York about ten blocks from DC’s and Fox’s offices, and I was working on Blue Bolt for Funnies, Incorporated. So, of course, I loved Jack’s work and the first time I saw it I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He asked if we could do some freelance work together. I was delighted and I took him over to my little office. We worked from the second issue of Blue Bolt through many, many... 25 years? How long were we together? MARK: About 25 years. JOE: About 25 years and we were very happy together. We thought we did some great things. I know we had the best record of sales of anybody in the entire industry as far as having one hit after another. Many people had one hit and that was it. But we came up with so many of them, and we were very proud of that. After WWII, our families bought houses across the street from each other, and we brought in carpenters to build up the attic with slanted ceilings and made studios out of them, so we could walk across the street and go to work. MARK: Victor Fox was supposedly not the most honest person at times. He had different people working for him under the name of “Mr. Roberts.” JOE: I was “Mr. Roberts.” (laughter) MARK: Tell us about “Mr. Roberts.” JOE: I think that I was the first “Mr. Roberts.” Actually, I was working at Marvel freelance and saw an ad in the paper that Victor Fox wanted an editor. At that time it was always good to have a steady job, y’know; it was after the Depression and things were not that great. And a freelance man, he’s working one week, he’s off the next week, and that’s

Early Kirby cartoon.

when I met Jack. Will Eisner and [Jerry] Iger were doing [Fox’s] work. He didn’t have a staff of artists up there. He told Will Eisner to copy Superman and they called him Wonder Man; and Donenfeld sued Victor Fox and he sued Will Eisner, and Will Eisner was asked to do a Bill Clinton thing—disguise the situation. (laughter) And Will got scared and he backed out. That’s when I took over. MARK: What was the idea of “Mr. Roberts”? What was the concept of the fake name? JOE: Victor Fox—the easy way for him to get Will Eisner’s staff over there [to work for him] was to just advertise in the papers: “Artist who did Wonder Man call Mr. Roberts at this number” at Fox’s office; and he didn’t want us to use our real names because, y’know, we could do the same thing Will Eisner did. We could take the characters and leave. So anyway, everybody who answered the ad had to be referred to a “Mr. Roberts” to be interviewed for the job. MARK: It was a fake name? JOE: Yeah, a fake name. MARK: Wasn’t it also, if bill collectors came around they’d say, “Talk to Mr. Roberts”? (laughter) JOE: Thank God, the bill collectors didn’t come to me. He didn’t get a lot of people from the Eisner/ Iger studio because most of the names on those things were Will Eisner’s anyway and he had done most of the work himself. And [Eisner] was using fake names. So, nobody knows who was who. MARK: Dick Briefer worked in there for a while, right? JOE: Dick Briefer, Bob Powell, Jack Kirby before I knew him. A lot of guys got started there. Y’know, I think Eisner and Iger were still in their teens when they started that company; but we were all very young. MARK: How much were they paying you? What was the pay like at Victor Fox’s company? JOE: I think Eisner and Iger were charging $5 a page. So what we were paying was probably a little more than that; a couple of dollars more.

MARK: Bob Wood got too involved.

MARK: And one of the people that came in looking for work was Eddie Herron.

JOE: Bob Wood killed his girlfriend with an iron and wound up in prison for a long time. It was a pretty sordid experience for all of us.

JOE: Yes, Eddie Herron was a kid from West Virginia. He was, like, homeless, and he came up, he had a lot of samples. We had a lot of people coming up with other people’s samples. That went on through the years. That was a big problem. But Eddie’s samples weren’t that good. He wanted to be a comic book artist and I went through them and I thought some of the writing was pretty inspired for comic books in those days; and I asked him if he would be a writer. At that time, there were very few writers in the business. If they did have them, they were mostly unknown, anonymous. So Eddie Herron became a writer and became one of the most prolific writers in the business. Eventually he wound up working on Captain Marvel. He became an editor there and main writer for Captain Marvel. And he wound up in later years with DC Comics. Eddie, Bob Wood, Dick Wood, and Ed Wood—no, not Ed Wood (laughter)—Dave Wood; the three brothers were the mainstay of the DC writing team. They were all involved too much in alcoholism.

MARK: How fast was Jack drawing in those days?

Bullseye #5 splash page.

JOE: Jack was as fast as he could be—Jack was very fast. At one time he said, “I’m going to pencil five pages today.” He’d pencil five pages and then he’d be out the rest of the week. (laughter) So it’s not the kind of question that I’d be interested in. (laughter) MARK: Everybody knew Simon & Kirby was the team that delivered hits. What was the reaction of other artists? Did you notice that other artists were imitating your work? Did you notice that you were setting a style for other people at other companies? JOE: I was imitating everybody’s work. (laughter) I started off with Jack and I wound up with Jack. I was doing covers for Terry and the Pirates, Joe Palooka, almost all of them. MARK: Were other companies making their books look like Simon & 35

Kirby’s? JOE: No, they were all trying to copy the slick style at that time of DC Comics. As a matter of fact, when we were doing The Fly, they decided that our work was too rough for them and they wanted the DC type of work— very slick inking. That was a disaster for them because we were doing very well. That came later when everybody was trying, right up till now, to do the Kirby thing. MARK: What was your favorite book that you did with Jack? JOE: I think that the favorite book was Boys’ Ranch. It was a western. We still own the characters and Jack always said it was his favorite and I always said it was mine, but we have to wait until weapons come into vogue before we can do some serious licensing on it. Then there was Bullseye, and that was also a western. We liked those two the best. MARK: Let’s ask the audience what their favorite Simon & Kirby strips are. AUDIENCE: Fighting American! Boy Commandos! JOE: I like Boy Commandos, too. I don’t have any of those. I never saved any.

1950s cover art intended for Fighting American #8, and eventually used on Harvey’s 1966 Fighting American one-shot.

MARK: Let’s talk about Mort Meskin; one of the fastest artists you ever worked with, right?

JOE: Mort was in the bullpen with us. A lot of these people couldn’t work at home; they had to be around people. They had to be in a commercial studio to work, and Mort was one of them. Actually, Jack liked to work in a bullpen also, but he had his own place at home. This was after Captain America; we were doing Young Romance, Black Magic, the whole Prize line. Mort had his problems; he was sitting at his drawing table and there was this blank sheet of board in front of him, and he’s sitting there all day looking at the board and then he went home. We all went home. We came in the next day and Mort was sitting at the same blank board and he kept looking at it. And he did it for another day. And he came and asked for an advance. (laughter) So I said, “Mort, you haven’t done anything.” It wasn’t like we were no-profit publishers. We had to turn this stuff out; we had a huge line of stuff to turn out. He says, “Joe, I just can’t look at this board—I can’t get started.” So, I took out a pencil and I made some scribbles on the board and he went right ahead. Y’know, he got very enthusiastic. He was the fastest artist in the place. He’d do 2, 3 pages a day there and other guys were struggling at half a page; couldn’t stop him. And so, every day after that, whoever came in first, they’d scribble something on Mort’s blank page and he’d get through the day fine. (laughter)

JOE: Oh, one of the fastest, one of the best. Mort originally worked on Batman at DC. Mort had some emotional problems, and the last day that he worked for DC, before he came over to us, was the day that he picked up a ruler and brandished it as a sword and jumped on his drawing table and threatened everybody in the room. (laughter) MARK: And that’s how you got ’im. (laughter) JOE: And that’s how we got ’im. They had problems with him before, but that was the last charge. (laughter) MARK: Tell everyone about the blank paper.

Nancy Hale dishes out advice (fully-clothed) in Young Romance #18, by Kirby and Meskin.

MARK: You remember the time he drew a nasty Nancy Hale story

which was what, the early ’70s? MARK: No, that’s ’50s. JOE: ’60s? MARK: What are we talking about; like, Earthman? JOE: Yeah. MARK: Okay, then that’s the ’60s. JOE: The ’60s, okay. So we gave Wally his set, he did whatever he wanted, and he did it very well. He was doing Miracles, Incorporated at that time. MARK: Jerry Grandenetti took it over after that. Wood did the first couple, then Grandenetti took it over. JOE: I don’t think so. (laughter) I don’t think Grandenetti was with us at that time. That came later at DC. MARK: Okay, let’s talk about some other people. Let’s talk about Jack Oleck. We don’t too know much about Jack Oleck. JOE: Jack Oleck? He was my brother-in-law! I saw him every day—I couldn’t get rid of him! (laughter) MARK: A good writer? JOE: He was great, he was great. I’ll tell you a story about Jack Oleck. He was a professional. He wasn’t interested that much in the art of the... he took a story seriously but he was out to make a living out of it; that was his main goal. When comics got weak, after the Kefauver Senate hearings, Jack scrambled around to find whatever work he could. He had our bound volumes of Black Magic and Young Romance and everything else that we had done. We had them bound in volumes, which we found out later diminished the value of the original books. Eventually, after Jack died they returned these bound volumes to us and he had little Post-it Notes on every story, of how many times he did this story for DC Comics, Marvel Comics and anybody else. (laughter) He had them all listed and written up; he did the same story, three Mort Meskin page from Young Brides #5.

that you couldn’t print? JOE: Oh, yeah. I got a lot of artists who did stuff like that. (laughter) They’d do these pornographic pages; they’d spend time on these pages! (laughter) They’d ink them, they’d letter them. They didn’t have xeroxes in those days. They’d take them in for photostats and they’d have trouble with the photostat people because they didn’t want to get in trouble. But eventually everyone wound up with copies of these things that never saw print. In those days, it wasn’t as liberal as it is today, as far as sex goes. MARK: So, Mort drew this pornographic Nancy Hale story. JOE: Yes, we were doing Young Romance at the time. Mort did Young Romance. MARK: He handed it in, he tried to slip it in so you wouldn’t notice it. Isn’t that the story? JOE: No. Everybody was hanging out [looking] over his shoulder. (laughter) They were all hysterical about it and cheering him on! (laughter) I think Wally Wood did some really pornographic stuff with the Disney characters. Have you ever seen it? (laughter) Really, he was all into it. (laughter) Wally was working for us. I always thought it was a privilege to have him working with us. Wally was working on the Harvey characters at that time, 37

The S&K shop circa 1949: (l to r) Kirby, Simon, Bill Draut, Marvin Stein, and (seated) Ben Oda.

or four times each! (laughter) And I still have those Post-it Notes in the same book. But Jack was a professional, he was great. He made a lot of money at the end of his career by going into the magazine publishing business. He started a magazine called Interior Decorator. He opened— I forget the year but it was when comics were really in a crash—and the IRS closed it two years later. They padlocked the doors. (laughter) So then Jack sold the title. I think it’s still being published under the title Decorator. There was a lot of money involved and the family did very well. The IRS didn’t do so well. (laughter)

JOE: Oh, we’re skipping something here.

JOE: All right. I got the job at Fox as editor. It was all manipulated with tricky letters of recommendation from my old newspaper days; the copy boy would send in a great letter of recommendation, and he’d sign the editor’s name to it and Victor Fox was very impressed by that. (laughter) So, I got that job—it was $85 a week, which was a lot of money in those days—but I had like 20,000 books to put out since Eisner and Iger had quit. It was a big problem. I did a lot of covers myself and I had to keep changing styles to match the artwork inside. Sometimes the covers had nothing to do with the insides anyway— but we got the books out, we did well; and Jack Kirby was from the East Side of New York, from a very poor family there. And I was doing work for Funnies, Incorporated at night. And I did a thing called Blue Bolt, which was one of my first super-heroes; was it the first?

MARK: If we go through your whole career, we’ll be here forever. (laughter)

MARK: The first for you.

MARK: Tell us how you got to Martin Goodman’s offices; how you got the job at Timely after Fox.

JOE: So, Jack came up and asked me if he could work with me. And, of course, I was delighted—I loved his work. We rented an office a few blocks from the Fox office—Fox was in an elegant office, by the way. It was like, his private office was like this room. (laughter) It was right in the heart of town, near Grand Central and the name of the building was Grand Central Palace. DC was upstairs, Fox was downstairs. So, Jack and I rented an office on West 45th Street for $25 a week. After work, we’d go there and work on our other characters, Blue Bolt, and Jack came in with me on the second issue of Blue Bolt. We worked on that stuff and other stuff and Martin Goodman, who owned Timely and Daring and Marvel—it was all the same company—was buying stuff from us through an agency called Funnies, Incorporated. Martin was their biggest customer but then he decided to eliminate the middleman, so he hired us from Funnies, Incorporated, and gave us more money. And this little room on 45th Street is where we started creating new characters for Martin, or for anybody, and one of the first ones we did was Captain America. We brought him a first sketch to look at, and Martin liked it. Martin had very good ideas on sales—he had good instincts on what would sell and what wouldn’t—and he loved the idea. Then we finished the book in our own little private office there, and brought it over there. And, of course, the first issue was a sellout. As Frank Sinatra said, “I did a lot of bad stuff and I did a lot of rotten stuff,” (laughter) but this one was the good stuff. It turned out well. Everybody turned out a lot of dogs, and it’s still happening—nothing new; but even at the beginning, when there were so few titles, you’re always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and this time we found it. I think between us, we had more hits than anybody ever in the whole history of comic books. We also had a lot of dogs, like Sinatra. MARK: What was the worst comic you ever did? (laughter) JOE: The worst comic book—I had a lot of competition there. (laughter) In the early days, the Red Raven got the worst sales, and now it’s making a big comeback. MARK: The two that Jack used to always mention were Red Raven and Win-A-Prize Comics.

Mid-1980s Kirby drawing of S&K’s two super-patriots, Captain America and Fighting American.

JOE: Win-A-Prize? No, now that’s not fair because Win-A-Prize was published at Charlton and they weren’t in the business of selling comics. They were

printing them, they were distributing them, they were doing everything but selling them. (laughter) They made money; they made money because they had their own distribution, they had their own printing plants. They used to bring in a bunch of guys from Italy who couldn’t speak English, put them in a printing plant and, at lunchtime, they’d go out for an hour-and-a-half and put up buildings—they laid bricks, and then they’d go back to the printing plant. (laughter) Great outfit there; they didn’t have to sell much. MARK: Now at the same time you did Captain America, you did another Captain: Captain Marvel you did an issue of. Tell us how that came to be. JOE: Okay. We had friends at Fawcett; we had the aforementioned Eddie Herron, and one of our other friends was there—name doesn’t come to me. We were working at Timely at the time, on West 42nd Street. We were taking on night work; we were working all the time. They asked us to meet with them at lunch. We didn’t create Captain Marvel, but they asked us to do a full book on Captain Marvel. We had a week to do it, and we had given up our office to move to Timely, so we just rented a hotel room. We stayed there for a week at night. When we left Timely, we went to the hotel to start working on the Captain Marvel book. What was the name of that book? MARK: It was called The Adventures of Captain Marvel. JOE: We did the first book on Captain Marvel. We didn’t sign it. We didn’t like the job that we did. We were trying to imitate the style that they had established and it just wasn’t us. But as I look at it now, it was a pretty lively book. I kind of like it. MARK: And while you were working at Timely, they hired a kid to work there named Stanley Lieber. JOE: Stanley Lieber, that’s right. MARK: He used to play the flute or the clarinet. What was it?

A much older Stan Lee dialogued these Kirby pencils from Captain America #103.

Somebody told me he had very delicate skin, (laughter) but I don’t know what he had. He’d keep changing the pillows. He was a young man, prematurely white. Nice looking, well-built. But Martin was smart, he had a great sense of sales. Stan Lee; is Stan here? No? (laughter) Stan Lee called me about two or three years ago, and says, “Joe, I opened my convention with the story that I answered an ad in the newspaper to get my job. I answered an ad in the newspaper for a job in comic books and then I went. You hired

JOE: He played the flute. This place, Timely, was full of relatives: (laughter) Uncle Robbie, Martin, Abe, Dave. Martin was the founder of the whole Marvel thing and he was very bright. I never heard this confirmed but he was supposed to have only gone through the 4th grade in school. He had a great mind. He was very shy. He had all his relatives around him. He had Uncle Robbie there, taking care of Uncle Robbie. He’d have to change the pillows on [Uncle Robbie’s] chair every half hour or so. 39

what the hell’s a year, right? I think he wants to be younger now. (laughter) But anyway.... MARK: I think he’s getting there. JOE: But Stan used to drive Jack Kirby crazy. He’d sit there while Jack was working, while we were all working. He’d sit in the corner with a flute, and he’d play the flute. Jack and the guys would throw things at him. (laughter) Finally, to give him something to do, we told him he could... every comic book had to have a page of text to get Second Class mailing privileges, which are not that important today. But it would take three issues for a publication to be credited with that mailing privilege; then the publisher would get money back from the Post Office. So, it was very important to get that mailing privilege, and to qualify you had to have a page of text. They didn’t have a lot of letter columns in those days, they had all artwork. So we gave Stan some of the text to do. Nobody wanted to do that stuff because nobody read it—and so Stan did it, and he treated it like it was the great American novel. (laughter) And he kept doing them, and he loved doing them, and it turned out he made a career out of it. He respected it—I give him credit for that. Now, where were we? MARK: So you did ten Captain Americas, I believe. JOE: Yeah, well, we were fired. (laughter) What happened was that I had a deal with Martin Goodman that I was to receive about 15-25% of the profits. MARK: You got 15% and Jack got 10%. JOE: Okay, so we were supposed to receive 25% of the profits on Captain America. The rest of the stuff was all thrown in, but since we started Captain America clean, we thought that we deserved that. We had an agreement, we did a handshake on it. It turned out that the bookkeeping was like Warner Brothers. We didn’t get, like, $3 royalties after the book sold out; and instead of confronting Martin, which we should have done, we contacted Jack Liebowitz at DC Comics. He was running DC Comics. He Unfinished, unused Vagabond Prince page; pencils by Joe Simon. was very happy to hear from us. We were really me and I was walking in the hall and I ran into Martin.” Well, I knew the stars of the whole industry at that time, coming up from nowhere Martin was his uncle; well, his relative. Actually it was Stan’s mother’s to million-a-month sales on these. Not only Captain America but we cousin, something like that. were boosting up USA, All-Winners, Young Allies. I stole that from Boy [Stan continues:] “So, Martin said to me, “Stan, what are you Allies. (laughter) The books were selling well, so they were happy to give doing here?” And I said, ‘I work here.’ And Martin says, “Is that right? us a very good contract at DC. Anyway, we had a minimum according I didn’t know.”” to what we produced; we could make more, but the minimum was I said, “Stan, that story can’t be true. We only had three offices $250 each a week. Jack had been making $75 at Goodman’s and I had and a bunch of relatives in the building. We didn’t even have a hall.” been making, what, $85? So, I thought that was a pretty good deal— (laughter) So Stan says, “Is that right? My memory is going.” (laughter) we were both pretty happy about it. I thought it was a pretty good story. (laughter) I figured at that time, Meanwhile, we had to come up with new characters, although it he’d stop doing it. He’s still doing it. A month later I read the same didn’t depend on the content—they were paying us anyway. We were story in Newsday. But, God bless Stan, he’s got a good story and he’s finishing up the stuff for the last issue of Captain America; we hadn’t sticking with it. (laughter) He did a wonderful job. He did a miraculous announced to Martin Goodman that we were leaving. We thought we job. I’m proud of him. were justified since we were getting such a screwing on the royalties, in our estimation. Anyway, Stan Lee... we rent another hotel room and MARK: He was, like, an assistant, an office boy. we went there at night and started creating new characters like Super JOE: Oh, yeah, he was a gofer. Stan was only 16 years old. He told me Sherlock Holmes and stuff like that; stuff that never occurred. And he was 17; he told me last year that he lied about his age; I mean, Stan Lee used to tail after us. He was a little 16-year-old, y’know? We 40

liked him, and we let him tail after us. This story’s never been told; so we came back to Timely and sat down and we both worked on Captain America, and Stan was there while we were penciling up Captain America. Suddenly, we’re surrounded by the brothers and the uncles; it was like they formed a ring around us, and accused us of working for other publishers. I remember Abe Goodman. He says, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” He says, “You’re fired.” And then one of the other guys says, “But first you have to finish this issue of Captain America.” (laughter) MARK: How did Goodman find out that you were working for DC? JOE: Well... [pause] Stan said he didn’t do it. (laughter) Jack said, “The next time I see that little son-of-a-bitch, I’m gonna kill him.” (laughter) And then, the next thing I knew, he went back to work for them, so you do what you gotta do, right? I had started Sick Magazine at that time, which kept me going very nicely for about 20 years. I’ll say this for Jack—Jack went back to Marvel, he switched to Marvel from DC. We got together a couple of times in-between. But every time I called Jack I’d say, “Jack, I’ve got a project to do; come do it with me.” He was there the next day—and in those days, we were always together when we had to be, when we wanted to be. He always came back to me. I never paid him the way I’d pay the other artists; I always split with him, everything we had. We had kind of a nice relationship. Later in his life,

he got a little crazy and started talking about “I never worked with someone else’s script,” and I said, “What if you got a script?” and he said, “I’d throw it out the window.” He’d come up with ridiculous statements like that. I think he was having problems then. We had a very nice relationship. We never had any arguments.

Syd Shores worked on CA after S&K were fired.

AUDIENCE: Could you tell us about the Newsboy Legion and how that started? JOE: Well, we got fired from Timely Publications. We went over to DC Comics—we had a contract with DC Comics at the same time we were doing Captain America. We were also doing Captain Marvel, Captain America, and probably Blue Bolt at that time; a lot of stuff. We had signed a contract with DC Comics for a lot more money, and we had a meeting with them— we had lunch at a very fancy Hawaiian restaurant on Lexington Avenue in New York with Jack Liebowitz and Mort Weisinger, a bunch of editors, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. They brought them along because they were trying to impress us; they didn’t have a lot to say. (laughter) They didn’t know what to do with us. We were on the payroll and we had been trying to come up with characters. We had a hotel room there and we used to go there at night after Captain America and draw up these characters like Super Sherlock Holmes and stuff like that. But we were told that we were tied up with copyrights on that, so we couldn’t do that and we had to try other things. None of them was too bright. And then they brought us into the office and they gave us ghost work to do. They wanted us to ghost ordinary features; I don’t even remember the names of the features now. AUDIENCE: The Sandman?

JOE: No, we did the Sandman after we flopped at those ghosting jobs. They told us to “just do what you want; you guys are getting paid. Go, go, figure out something.” Then we came up with our own character which is Sandman. It wasn’t the traditional Sandman, it was our own version of a super-hero. Manhunter, Newsboy Legion, Boy Commandos. What else was there? Those were the mainstays. They were instant successes. All of them were very big. In fact, Manhunter and Sandman were in Adventure Comics. This was the first time that I knew of that anybody ran the byline on the cover of a comic magazine: A big, fat “New Sandman by Simon & Kirby.” So we were very successful with all of the new characters. They were very happy with us and we did The Boy Commandos which turned out to be the number one hit of that time—it lasted all through the War. Joe produced Sick Magazine after he and Kirby split up, and even featured Fighting American on the cover of #42. Biggest thing in the War for that period. [pause] 41

(laughter) He thought it was very innovative. AUDIENCE: What exactly was the process with you and Jack in putting a story together? Would you give him a script and he would draw the art?

Another unfinished Vagabond Prince page with Simon pencils.

JOE: Let me tell you something about collaborations. Everybody in this industry collaborated. Everybody worked with other people. There was so much to do. There wasn’t any one way that we did it. Before we went into the service, DC wanted us to turn out several years’ worth of Boy Commandos, and the quickest way we possibly could. So at that time, I would write the stories on the drawing board. Jack would pencil it, we would have another guy outlining it, we’d have a guy lettering it. And Jack and I most of the time would pitch in and throw the blacks in. Other times, when we weren’t working so much, we weren’t so busy, the ideal way we’d like to work was Jack did the penciling and I did the inking. We both could handle the writing real well—neither of us like writers. We didn’t appreciate them—whatever we got, we re-wrote and re-wrote until there was very little left of the writing. So, there was no one way that we collaborated. If we were out of work, if we didn’t have anyone, our way of working would usually be to write the script right on the drawing paper. We used that heavy board—everybody hated us for that. You know, we’d get through with the book and we’d have a pile like this. It took a couple of people to carry it. (laughter) There was a reason that we had for using the heavy board; the drawing table has a little edge here, and it’s on a slant, and the board just fits; you don’t have to thumbtack it down or tape it down. And you could move it back-and-forth; have a tsquare to get your lines horizontal and vertical. For a long time, we used that board just because it was easier to work on. All the artists, y’know—Will Eisner had Lou Fine working with him and you don’t know which is which a lot of the time. Terry and the Pirates; how many artists did they have? You don’t know. We did the best we could. We had to make a living. We never thought that we’d be here in this position talking about this stuff. That was the farthest thing from our minds.

Uh, what was the question? (laughter) MARK: I think you answered it. Any more questions for Joe? AUDIENCE: Can you tell about the evolution of two-page splashes? JOE: Oh, that was mine. I worked on a newspaper and I saw the way the paper’s cut. You’ve got one sheet in the middle of the book just with the staple in the middle and I thought that we could utilize the whole thing with a spectacular spread. And, y’know, with Jack’s artwork on there, we got the action in there, and everything. Everybody was delighted, including ourselves. So we did it in practically every book that we could. Later, many years later, we were restricted by the advertising space. The advertiser wanted to buy either one or both of those pages. So that was the problem that we couldn’t do them in every book. There’s a cute little story about Irwin Donenfeld at DC Comics. I went there to visit them when Carmine Infantino was the editor many, many years later. Irwin called me in and showed me this “new idea” and it was one of those double-page spreads. I told him the bad news!

An example of how DC touted the S&K team in their house ads in the 1940s.

AUDIENCE: I wanted to know how you guys decided whose name came first on the credits.

wall and Howard would stay there. We had a little kitchenette. He practically lived there and then we went home to our families at night.

JOE: Well, I had the suit. (laughter) The first thing we worked on together was Blue Bolt, and I had started that before we teamed up. And I was a couple of years older than Jack; hey, c’mon. (laughter)

AUDIENCE: I came into Captain America in the Silver Age time period, and going back and looking at Captain America when it was Simon & Kirby, there are distinct differences in how it was drawn and the style that typified it. Were we dealing with an evolution here, or were we drawing for that particular time, and how people were drawn at that particular time?

SCOTT SHAW: Can you share any thoughts about cover design, cover theory; how you do covers? JOE: We were restricted by the companies we worked for. I noticed that the DC covers were all posterized. That’s the way they wanted them, almost like children’s books. Martin Goodman’s covers had every inch of space taken up with action, in the background and stuff going on, so that kids would look at it like a puzzle. At Harvey’s, I think that we were just trying to get some kind of a strong sales message across. So, we didn’t spend our career on any one type of layout or design on a cover. We just did the best with whatever the publisher required at each company we worked for.

JOE: He wasn’t bulked up when we did him, like he was later. That was the way the evolution of the super-hero went. He was slim and he was

MARK: What do you remember about Howard Ferguson? JOE: Howard Ferguson was the greatest letterer and Ben Oda was the second greatest letterer. Howard Ferguson was a middle-aged man from Detroit, and like everybody else in the business he was living hand-to-mouth. He came here, he got divorced; he brought his daughter, Elsie, to live with him. I think his wife left him, he said. He was the only letterer I ever heard of that could draw in a straight line with doing the penciled lines. Just like a machine and very, very creative. He was a big part of our effort, of our creativity. He was great with logos and designs, everything. We’d just rough out the stuff and give it to Howard, and he’d give us back beautifully-inspired, inked lettering and logos. The only problem was that there’d be coffee stains on every page. (laughter) He’d drink like 30 cups of coffee a day. AUDIENCE: Where did you meet him, how did you hook up with him, and what was the first thing he did with you? How long was he with you? JOE: I’d really have to look back and recognize his work. He worked on Captain America, didn’t he? He wasn’t our first letterer, but he was really there at the beginning. We had the Rosen brothers later; Sam Rosen and Joe Rosen, great letterers—I really respected those letterers. But there was nobody like Howard Ferguson. AUDIENCE: So he worked with you at Timely and moved with you to DC? JOE: Yes, he was with us, he wasn’t with the company. We didn’t work at DC in their offices. We had our own studio in Tudor City, which is directly across from the UN building now, and Howard was with us. We had a bed that folded into the

More Kirby pencils for an action-packed page from Captain America #103.

lithe. I think he was probably quicker than stronger. Basically, there were some panels where he was bigger and some panels where he was smaller. (laughter) I think all of our super-heroes looked alike anyways; they all had the same face and the same body, right? (laughter) I’m not too happy with the big guns and the small heads of today. They look like mushrooms growing up. (laughter) But if that’s what they really want, good luck to them.

we didn’t own the title. We were 50% owners of the profits, that’s all it was. We weren’t that smart. We liked to think we were, but we weren’t. MARK: You’re smarter than a lot of people. JOE: We’re a lot smarter now. (laughter) AUDIENCE: I only ask because Bob Kane did have some ownership of Batman.

AUDIENCE: Why didn’t you try to get ownership of Captain America in 1940? When it came for renewal in ’68, you said that you had copyrighted the first ten issues. But you worked out participation royalties with Martin Goodman, right? Did you not try to get ownership of the character in 1940?

JOE: I heard that story from Carmine Infantino but I spoke to Bob about it once. He was pretty sensitive about it. I really can’t comment on it—I wasn’t there. I heard the story. AUDIENCE: I was wondering how much, as far as ownership, you knew about Eisner owning characters and how familiar you were, because most people didn’t own anything. You at least worked out some contracts, which seems unusual for those characters.

JOE: Look, y’know, we were kids off the street then. (laughter) We’re dealing with wolves in this business. These guys owned sweatshops; they were clothing makers. They knew how to handle us. Jerry Robinson said, “Y’know, to criticize us because we did these things without proper protection isn’t fair because what were we going to do? Are we going to sell newspapers? Are we going to drive trucks?” We saw a chance to do our work and we never thought that anything was going to happen with these characters. We never thought that they were going to be worth millions of dollars. It was the farthest thing from our minds. We were at the bottom of the totem pole as far as art was concerned.

JOE: We had good lawyers working on our stuff. We knew all the tricks at that time. When you work on a contract with a comic company, it would say “all the work will be to our satisfaction” and our lawyers changed that to say “to the usual standards of Simon & Kirby.” So, we

AUDIENCE: But later on, even in the late ’40s, you started owning some of your characters; like, you owned Young Romance, didn’t you? JOE: Well, Young Romance, we made a deal with Teddy Epstein and Paul Blyer. They had a little company called Prize Comics. I had the Young Romance idea coming out of the service. I saw all these adults reading comic books and said, “Jeez, they’re all reading Disney and Donald Duck.” I got together a few pages of True Romance Confession and I thought the girls, the housewives that were reading comics, the housekeepers, the housemaids, everybody who was reading comics would really like to read some adult comics. I showed it to Jack and he loved it. A lot of people didn’t think it was a good idea. But the first thing we did, we agreed that we would do a whole issue; invest in a whole issue of Young Romance Comics before we peddled it to these gangsters that were publishing. (laughter) In this way, we would be protected. So we signed a contract; we were full partners in the thing. We were to pay for the art and editorial, they would pay for the publishing and do the publishing business. We thought we were pretty great with that contract—we were supposed to split the profits. We thought we were pretty damn smart to do that, but later I found out that these guys weren’t even putting their money into it. The distributors were giving them a 35% advance. So, they weren’t paying anything. We were the ones that were paying the money. The good part is that the thing sold out and that was really a bonanza. We were taking in tons of money. AUDIENCE: But who owned the title of Young Romance? Was it you or was it your partners? Kirby cover to Young Brides #28 (May 1956).

JOE: Well, the corporation owned the title. No, 44

went with tricks a little bit. Still, we couldn’t compete with them. AUDIENCE: You and Jack created so many terrific characters together. I was wondering if there was ever a character created by other artists and writers where you looked at each other and said, “Doggone it, I wish we would have come up with that.” JOE: Maybe we did. I don’t know. We would steal anything good. (laughter) There were certain artists, of course, that both of us looked up to and respected. One of them was Lou Fine, who was there even before we were. So many of them. We respected them. AUDIENCE: I’ve been re-reading your first ten Captain Americas you did with Jack and it struck me for the first time that Bucky’s the only character that put on a little mask and still called himself by his real name. (laughter) I realize that this was a less sophisticated time, but if his identity was supposed to be a secret, why didn’t he name himself “Kid USA” or something like that? JOE: I don’t think we thought these things out very well. (laughter, applause) We didn’t get paid for that. I mean, look at Superman, even today, without a mask and nobody recognizes him; you see that on television and say, “Hey, what’s going on here? I know who he is.” (laughter) AUDIENCE: When it was business negotiating time for the Simon & Kirby team, could you give us a sense of what that was like? Would Jack defer to your business sense? JOE: I’ve heard that I was the businessman and the manager. I just worked too hard in the business to be classified that way. I never did anything without discussing it with Jack. I was working day and night at the other stuff. I kind of resent the allegation that all I did was the business. I heard that many times. It was floating around all over the place. It’s okay now.

Kirby drew this page in the 1980s, to replace a missing page from the first Vagabond Prince story. It was inked by Greg Theakston and published—with the original pages—in Simon & Kirby Classics #1 (and only) in 1987.

always stuck with me. When you’re doing comic books, you’re always looking for a unique idea. You can’t just do another Superman, another Batman, another Flash, another Captain America, another Spider-Man— they stole Spider-Man from me, by the way. (laughter) So, we’re looking for unique ideas. I think we made it kind of a hobby to put in unique ideas in-between our winning ideas. Y’know, like Sinatra said, “From bad to rotten.” We had Young Romance. We had Win-A-Prize; we liked these ads that they were running in the back of the comic books, and we offered prizes based on the stories in the comic books. That was a pretty unique idea but that was published by Charlton.

AUDIENCE: Where did you get the idea for romance comics? Was it from people you know or things that happened? JOE: When I was a little boy, there were these True Confession books put out by Fawcett and Hearst. I remember watching my mother; she couldn’t even write, she was from Russia, and my father was from England. He was a talker but he couldn’t write very well, either. They were doing a contest from one of these love confession magazines: write us a story about how you met and how you fell in love. Y’know, a love story. They were doing this stupid story, it was like what happened 20 million times in the world—nothing unusual about it. But that 45

JOE: We were always trying for new characters. We had a lot of failures, we had a lot of marginal characters, but we kept trying new ones. Captain America was a wartime thing, a patriotic thing, and we had the greatest villain you could think of: the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler. It turned out, you put a little comedy into it, a very colorful costume, and it went over. It was not the first patriotic hero in comics but it was the best. The kids ate it up. We knew when we had a sellout and we had many of them. Young Romance, the Boy Commandos— we knew that; you could just feel it. You’d go to the newsstand. When we were at Marvel Comics, it was not the same way it is today where the distributors send you over a lot of different comics and you’d look at your competition’s books. At that time, Martin Goodman was the guy that owned Timely, which became Marvel. He would send his relatives down to the newsstand with big packages of his comic books, and they would trade with this newsstand on the corner for competitor’s comic books; we’d give them three for one. That’s the only way we saw what our competitors were doing. AUDIENCE: When you created Captain America and designed that first cover, you talked earlier about Martin and how he had a good sense for sales. Did you have a sense of what kind of impact that cover was going to have, and the kind of response you were going to get? JOE: I liked the idea of having it political, and having Adolf Hitler on it, because that was about the best villain we could get in those days. Actually, it caused us a few problems with the American Nazi groups. They threatened us. We had police Unused Stuntman #3 page. We always thought Pandas were cute and cuddly... sent over to watch our office. I AUDIENCE: Joe, how did you come up with the stories for the kind of liked the idea. What the hell, I’ve done it a half-dozen times romance comics? since then—the same idea, with The Shield and Fighting American and everything else. JOE: The stories sounded really bad but they were very mild. Y’know, “I Was A Teenage Hitchhiker” and you thought the woman was going AUDIENCE: There was an obscure title called Champion Comics in to get assaulted or something, but she just took a ride. (laughter) They the ’40s. You and Jack did some classic covers: #8, 9 and 10. I think it were very, very mild romances. Just a kiss and you fell in love, and the was by Worth Publishing before Harvey bought it. Do you know anygirls ate them up. There was nothing like it in those days. They sounded thing about the background of Worth Publishing or how you got like there was going to be something happening, but there wasn’t. involved with those guys? AUDIENCE: Tell us about how you went about creating Captain JOE: This guy had one comic book. He was a middle-aged man who America. married a rich woman, and she wanted to get him out of the house. 46

Joe Simon pencils for what appears to be a Green Hornet newspaper strip.

(laughter) I forget his name, but he published one comic book. He had a nice little office at 42nd Street off 5th Avenue. Here’s how we got hooked up with him—we needed a place to work and he had this beautiful office, so we told him we would do his covers if he let us use his space. We got involved with him; did a few things for him. We had some kind of collection problem from him.

Eisner was stationed there. Jack was off fighting somewhere, putting up fences in the Army. But I made a deal with Al Harvey to be part of the business and get 50% shared profits. DC had voluntarily been paying us royalties on Boy Commandos—characters we left behind. They did wonderfully by us and we appreciated it, but we just couldn’t pass up this partnership deal with Harvey. And after the War, we went back there. We went back with him. It was just business; not something I’d be proud of, but that’s what you have to do in business. I guess we’re talking about a businessman again. (laughter)

AUDIENCE: Was that after Fox and before Timely? Or, can you even remember? I know I’m going back a bit. JOE: I tell you what I remember about the place, and this will help date it. I had a friend named Alfred Harvey, who was working at Fox. Alfred Harvey, also like Victor Fox, had the idea of going into publishing comics. He used to come up to this guy’s office where we were working. We were working at night, and this guy had to go home to his wife because it was her money anyway. (laughter) So Alfred Harvey used to come up, and he was at the time working for Fox in a very small capacity. He used to go into this guy’s office and sit down at his desk and go through all the drawers and get all the information about publishing comics. So, that put a timeline on that.

AUDIENCE: How was Stuntman created? Did you do any particular research on the subject? JOE: We never did any research on anything. (laughter) It was just another attempt at a super-hero. A lot of our super-heroes were satirical. Stuntman was an alter ego of a movie star who couldn’t, y’know, jump over a puddle, and Stuntman took his place; he didn’t have any superior powers, but he was a stuntman. I thought we had some very nice stories in it. That’s all that I can tell you about him. It was just kind of something that should’ve been done—stuntmen.

MARK: Okay, I’ll work on it, I’ll work on it. (laughter) AUDIENCE: Harvey bought the company from Worth and then he took over Green Hornet and he published that and he published Champion for a while. JOE: Was Worth publishing Green Hornet? AUDIENCE: No, that was Hillman. JOE: Alfred got Green Hornet from the distributor—PDC—Publisher’s Distributing Corporation, which, many years later, was bought out by Hustler Magazine, who now owns it. But in those days, they were a big comic book publisher. When Alfred Harvey came to them with this idea for a pocket-size comic, they loved the idea and they put him in business, also with very little. He asked me, “Come on, Joe, put up $300 and we’ll be partners.” And I said, “Ahhh, I’m making a lot of money now—I’m doing Captain America. But I’ll help you out, I’ll do three covers for you.” And I did that. Alfred was my life-long friend. AUDIENCE: You talk quite a bit about how you made the transition from Marvel to DC, but I’m interested in how, after the War, you and Jack also made the transition from DC to Harvey. Jack did some stuff for DC right after the war and he was still doing Boy Commandos for a while even after you started up at Harvey. And then gradually you dropped the DC stuff and worked almost exclusively for Harvey. JOE: We worked for Jack Liebowitz who was running DC Comics when we were up there. We had the utmost respect and affection for Jack Leibowitz. After we went off during the War, we had talks with Alfred Harvey who was very successful at that time. He was stationed in Washington, DC and I was stationed in Washington, DC and Will

Joe Simon drawing of the Boy Commandos done for a fan.

We have an idea to bring it back, actually. Do you want me to tell you the idea? Okay, here’s the idea. This is an exclusive! (laughter) The stuntmen today are being eliminated because of all the computers and stuff. So what we’re forming is a group of stuntmen who are being put out of business by computers and we’re calling them Stuntmen. They’re all going to be computerized themselves; they’ll all be put into computers. [pause, silence] That’s our new idea. (laughter)

that you were influenced by Jack’s artwork, and how would you say that he was influenced by your own artwork? JOE: I was like a coach. I was influenced by his artwork more than he was influenced by mine because we had to have a unity about whatever we completed. I think that would answer the question. AUDIENCE: I’ve got a real fanboy question here. How did it come about that you changed the shape of Captain America’s shield, from the big triangle to the circle?

AUDIENCE: In the days when you guys were doing all the Prize publications like Black Magic and Young Romance, who were some of the writers you had working with you?

JOE: We had to do that. We came out with the vertical shield and, at that time, John Goldwater had this character called the Shield. He

JOE: Well, Jack Oleck and Karl Wessler did a lot of work for us. MARK: Dave Wood? JOE: No, Dave was working with DC at the time. He was tied up with them, Eddie Herron was tied up with them. I’ll tell you something, all my people, all these guys that were over at DC or wherever they were, if I ever called them and asked them for anything, they were always there. I had very good friends in the business. I remember Eddie Herron was doing a script for Harvey when he died, and Dave Wood came in the next day and asked me if he could finish the script for Eddie. So, I’ve had wonderful friends in the business; wonderful friends. There are only a couple of guys I know that hate me. (laughter) AUDIENCE: Why did you and Jack stop working together? JOE: I want to tell you something about that. The comic business was shaky because of the heat over the Senate Committee investigations. There just wasn’t a lot of work or a lot of money there. I think that the last thing we did together was at DC: Challengers of the Unknown. I went somewhere else and Jack stayed there a while and went to Marvel. But here’s what I want you to know. Anytime I had a project I would always call Jack to get together and he would always be there the next morning. We had this deal with Archie to do The Fly and The Double Life of Private Strong. We got together and Jack came over and it was never a matter of “Hey, I was getting this much money for the thing; I’ll pay you this much.” It was always “We’ll share the whole thing.” We were partners in everything we ever did, and Jack was always willing and always there. Would we have our disagreements? On and off—like a husband and wife—everybody has their disagreements every once in a while, but never anything that would be called an argument; nothing like that. Not even creatively; never. AUDIENCE: How would you say

An unused page meant for the “Terror Island” story in Stuntman #3.

had a shield on his shirt going right down to his private parts. (laughter) Ugly character, and we didn’t even notice it. So, we put out this thing. Martin Goodman was very upset; he didn’t like lawsuits, and John Goldwater had threatened to sue him because Captain America was outselling his character, like, 20 to 1. So Martin brought me in there and we had a conference with John Goldwater. I suggested to Goldwater that we’ll change the shield to round to be more unique. Anyway, he had to agree to it, he couldn’t argue against it. The thing is, the thing that ticked off Martin the most was that before we left, John Goldwater brought out a contract he wanted me and Jack Kirby to sign—he wanted to steal us away from Martin. (laughter) So Martin got very mad about that. But that’s the reason we did it, because of the original Shield. MARK: We’re out of time here. I want to thank Joe Simon, for not only this hour-and-a-half with us but also a lifetime of wonderful comic books. (applause) ★

Despite their “official” split when Mainline Publications went bankrupt, Joe called in Jack to help with the launch of two books he was doing for Archie Publications. Shown above is a splash page from The Double Life Of Private Strong #2, and below are detail panels from Adventures Of The Fly #1, both from 1959.

Here’s what may be the oldest existing piece of Simon & Kirby original art: Page 7 of “Killers of the Bund” from Captain America #5, showing the style that sold a million copies per issue. This is shown slightly smaller than actual size.

comic book, and just do it in 3-D—and it wasn’t so. There were certain ways you had to do it, and they didn’t plan it. We used visual scripts to begin with of different colors; each plane was a different color. We planned it very much to begin with. We worked very much with Bob Powell and Howard Nostrand on those books.

Sid Jacobson On S&K Interviewed by John Morrow (In the 1950s, Sid Jacobson was employed by Harvey Comics, where he co-created many of their most famous characters, including Richie Rich. During his time there, he had occasion to work with Simon & Kirby. After several years as an editor at Marvel, he returned to Harvey in the 1990s. This interview was conducted by telephone on November 20, 1996.)

TJKC: Did Joe and Jack actually have office space at Harvey? SID: Not at that time. They had their own, over at Prize I think. I never actually went to that office. Years later I worked with Joe when he was doing Sick Magazine. I was also in the record business, and I wrote songs, and produced a comedy album. I went to Mad first, and they would only give me a one-shot deal. I wanted them to allow me two, and [Bill] Gaines said ‘no,’ so stupidly I said, “Forget it,” (laughter) and I went to Joe Simon and Sick, and produced a hit record! (laughter) We did the first Kennedy take-off.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: It sounds like you worked mostly with Joe Simon. SID JACOBSON: Right. When I was at Harvey, right before they went out of business in New York, Joe Simon did a lot of work for them. It was probably six, seven years he did work there in different ways. When I first got into the business, about 1952-53, I did a 3-D book with them, Captain 3-D. I had grown up with Simon & Kirby and Captain America, and that was the best for me. I remember the initial meeting to this day. When I first met them, I shook! (laughter) I was supposed to be the editor of this book, and I really was trembling. That was the first time I’d ever met them. I remember the two of them were smoking cigars, and the smell was awful! (laughter) I remember the room! (laughter) They’ve torn down the building, but that was where Harvey had been for long years; it was at Broadway and 61st Street.

TJKC: How is it Simon & Kirby kept ownership of their ideas, when they were being published by a large company like Harvey? Back

TJKC: George Pacheko told me you were very young at the time. I think he said Joe called you “The Boy Editor.” SID: Joe had written a book [The Comic Book Makers, page 192], and in it he said he had come to me with the concept of, supposedly, Spider-Man—but it was a character called The Spider or something— and what I told him was, “If you’re gonna do a character called The Spider, you’ve gotta have reasons for him to be called The Spider, and you don’t here. So you have to find a way to in some way emulate what a spider is in this character.” And I think he had forgotten the real details of it. He said this “boy editor” at Harvey, Sid Jacobson, had turned it down. This guy turned down Spider-Man! (laughter) That was his interpretation of it. I guess at the time they were still Simon & Kirby. At the time they were probably into the romance stuff. Then years later, when I was at Marvel, I edited a hardcover book of Fighting American. TJKC: How did Captain 3-D come about? SID: I basically started all the 3-D books for Harvey. We rushed out a book called Adventures In 3-D, which I think was probably the most superior 3-D book at that time. It’s the only one where we used a process called “True 3-D”; it wasn’t just on backdrops. For those days, that was pretty good. I don’t think Captain 3-D was that good, but Adventures in 3-D was an incredible seller, several million. Then the whole thing died in a minute. TJKC: Did Captain 3-D sell fairly well? SID: I don’t think great. It came out late in [the scheme of] things. The fad lasted probably six to nine months, and then it totally died. It’s a hard thing to read, and it’s a gimmick. I don’t think Joe and Jack took into account how it should be used. In their mind, all you had to do was a super-hero

(this page and next) Pages from Captain 3-D #1 (Dec. 1953). Art by Joe and Jack, edited by Sid Jacobson.

then, that was a very rare deal for a creative team. SID: Absolutely; they were the only ones that I know of. They were important enough. They made a lot of money, and this is what their demands were. Tigra, Captain 3-D’s female nemesis. It was probably more Simon at the time who ran things. They were the only really important ones. They were very good friends of the Harveys; probably Joe more so than Jack. They and Al Avison were their earliest artists they gave work to. They really became close friends, and had strong ties. I believe Joe Simon’s wife had worked at Harvey. TJKC: How did the Comics Code affect Harvey? SID: Harvey became the #1 company in the field for a good period of time after that. That was the rise of Casper and Richie Rich. They were around before, but they became gigantic during that time. Suddenly the other books were banned and they died, and those were the huge sellers. Richie probably had more books than any character ever had; there were thirty books on Richie. TJKC: Did you get a sense of how the work was divided in the S&K collaboration? SID: I never could figure out, no matter what any of them said, who did what when they were together. I made the assumption that Simon did the inking, but I’m not sure. Joe did all the business, and Joe did the writing, or so he said. But I don’t know what part in the art he played. His art alone was always so different. But the Simon & Kirby look to me was just incredible, and I preferred it to just the Kirby look. They were very close friends; I didn’t have that much to do with Jack. I’m just a great admirer, and glad that I had anything to do with them. ★

SPECIAL ISSUE: SALUTE TO

SIMON & KIRBY! R.C. HARVEY remembers

BOYS’ RANCH! The Complete Run Down on

CAPTAIN 3-D!

by BILL BLACK, JEFF GELB & RONN FOSS! The Saga of

BULLSEYE!

by BILL BLACK & BOB COSGROVE MIKE KIDSON dissects

FIGHTING AMERICAN! New Interview with comic book legend

JOE SIMON!

JACK KIRBY’s BLACK OWL! 53

Simon & Kirby and the Kid Gang by Rich Morrissey

Simon & Kirby’s first kid gang originated as an offshoot of their first great success, Captain America. Although not the first patriotic hero (Editor’s Note: Way back in TJKC #7, we were only able to print a few in comic books (he had been preceded by The Shield at MLJ), he quickly excerpts from this article, due to our limited page count. We’re pleased to became the most popular, thanks to excellent scripting and Kirby’s finally have this opportunity to present a much lengthier version of it here.) dynamic penciling. From the very beginning Cap had a boy sidekick, hile Jack Kirby is known for more innovations in the field of comic Bucky Barnes. Possibly added as an afterthought, Bucky was admittedly books than any other individual who’s worked in the field to date, inspired by the success of Robin the Boy Wonder, “the character find his earliest original concept—in that it introduced an entire subof 1940” added to Batman’s adventures by creator/artist Bob Kane and genre to the field that became immensely popular—was what came to writer Bill Finger. Many other heroes had also followed Batman’s lead be called the “kid gang.” Features with multiple protagonists were hardly in taking on young sidekicks, a few (like Hourman with his “Minute Men new, but Jack Kirby—together with his partner Joe Simon—introduced of America”) taking on more than one before the end of 1940. But not a take on them that, like Kirby’s Marvel work with Stan Lee decades until 1941 would S&K’s definitive take on the concept make its debut. later, influenced most subsequent comics that even touched on the idea. In Captain America #6 (August 1941), Cap and Bucky teamed up with some unidentified boys from Bucky’s class at school to battle the villainous Camera Fiend—who, in what seemed an unusual case of wish-fulfillment, proved to be the boys’ teacher in disguise! The story evidently impressed both the readers and the creators, because very soon after, Young Allies #1 (dated Summer 1941) appeared. Although not written or drawn by Simon & Kirby (it’s said to have been written by freelancer Otto Binder, with art by S&K assistant Al Avison), the two, as Marvel’s first editors, very likely were responsible for it, and supplied a series of splash pages for it. It carried the setup of the Camera Fiend story one step farther by teaming up Bucky with three specific other boys nicknamed Tubby, Knuckles, and Whitewash, also adding in Marvel’s other major boy sidekick of the time—The Human Torch’s young friend Toro. Avison, who also took over as artist on Captain America after Simon & Kirby left Marvel, continued to draw the Young Allies for a number of years. In the meantime, the success of Captain America hadn’t gone unnoticed elsewhere, and in late 1941 DC introduced its own patriotic pair, created by the company’s own star writer, Superman creator Jerry Siegel. While company policy refused to allow a hero to make his debut in his own title as Captain America had done, DC came close by giving The Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy several stories in each issue of the similarly-named Star-Spangled Comics. Siegel’s own contribution to the concept seems to have been the idea that the boy (rich Sylvester Pemberton) would lead the team and the adult (chauffeur/ mechanic Pat Dugan) would be his sidekick. Yet, although the stories featured a wide variety of unique villains like The Needle and some above-average writing, StarSpangled Comics didn’t really catch on— perhaps due to the less than stellar art of co-creator Hal Sherman. So, with Star-Spangled Comics #7 (April 1942), the title character was relegated to a secondary slot while new characters were introduced. DC had reached the reasonable A page from Star-Spangled #19 (April 1943). The name “Gashouse” would be reused later in Boy Explorers. conclusion that the best way to duplicate 54

the success of a Simon & Kirby feature was with Simon & Kirby themselves, recently lured to DC from Marvel. “The Newsboy Legion, Starring The Guardian,” like “The Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy,” gave kids top billing over an adult super-hero, and the name might have been contributed by editor Mort Weisinger, who had always been fond of the word. (The Seven Soldiers of Victory, who starred in Leading Comics, were also known as the Law’s Legionnaires; many years later Weisinger would introduce the still-successful Legion of Super-Heroes.) But everything else in the feature was pure S&K. The Newsboy Legion wasn’t a group of middle-class kids like the Young Allies or the Minute Men of America, but a street gang of young orphans. Tommy, Gabby, Scrapper, and Big Words made what little money they had by selling newspapers, giving them their name, but they initially weren’t averse to augmenting their income by petty pilfering. The Guardian was literally just that: a young policeman named Jim Harper who had initially arrested the boys, but then saved them from reform school by getting himself appointed their legal guardian. At first the boys resented him, but, after Harper adopted the identity of a costumed hero to rescue them from hardened adult criminals, they became fonder of the cop, whom they didn’t know but frequently suspected to be the costumed Guardian. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first instance of a hero whose identity was regularly suspected by his supporting cast: Lois Lane didn’t begin to regularly suspect Clark Kent of being Superman—also in comics edited by Mort Weisinger—until some years later. The young protagonists, and the criminals and situations they faced, may well have been inspired by Page from Boy Commandos #3 (Summer 1943), “Cyril Thwaite Rides Again.” S&K’s earlier work on the Young Allies, With the Newsboy Legion as its lead feature (where it would remain as well as by influences outside comics. The late E. Nelson Bridwell has until #65), Star-Spangled Comics became one of DC’s more successful cited the then-contemporary Dead End Kids movies as a major influence, titles. The team’s next DC project combined the theme of the Newsboy and MGM’s Our Gang comeLegion with the wartime action Simon & Kirby had so enjoyed in dies, with a cast averaging a Captain America, but that DC policy had refused to allow until the few years younger than the United States had formally entered World War II. The Boy Commandos Newsboys, were still successwere introduced in Detective Comics #64 (June 1942), and, like the ful—but they were also Newsboy Legion, featured four boys and an adult mentor battling the rooted in the reality of the forces of evil, this time the Nazi hordes overrunning Europe. In a twist streets on which Kirby had perhaps inspired by the Blackhawk series Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera grown up, with the wise but had created for Quality Comics, each boy represented a different Allied friendly adult mentor, as country: Alfy, Jan, and Andre from England, Holland, and France Ray Wyman has noted in respectively, with a tough American kid known only as Brooklyn The Art of Jack Kirby, reflecting (closely resembling a slightly older Scrapper) being the most prominent. the lessons of Kirby’s own Officially the mascots of a Commando unit under the supervision of Hal Sherman’s Star-Spangled Kid. boyhood. Captain Rip Carter, the boys saw more action than most adult soldiers, 55

and for that reason became phenomenally popular. Joe Simon has cited that one of the initial inspirations for Captain America was that German leader Adolf Hitler was almost a real-life comic book villain—half comic but immensely powerful and totally evil. Now, once more, Simon & Kirby could have their heroes do their best against him and his minions. Unlike the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos didn’t become the lead characters in their title—Batman and Robin were impossible to dislodge; but they did increase its popularity, and quickly settled into the prestigious concluding position in Detective Comics—and, in Winter 1942, became the first DC feature to receive its own title without first being a lead feature. The kid gang was definitely an idea whose time had come. And nobody did them as well as Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Only one kid gang, quickly following the two DC groups, rivaled their popularity—the Little Wise Guys, introduced by writer/artist Charles Biro

into the adventures of the original Daredevil, a hero created by Jack Cole for the Lev Gleason line. Scarecrow, Jock, Pee Wee (the smallest and most feisty of the group, who eventually changed his nickname to Slugger), and Meatball (a fat boy who died early on, being replaced by another boy called Curly), like S&K’s kids, were well-characterized and ended up stealing the spotlight completely away from Daredevil, whose importance to the stories decreased until he disappeared from them altogether. Daredevil (which retained that title to the end, long after the departure of its title character) lasted into 1956, starring the Little Wise Guys until the end. Biro continued to script the stories for other artists including Norman Maurer, Tony DiPreta, and William Overgard. As for Simon & Kirby, they continued to turn out the Newsboy Legion and the Boy Commandos until their own draft notices arrived. At that point they began taking on more assistants, including the young Carmine Infantino, Joe Certa, and Gil Kane, in an effort to turn out as much material as possible for their features, especially Boy Commandos (who now appeared in World’s Finest Comics as well as Detective Comics and their own title) before they had to report for duty. After their final departure, writers Don Cameron and Joe Samachson, and artists Gil Kane, Louis Cazeneuve, and Phil Bard took over both the DC groups. Kirby briefly returned to his DC characters after the war, but once Joe Simon was discharged, he accepted an offer for the pair from Harvey Comics, who offered them ownership of any new characters they created. Both the Newsboy Legion and the Boy Commandos were turned over to writer Ed Herron, a one-time protégé of Simon & Kirby who had worked for them on past features like Captain America. Curtis Swan, a mapmaker with whom Herron had worked on Stars and Stripes during the war, came to DC with him and made his debut on Boy Commandos before going on to other features, eventually becoming one of the classic Superman artists. Other artists, including Mort Meskin and Carmine Infantino, also worked on the features. The Newsboy Legion was dropped from Star-Spangled Comics in 1947, ironically replaced by DC’s first kid sidekick in a starring role—Robin the Boy Wonder, in mostly solo stories in which Batman’s appearances were limited to supporting roles. The Boy Commandos hung on until 1949, but their very realism and popularity ultimately worked against them. Their entire claim to fame rested on their action against the Nazis during the war, and after 1945 they had little to do but become relatively low-key crimefighters. Kirby’s occasional stories had given them memorable villains like Crazy-Quilt to battle, but, no longer having the war as a backdrop, first Jan, then Alfy, and finally Andre dropped out. Jan wasn’t replaced, but the other two were respectively replaced by a Western boy called Tex and a boy genius named Percy, in what may have been an effort to turn it into an American team like S&K’s others. Still, it was impossible to avoid the Splash from Detective Comics #134 (April 1948). After the War, the Commandos found adventure around the world. fact that Brooklyn, even if he’d only been 56

12 years old when he first battled the Nazis, now had to be at least 18 and hardly a “boy” any longer. The Boy Commandos were, to all intents and purposes, adults when their book died with #36. In the meantime, Simon & Kirby proved that their imagination hadn’t faltered at Harvey, where they introduced The Boy Explorers. Smiley, Gadget, Gashouse, and Mister Zero were a seagoing version of their traditional foursome, with their adult mentor this time not being the traditional young big-brother figure but an elderly, wooden-legged sailor, Commodore Horatio Sindbad. Bearing the names of two other great fictional men of the sea (C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and the Arabian Nights’ Sinbad the Sailor), the Commodore led the boys into adventure in forgotten places around the world in their quest to duplicate seven tasks once performed by one Sindu San. Alas, they never completed their tasks, for only one issue of Boy Explorers was ever published. A black&-white copy of the unpublished second issue was mailed to subscribers, a third story appeared in Joe Simon’s 1990 book The Comic Book Makers, and still others were used as fillers in Harvey titles like the licensed Joe Palooka, but the nautical setting may not have been as accessible to readers of the ’40s as the Newsboy Legion’s big city or the Boy Commandos’ battlefields. Simon & Kirby turned to a more traditional, and then widely popular, genre for their second and last kid gang at Harvey. Boys’ Ranch was a Western dealing with three boys who, after helping a misanthropic rancher defend his property, were given ownership of the ranch in his will. Dandy, Wabash, and Angel came from Northeast, Deep South, and West to their final home, settling at Boys’ Ranch with a more traditional adult mentor. Clay Duncan was a young white frontiersman who had been raised by Indians (and was the adoptive brother to the historical Final page from the Boy Explorers story “A Trip To The Moon” in Harvey’s Joe Palooka #5 (July 1946). Native American leader Geronimo, a In many ways, S&K’s gangs were distinguished as much by their frequent antagonist in the series); he settled in as foreman, and as similarities as by their differences. After the Young Allies, on which Simon S&K’s traditional father/big brother figure. The cast was completed by & Kirby didn’t work directly in their final form, each group consisted of several later arrivals: Wee Willie Weehawken, a former lawyer turned four boys, together with an adult mentor (Boys’ Ranch, which ultimately prospector and cook; a young, mute Indian called Happy Boy; and an housed three adults, evolved into a special case to be discussed later). orphaned rancher’s daughter called Palomino Sue. Simon & Kirby Four seemed to be an ideal number for Joe and Jack—it allowed differences produced all the early stories themselves (in their traditional arrangement in personality and sharp characterization, but it wasn’t too many to of Kirby scripting and penciling, with Simon and others inking), but allow each character a share of the spotlight. By contrast, larger groups some of the later art was by DC veteran Mort Meskin, no stranger to like the Blackhawks (with its seven members) and the Justice Society Simon & Kirby kid gangs with his past work on Boy Commandos. (Joe (with its seven or eight) had wider variety but a corresponding loss in Simon recalls Superman and Star-Spangled Kid creator Jerry Siegel characterization. having come up with a similar concept with the same title for Ziff-Davis Indeed, the groups featured a number of similar types. Each group at almost the same time, but the Simon & Kirby version appeared first. featured a young, handsome boy who seemed older than average (the Siegel’s series was published as Kid Cowboy, lasting 14 issues.) 57

boys’ ages were rarely if ever given, but all seemed to fall somewhere between 10 and 17) and was, after the adult mentor, the natural leader. Bucky of course played that role in the Young Allies, followed by the Newsboy Legion’s Tommy, the Boy Commandos’ Andre, the Boy Explorers’ Smiley, and Dandy at Boys’ Ranch. These may well have been intended as the prime identification characters—especially by Joe Simon, the team’s businessman, who dealt directly with editors and publishers and always had top billing. But Kirby’s heart always seemed to be with another character—a short and ugly kid (Kirby was short and sometimes seemed unduly modest about his own physical appearance) who was feisty and more often than not shared Kirby’s Brooklyn background and accent. Typified by Brooklyn of the Boy Commandos, unquestionably the most popular member and the only one besides Rip Carter who

stayed from beginning to end, this type was easily identifiable by its very name—Knuckles, Scrapper, and Gashouse were all prime examples of it. Other “types” filled out the roster of the groups: intellectual kids (the Newsboy Legion’s Big Words and the Boy Explorers’ Gadget) and fat kids (Tubby of the Young Allies and Alfy of the Boy Commandos), but not to the universal extent of the arguable young analogues to Simon & Kirby themselves. (Interestingly enough, Charles Biro’s Little Wise Guys followed the formula to an extent, but handled it differently. It did have the handsome leader in Jock, but the fat Meatball was killed early on, and the tough little fighter, Pee Wee/Slugger, was almost a parody of the Kirby type. He was just as feisty as Brooklyn, but so tiny (though indicated several times to be the same age as the others) that he was rarely any serious threat to a villain the way Brooklyn—and even the younger Scrapper and Angel—were.) Furthermore, with two exceptions that deserve detailed exploration, Simon & Kirby’s groups consisted entirely of white boys. There were no blacks, no Hispanics, and no girls in the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, the Boy Explorers, or the owners of Boys’ Ranch, and the adult mentors were all white men. Moreover, none of the characters, with the exception of Boys’ Ranch, seemed to have associated to any extent with girls or women. While Superman’s stories had Lois Lane as a constant presence from the very beginning, Bruce Wayne was a playboy who flirted with a number of women in succession, and even Captain America had the occasional attention of Betty Ross, there were few if any romances in the lives of Jim Harper, Rip Carter, or Horatio Sindbad, nor even their post-pubescent charges. If anything, the exceptions were more revealing than the rule—Brooklyn would occasionally express his admiration for a feisty young girl like Russian patriot Tanya Vanin, and in the Cameron era he spent a very pleasant convalescence in a hospital surrounded by WAC nurses, but his war responsibilities always came first. Most startling of all was a story titled “The Romance of Rip Carter,” in which Rip fell head over heels for one “Rosalind K.”—a special in-joke to those in the industry who knew that to be the name of Jack Kirby’s new bride. But this Rosalind K. was quickly revealed to be not a woman but an aircraft. Critics like the late Dr. Fredric Wertham would, and did, reach unsavory conclusions about men who apparently preferred the company of other men and young boys to that of women. But in actual fact, the composition of Kirby’s gangs reflects nothing more than the social realities of the time—and, to a certain extent, even our own time. A friend who grew up, like Kirby, in the world of street gangs tells me that, even today, such gangs are among the most racist and sexist societies in existence. White boys still do hang around in gangs together—with Hispanics, blacks, and girls of various races not joining those gangs but having groups of their own; and most Original art to the cover of Boys’ Ranch #1 (Oct. 1950). of Kirby’s groups were in settings—the 58

Old West, the sea, the wartime Army—in which minorities were still segregated at the time, and women often officially barred (and even now making inroads still resented by many). If these boys stuck to their own kind and preferred the exciting action of which most others could only dream to romantic liaisons, they did no more than fulfill their own wishes and those of their readers—for a position in the fraternity of men, to work alongside strong but dedicated men like Captain America, Rip Carter, or Clay Duncan and be considered equal to them. To his credit, Kirby recognized the limitations of the street-gang codes, and, as an adult, strove to transcend them; but in many ways, he fell short in his attempts to do so, particularly when it came to adding minorities to the mix. The Young Allies, again only overseen rather than produced by Simon & Kirby, initially contained one African-American boy, Whitewash Jones. Unfortunately, Whitewash was nothing more than a supposedlycomic stereotype, reflecting other media figures of the time like actor Stepin Fetchit and radio’s Amos ’n’ Andy (originated and played by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll), without the genuine humor even these characters displayed at their best. He became downright embarrassing in a short time, and was dropped from the cast, leaving The Young Allies with the same cast of four white boys seen in most of Simon & Kirby’s other work. In Boys’ Ranch, Kirby seemed to be attempting to go beyond his previous limitations. In its relatively short run, no fewer than three of the regulars had relationships with women. The most famous, a story considered by many fans to be one Many Boys’ Ranch #1 panels were altered (right) to conform to the Comics Code when reprinted in Western Tales #33 (1956). of Kirby’s best stories ever, was the classic “Mother Delilah,” in rancher. Although, like Delilah, she appeared to be older than the young which a female saloon owner befriended Angel, only to betray him, cut rancher who fell for her, she was close enough to his age to make a his hair (in a clear parallel with her Biblical namesake) and reduce him romantic liaison a strong possibility—though, by the end of the story, to helplessness—a warning against allowing women to invade a society at least temporarily shelved. She might have reappeared if the series free of them in some ways, but also acknowledging their existence and had lasted longer, but, as it was, like Delilah she was only a temporary importance; and, as the title indicates, Delilah was less a romantic aberration in the essentially non-romantic life of the boy hero. figure for the prepubescent Angel than a maternal one, aspiring to make Only the adult mentor, Clay Duncan, had a romantic interest who the “family” complete with her own unrequited love for Angel’s father appeared in more than one story. Palomino Sue first appeared in the figure, Clay Duncan. There may be an understated Oedipal theme here, second issue, and, though maintaining something of a low profile, but, like the close friendship of Kirby’s boys with their mentors, it’s very remained as a regular in the series. The attraction between Clay and easy to overanalyze and misconstrue. Sue was apparent from the start, if more on Sue’s part than on Clay’s. The older Dandy had a somewhat more successful but still The presence of a single woman on a ranch that otherwise was run inconclusive relationship with Lucy, the daughter of a neighboring completely by males raised few if any comments (with the exception of 59

Delilah’s clear resentment). The question of whether the two were his place by pointing out that the will never gave an age limit for a “boy.” actually sleeping together was, of course, never raised; I could see it The self-styled “oldest boy at Boys’ Ranch” was closer to the traditional either way, but ultimately it was their own business and nobody else’s. Kirby self-image of the short, ugly and feisty boy than either the feisty Still, the very presence of Palomino Sue added an element to the series Angel or the ugly Wabash. He may have originated from the idea of not found in Simon & Kirby’s past work in the genre, and was handled giving boys an older mentor originally seen in Commodore Sindbad on an adult level. Kirby almost seems to be warning against attempts in Boy Explorers, but maybe he also was an indication that Kirby saw to develop sexual relationships too early—disastrous at Angel’s age, himself, and his characters, to be growing up. ★ somewhat uncertain at Dandy’s, but ultimately successful and up to the individual at Clay’s. In a day when unwed parents are an increasing part of the American scene, one doesn’t need to be a social conservative to regret the apparently dated nature of this classic 1950s message. Less successful, however, was Kirby’s attempt to add ethnic variety to the group for the first time since Young Allies. While Happy Boy, the Indian member of the group, was a definite step upward from Whitewash Jones, he still seems to reflect Kirby’s own embarrassment in attempting to correct the inherent racism of a gang of boys. For a reason never explained, Happy Boy is mute— he almost invariably remains in the background as Dandy, Angel, and Wabash bring their distinct personalities to the fore. Also, for the first time, the feisty little warrior isn’t ugly. Indeed, Angel’s almost pretty features are complimented by more than one character, which in its own way often appeared more embarrassing to their owner than an ugly but character-filled face like Brooklyn’s might have been. His name, one of his few legacies from his lost parents, was an equal source of pride and shame for him— although not uncommon among Hispanic boys, it almost invited derision among whites. Angel, of course, developed his own fighting skills as much as Brooklyn or Scrapper ever did—but, this being the Old West, he learned to fight with six-guns rather than fists, no doubt partially explaining his unmarred face. Whatever the time or setting, Kirby always devoted a great deal of time and care to his characters, often figuring out back stories never seen in print. Indeed, the whole format of the S&K kid gang was clearly breaking down by the end of Boys’ Ranch. In many ways, the fourth member of the gang wasn’t so much the self-effacing Happy Boy as he was Wee Willie Weehawken, the Kirby’s Newsboy Legion grew up and had kids of their own, as shown in these pencils from Jimmy Olsen #139. grizzled prospector who earned 60

Re-Examining The Boy Explorers TJKC reassembles some lost treasures, thanks to the help of Frank Johnson, Tom Morehouse, Peter Koch, Mike Gartland, Mark Pacella, Russ Garwood, and Larry Shell ay back in TJKC #7, we presented a feature on The Boy Explorers. To recap: the Boy Explorers are a ragtag group of orphans, rescued from an orphanage (run by Miss Prunella Axehandle!) by the kindly Commodore Sindbad. Sindbad is betrothed to Princess Latima, and since he’s not particularly interested in marrying her, his only way out is to recreate the seven tasks of Sindu San—and he drags the kids along with him! So ended Boy Explorers #1 (cover-dated May 1946). The post-war comics glut resulted in more titles than rack space, and Boy Explorers was one of the casualties. A couple of unfinished stories existed when the book was cancelled in 1946, so we decided to do a little exploring ourselves, and track down as many of the missing pages as possible.

The first unpublished story was probably entitled “Centropolis,” after the destination of the Explorers’ fourth task. Shown here is the complete final page of that story, and you can see the similarities to a couple of panels from the 14-page story “City At The Center Of The Earth” in Boy Commandos #29 (not “The Sunken World” in BC #23, as we erroneously reported in TJKC #7). A close inspection of Boy Commandos #29 reveals most of the story was reworked from the original Boy Explorers #3 “Centropolis” pages. In addition to the identical characters of Captain Khredo, Feran, Alora, General Zort, and the Shark-Men, a telltale sign is the lettering; throughout the Boy Commandos version, character names have been relettered by a different letterer (you can spot extra space before and after words that have been replaced, such as when “Commodore Sindbad” is replaced with “Rip Carter”). The splash and final pages are fullylettered in a different style, so it’s safe to assume this was originally a 14-page story (not a 13-pager as we first thought), and only the splash page is now unaccounted for. Next up is “Gulliver,” the Explorers’ fifth task, where they have to recover a crystal ball from a band of Liliputians (à la Gulliver’s Travels). Of the nine unused pages known to exist, we had two from TJKC #7, leaving us seven “tasks” of our own to complete! We managed to track them down, so here are pages 2-10 for your enjoyment: This final “Centropolis” page and the splash page are the only ones not reworked for Boy Commandos #29.

(NOTE: Pages 6 and 7 are intentionally reversed.

The letterer must’ve gotten the page numbers mixed up!)

Don’t you just hate cliffhanger endings? We didn’t find any further pages, but undoubtedly one of the “giant” Boy Explorers managed to stop the tree from landing on the explosives factory, thereby averting disaster and proving themselves not to be the warlike monsters they were perceived as by the “Little People.” Perhaps in thanks, the Liliputians awarded the Boy Explorers the crystal ball they came seeking. These nine pages were split up among the collections of a number of individuals, but we were finally able to track them down. However, after questioning numerous knowledgeable original art dealers and collectors, no one we spoke with had ever seen a splash page, or any pages beyond page 10 of the “Gulliver” story. Considering that page 10 is the only one that’s not lettered—and the other pages are only partially inked at best—it’s likely this story was in progress when Boy Explorers was cancelled. Perhaps work on the story simply ended with page 10, and no further pages exist. The reuse of the “Centropolis” story in Boy Commandos points out a common misconception: that S&K severed ties with DC right after the war to start their own books at Harvey. Although Joe and Jack did produce Stuntman and Boy Explorers at Harvey in 1946, they (or Jack, at least) were still producing Boy Commandos work for DC into 1949 (and also working for other publishers besides Harvey). The “Centropolis” story was done for Harvey first, then reworked and sold to DC. The final “break” with DC didn’t come until the end of 1949, following their success with romance comics. Which leads us to this final page (a panel of which we ran in TJKC #16). It’s obviously an unfinished Boy Commandos page... or is it? The first two panels are drawn in pencil on the heavy illustration board the S&K shop used in the 1940s, but panels 3-6 are on a piece of tracing paper that has been taped to the board, containing what seem to be unrelated Kirby layouts. The foggy mountain on the tracing paper looks a lot like the one on page 2 of the Boy Explorers “Gulliver” story. The note in the top right corner of the art doesn’t help identify

it much, since it lists both Boy Explorers and Boy Commandos. There’s no discernable text on the tracing paper, except for the flag in the final panel which only says “J. Smitherson Malone Slept Here.” Are these tracing paper layouts from the end of the “Gulliver” story? Or are they layouts for a DC Boy Commandos story (perhaps BC #19’s “The Saga of Rip Van Carter” or #21’s “The Top Of The World”)? Are the first two panels from the beginning of a story S&K were working on when they made their final break from DC? If you’ve got any clues (or a good Boy Commandos collection), let us know! Now (with thanks to Joe Simon for his permission), we proudly present the story from the “subscriber-only” Boy Explorers #2! ★

Originally published in the low-distribution, subscriber-only Boy Explorers #2 (Sept. 1946). Reprinted here courtesy of Joe Simon.

The Mainline Comics Story: An Initial Examination by and © Robert Lee Beerbohm f Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had not picked Leader News to be the comic book distributor for Mainline Comics—their ill-fated selfpublishing venture back in 1954—we might very well have witnessed them invent “The Mainline Age of Comics” by the time the 1960s Second Super-Heroic Revivals were in full sway. Mainline Comics most likely would have introduced us in some form to Challengers of the Unknown, The Fly and/or Spider-Man, The Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, quite possibly The X-Men, etc. Simon & Kirby would have owned whatever was created in the early ’60s, lock, stock, and barrel. Think about it. Leader News was also the distributor for Bill Gaines’ line of Entertaining (EC) Comics, and the self-publishing team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito issued such titles as Mr. Mystery (1951-1954) and Mr. Universe under MR Publications, Get Lost! (Feb-July 1954) under MikeRoss Publications, and many other titles through a still littleunderstood quasi-partnership with Stanley Morse. As we shall see, the fate of Mainline and other small independent publishers being distributed through Leader News was forever intertwined with Gaines’ high media profile line of New Trend titles which centered on the horror, crime, suspense, war, science-fiction, and humor genres. For more than a decade by 1953, the team of Simon & Kirby was

Splash panel from Bullseye #2 (Sept. 1954).

synonymous with betterselling comic books— actually, the word “phenomenal” would be much more apropos—so much so that Simon & Kirby was the first creative team to have their byline printed on the cover of comic books as a specific selling tool. Jack & Joe formed an equal partnership circa 1940, and for almost 20 years worked for many of the various comic book publishers, ofttimes creating some of that company’s star attractions before moving ever onwards to promised greener pastures. They broke into the comic book business through the sweat shops of Eisner and Iger, Lloyd Jacquet, etc. when a fully finished page brought a creator a mere $5 a page—if he was good. From S&K, Martin Goodman got his top-selling title back in 1941, Captain America, followed a few months later with The Young Allies, among many other classic strips, which sold over a million an issue through all of World War Two. He would renege then—and again 25 years later—on royalty compensation promises made while the business was being built. Joe Simon told me, “Martin Goodman lied to us. He cheated us.” (Martin’s relative Arthur Goodman said recently he now believes Simon & Kirby got a raw deal at Timely back then.) Team Simon & Kirby soon thereafter went from Goodman to Liebowitz (following a very brief pit stop at MLJ, where Jack—sans Joe—basically drew just one cover) with the promise of huge royalties based on the number of copies sold increasing in the titles they contributed to. They accomplished what they were anticipated to do: They spiked upwards nearly everything they touched. DC sold many millions of Boy Commandos, clearly demonstrating a noticeable sharp upwards rise on Detective Comics’ sales curve, prompting a breakaway title of its own dated Winter 1942. Joe told me, “All the service men were reading Boy Commandos. For a while, we were told by Jack Liebowitz that Boy Commandos was DC’s #1 book.” In addition to Sandman and Manhunter in Adventure Comics, they did The Newsboy Legion in Star Spangled. While they were away for the war they got substantial royalties from DC/National. The brash young team was easily

where the term “hot” was coined as far as a creator’s personal name stamp causing sales to go up— and they were very much in demand from nearly all the publishers they might want to work for. (This was not a phenomena of the later era of the Direct Market. S&K sold out far higher numbers consistently, even more so than Claremont and Byrne at the height of that shortlived team’s X-Men popularity and copy count salability, or the wunderkinden of the former Image Comics consortium in their pre-Image days at Marvel or DC—to give it an historical slant for you younger readers trying to comprehend the many myths of the comics business I have been seeking to unravel for several decades now.) Flush from victory after World War Two, and able to command a substantial profitparticipation in their books (between 25% and 50%), the creative team of Simon & Kirby (above) Splash from Bullseye #4 (Jan. 1955). (below) Detail from the same story, showing the kind of action S&K could add to westerns. basically created and then lucky publishers working with them. popularized the romance comics genre aimed at mainly female readers M. R. Reese, General Manager of Crestwood Publishing Co., Inc. with titles such as My Date, Young Romance, and Young Love. Innumerable wrote it thusly in the March 1952 issue of Newsdealer in an article romance-oriented knock-off titles from all publishers became legion. entitled “The Comics Are Growing Up”: S&K’s supernatural entries were Black Magic and Mort Meskin’s brainchild, The Strange World of Your Dreams. The crime genre was “...It remained for an astute observer to foresee the coming of the cycle covered by them in titles like Justice Traps the Guilty and Headline Comics. and to make future plans accordingly. A case in point is the team of The magic that was Simon & Kirby was making a lot of money for the Simon & Kirby. They are two artist-writers whose high flying, hard punching Captain America and Boy Commandos had already earned a prominent place among the other bestselling comic characters of their type. “It took a war to give Jack Kirby and Joe Simon a new perspective, a position where they could observe at close range the people who were reading comics—the boys who were now men and demanding comics for men. And it stood to reason 87

there were also the little girls who once saw in the comic super-hero a protecting brother, and were now willing to trade vigor for tenderness.” In a short, revealing bio in The Merry Marvel Messenger #1 (1966), Jack wrote (with nary a mention of Joe Simon, back when no mention of Joe Simon was allowed anywhere in Marvel Comics): “Everyone hustled out of uniform and began raising families. I invaded Harvey Comics, drawing Stuntman, Boy Explorers, Boys’ Ranch. Rushing into other strips, I did a teenage feature called My Date, an adventure satire named The Flying Fool, and a bit of whimsy labeled The Rich Rabbit. There was nothing to be done then but innovate Romance Comics, pulverize the underworld in Headline Comics and Justice Traps the Guilty, and play Edgar Allan Poe in Black Magic. With Fighting American, I was ready for laughs. But fooling around with the 3-D madness and Captain 3-D gave me the vapors. When I came out of the fog, I found I’d also done Win-APrize Comics, Bullseye, Foxhole, [In Love] and Police Trap.”

(above) Original art to the cover of Bullseye #1 (July 1954). (below) Covers to (in order) Bullseye #2-5. Issues 6 and 7 were published by Charlton Comics after Mainline went under.

Jack Kirby says he came out of a “fog.” There was almost a year during 1954 of euphoria in that “fog.” The fog: A telling word for the creative mindset Jack and Joe experienced back in the mid-1950s which lasted for some years; a heavy word as they both struggled to maintain themselves at various levels of the comics business. Then the industry had a down time circa 19551957 which saw the implosion of dozens of publishers when more major distributors went bust, culminating with the collapse of centuryold American News. Hundreds upon hundreds of creators were also knocked out of work, never to return to the comic book business. Jack also referred to a decade of boom times stemming from 1945 through 1955; a decade some people these days are calling The Atomic Romance Era. Bill Gaines coined much of that era as a “New Trend” in comic books. It was most definitely an exciting time for highly creative comics work, as well as a time for substantial profits for many in the comic book industry.

Dozens of “new trend” titles were tried out by all publishers and discarded with impunity. Everybody was copying everybody else if they thought it was selling, glutting the stands with imitation after imitation. America became awash with way too many millions of comics. (I believe one could rightfully date the “Silver Age” of comics earlier than the first half-step of The Flash in Showcase #4 (1956), back to 1952 with the advent of such blockbuster-selling titles as Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge Four-Color #386 and Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad #1. It was also the year which saw the highest number—1158—of Simon & Kirby pages published. All S&K material was earning them percentage royalties. They knew no other way for almost 15 years.) Joe Simon told me during a recent phone interview that Young Romance, Black Magic, etc. were selling in excess of a million per issue, but there were some serious questions concerning proper royalty remuneration from the Crestwood publishing people at the time. Joe said, “Crestwood was stealing from us right from the get-go. It almost went to litigation.” Joe and Jack decided in late 1953 the best course of action for their young families was to take the plunge into self-publishing. This was an effort to maintain better control over their creativity and also reap the financial rewards they knew they had been making for others for such a long time. Jack and Joe also wanted to create comics for what was perceived to be an adult market; the demographics of the day suggested a comicsreading 12-year-old of 1940 was now a 25-yearold comics reader of 1953. Publishing was something that the two of them had wanted to do for a long time and it was only by late 1953 that they had made the necessary connections to get proper distribution. It didn’t matter how good the product was if it couldn’t be seen out in the marketplace. Hence, by late 1953 was born the concept of Mainline Publications, Inc. Nevin Fidler, who had been involved editorially with Prize Western, became their business manager. He had also been an office manager at Crestwood and dealt directly with the distributors and other vendors

(above) Page from In Love #1 (August 1954). (below) Covers to (in order) In Love #1-4.

necessary to make a comic book company function. Joe says Fidler was mostly a “front person” so the Crestwood people wouldn’t find out, since the S&K studio was still doing books for them. Joe says, “He was a very bright young man—he was our age. He did the business work so we could create. We The Nov. 1953 Ladies didn’t have any Home Journal cover other employees headline reads “What for that type of Parents Don’t Know work.” About Comic Books.” While still Look what book the kid is reading in this maintaining photo from Dr. their contractual Wertham’s article! output for Crestwood just in case they bellyflopped, S&K took every royalty penny they had built up since the end of World War Two, along with the distribution clout of paper and printing broker George Dougherty, Jr. (a long-time paper broker for the lumber industry whose father had been one of the printers at Eastern Color on Funnies On Parade back in 1933) who was fronting the paper. A commonplace 25% deposit was advanced by Leader News to World Color Press in Sparta, Illinois against projected sales to cover the printing and engraving costs. Joe and Jack felt they were making all the right moves utilizing the expertise of Nevin Fidler, who also owned a small piece of the action. On the surface it all seemed like wise, sound business moves. Unfortunately, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham got a prepublication excerpt for his book Seduction of the Innocent in the November 1953 issue of The Ladies Home Journal, seriously fueling fires which would soon rage out of control, culminating the following year in a moment of national hysteria. LHJ was very influential amongst America’s mothers of the day. (This was nothing new for this women’s magazine. LHJ’s earliest savage frontal assault on the comics began by 1909 attacking such

legendary strips as Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, Buster Brown, Foxy Grandpa, and others as unfit for children’s consumption.) Joe wrote in his wonderful book The Comic Book Makers (Crestwood, 1990): “Comic book publishers were dropping out of the business in wholesale numbers. The printers grew frantic. It was a necessity of their business that the presses keep running. When the presses were silent, printing companies still had to pay overhead, so they were more than willing to back a new comics organization if it showed promise. Since Simon & Kirby had one of the strongest creative records in the business, a printing salesman (George Dougherty, Jr., the same man who fronted paper to EC, MikeRoss Comics, Toby Press, Lev Gleason, Martin Goodman, and many other comic publishers) urged us to start a new line financed by very liberal printing credit. “In the spirit, Jack Kirby and I established our own corporation, Mainline Comics, Inc. We [eventually] rented an office from the Harveys at 1860 Broadway—the same office where we had done the 3-D comics... We started with four new titles—Bullseye, Western Scout; Foxhole (war adventures written and drawn by veterans); In Love (each issue a complete romance novelette); and Police Trap (“true” stories told from the policeman’s point of view).” Their first bi-monthly title released was Bullseye, Western Scout (cover-dated July-August 1954), which debuted in May of 1954—just a few weeks after the initial Senate Subcommittee Investigations centered on comic books had been televised live to the nation, and Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent had begun to frighten a lot of parents. The editorial office was listed in the indicia as Mainline Publications, 119 West 57th Street, New York 19, New York. Joe insists they always worked Mainline out of 1860 Broadway, with the West 57th address

(above) A previously undocumented Kirby panel from the splash of the story “Fly Cop” in Police Trap #4 (Feb. 1955). (below) Covers to (in order) Police Trap #1-4.

most likely their accountant or attorney’s place of business, since “it’s a pretty expensive address there.” Bullseye’s origin is told in a three-chapter book-length saga which spans the entire book. “The Boy,” “The Youth,” and “The Man” enables us to watch Bullseye grow up following a massacre perpetrated by “renegade” Sioux Indians led by the villainous Yellow Snake. Kirby supplied the art for the first chapter and the splash to the second, with other Chapter 2 pages featuring John Prentice pencils and John Forte inks. Chapter 3 is definitely Prentice doing the majority of the penciling with Meskin evident a bit on the splash. Other recognized creative elements on Bullseye so far include Bob McCarty and Charles Nicholas. The month after Bullseye #1, Jack and Joe brought out Police Trap #1 (August-September) and In Love #1 (August-September). The cover of the first issue of In Love promised “Adult Reading” in a “BookLength Love Novel” with a full-length Kirby and Simon story told in three chapters. Titled “Bride of the Star,” it’s about a woman who “had to share her husband with a million women fans who adored him! An intimate peek at the men and women who live and love behind the scenes of big league baseball.” In addition there is a two-pager, (above) “Hot Box” splash panel from Foxhole #2 (Dec. 1954). (below) Covers to (in order) Foxhole #1-4. “After the page) by Art Gates, and “The Beefer” (6 pages) by Joe Albistur. Honeymoon,” and a three-pager, Recognized creative talents on Police Trap so far include Ross Andru, “Marriage or a Love Affair.” Other W. G. Hargis, Rocke Mastroserio, Bob McCarty, A. C. Hollingsworth, recognized contributors to In Love so Al McWilliams, Jack Oleck (writer), Charles Nicholas (inker), Jack far include Carmine Infantino, Mort Kirby, and Joe Simon. Meskin, Charles Nicholas (inker), Jack In Love #1 also has a cryptic in-house advertisement (shown at Oleck (writer), John Prentice, Tom left) for a possible fifth title named Nightfighter, which never saw print Scheur, John Sink, Bill Draut, Hy because Mainline didn’t survive long enough to add a super-hero to Fleishman and Art Gates. their fledgling line. Its promo blurb “Battle stories written as they are Police Trap #1’s cover told us “Here lived by the men who marched and cussed... and died! Here is your are the scenes you read about but never father—your brother—and your son, touched by the hand of war!” was see—the thousand dramas that take place in your police station.” This undoubtedly meant for Foxhole, their highly-personalized war book— comic book was made up of a series of short vignettes of four to six and fourth title—which was not yet advertised by name. Foxhole #1 pages apiece pointedly portraying police in an ironic heroic light as (Sept.-Oct.) appeared on the stands the following month. Joe Simon had seen through their eyes. Stories include “The Capture” (4 pages) by met Ken Reilly and Bill Draut through the Coast Guard combat art Mort Meskin, “Masher!” (5 pages) by Bill Draut, “Beer Party” (5 pages) department in Washington, DC during the war. Jack Oleck was Joe’s by John Prentice, “Grafter” (5 pages) by Bernard Bailey, “Zany” (half-

Mainline Publications Timeline BULLSEYE #1 (July-Aug. 1954) S&K cover • “The Boy” (9 pages) Kirby art • “The Youth” (7 pages) Kirby splash; rest by John Prentice (pencils) and John Forte (inks) • “The Man” (9 pages) Pencils by Prentice and Meskin IN LOVE #1 (Aug.-Sept. 1954) S&K cover (man & woman figures only) Book-Length Novel titled “Bride of the Star” • Ch 1 “The First Pang of Love” (6 pages) Kirby art • Ch 2 “Falling Star” (7 pages) Kirby art • Ch 3 “The Challenge” (7 pages) Kirby art • “After the Honeymoon” (2 pages) Artist unknown • “Marriage or a Love Affair” (3 pages) Artist unknown POLICE TRAP #1 (Aug.-Sept. 1954) S&K cover • “The Capture” (4 pages) Mort Meskin art • “Masher!” (5 pages) Bill Draut art • “Beer Party” (5 pages) John Prentice art • “Grafter” (5 pages) Bernard Bailey art • “The Beefer” (6 pages) Joe Albistur art

BULLSEYE #4 (Jan.-Feb. 1955) S&K cover • “The Pinto People” (8) Kirby art • “Doom Town” (8) Kirby art • “Ghost Town Ambush” (8) Artist unknown FOxHOLE #3 (Jan.-Feb. 1955) S&K cover • “Chicken” (5 pages) Bob McCarty art and story • “Listen to Me, Sam” (6 pages) Art Gates art and story • “The Face” (6 pages) Written by Kirby; art by Albistur • “Office Upstairs” (6 pages) Written by Oleck, art by Bob McCarty IN LOVE #4 (Feb.-Mar. 1955) Cover artist unknown (At press time we hadn’t found a copy of this issue, so we’re unsure if there was any Kirby art in it. Please contact TJKC if you can supply artist and page count information, or verify any information listed here.) Book-Length Novel titled “Wolf Bait” • Ch 1 “Don’t Run My Life”(?) (? pages) Bill Draut art • Ch 2 “The Right Choice”(?) (? pages) • Ch 3 “The Proposal”(?) (? pages)

POLICE TRAP #4 (Feb.-Mar. 1955) S&K cover • “All In A Day’s Work” (6 pages) Joe Albistur • Doctor for the Dead” (6 pages) Ross Andru • “One-Armed Bandit” (6 pages) Joe Albistur • “Fly Cop” (6 pages) Partial splash by Kirby, Artist unknown BULLSEYE #5 (Mar.-Apr. 1955) S&K cover • “The Headhunter” (8 pages) Kirby art • “Grandma Tomahawk” (8 pages) Kirby art • “Tough Little Varmint” (8 pages) Artist unknown FOxHOLE #4 (Mar.-Apr. 1955) Kirby cover • “30 Year Man” (6 pages) Story by Oleck, artist unknown • “Suicide Run!” (3 pages) McCarty story and art • “Mayhem in the Sky” (5 pages) Art Gates in a serious style • “Find and Fire” (4 pages) Bill Draut story and art • “It’s Mutual” (5 pages) Ted Galindo story, artist unknown

FOxHOLE #1 (Sept.-Oct. 1954) S&K cover • “Brain Wash!” (6 pages) Marvin Stein art • “Casualty!” (4 pages) Bill Walton art • “A Day at the Beach” (4 pages) written by Joseph Peters, artist unknown • “Eight Ball Hero!” (5 pages) Artist unknown • “Fruit Salad!” (6 pages) Bill Draut art BULLSEYE #2 (Oct.-Nov. 1954) S&K cover • “Trial By Fire” (9 pages) Artist unknown • “Union Jack” (8 pages) Kirby splash; rest by Bob McCarty • “Grand Prize” (6 pages) Kirby art IN LOVE #2 (Oct.-Nov. 1954) Cover composed of rearranged panels from Chapter 2 Book-Length Novel titled “Marilyn’s Men” • Ch 1 “The Scandal” (7 pages) Artist unknown • Ch 2 “Set My Heart Free” (6 pages) Artist unknown • Ch 3 “Secret Meeting” (7 pages) splash and a few panels by Kirby • “Mother By Proxy” (6 pages) Tom Scheuer(?) art POLICE TRAP #2 (Oct.-Nov. 1954) S&K cover • “The Hoodlum” (3 pages) John Prentice art • “The Patsy!” (5 pages) Bob McCarty art • “The Alibi Twins” (9 pages) Kirby splash, rest by Mastroserio & Nicholas • “The Desk Sergeant” (1 page) Kirby art • “Gambler’s End (2 pages) A.C. Hollingsworth art • “You Can Play Detective” (2 pages) Artist unknown • “The Grouch” (3 pages) John Prentice art FOxHOLE #2 (Nov.-Dec. 1954) S&K cover • “Booby Trap” (6 pages) Kirby art • “Walkie-Talkie” (3 pages) Bill Draut art • “Hot Box” (2 pages) Kirby art • “Dishonorable Discharge” (10 pages) Artist unknown • “Replacement” (4 pages) Bill Draut art BULLSEYE #3 (Dec. ’54-Jan. ’55) S&K cover • “Devil Bird” (8 pages) Kirby art • “On Target” (2 pages) Some Kirby (reprinted panels from Bullseye #1) • “Ghosts of Dead Center” (7 pages) Kirby art • “Adventures of Sheriff Shorty” (7 pages) Leonard Starr art IN LOVE #3 (Dec. ’54-Jan. ’55) Kirby cover Book-Length Novel titled “Artist Loves Model” (assembled from unused INKY strips) • Ch 1 “Search for Inspiration” (9 pages) Kirby art • Ch 2 “The Girl—Cute and Cunning” (9 pages) Kirby art • “A Stranger to Love” (6 pages) Kirby face on splash? Artist unknown POLICE TRAP #3 (Dec. ’54-Jan. ’55) S&K cover • “Hick Cop” (5 pages) W. G. Hargis art • “The Mountie” (5 pages) Joe Albistur art • “Murder Frolics” (7 pages) Art Gates art • “Tough Beat” (6 pages) Bill Draut art

Simon & Kirby’s unused Inky comic strips were reconfigured and used in the lead story in In Love #3.

wife’s brother-in-law and became a prolific comics writer. Many of the people working for Joe and Jack were friends of theirs they threw work at. Other recognized creatives on Foxhole so far include Bob McCarty, Ken Reilly, Joe Albistur, Art Gates, Mort Meskin, John Augustin, and Jack Oleck (writer). Simon, Kirby, and their bullpen were a constant powerhouse of innovative new ideas, and these four titles comprised the self-publishing venture known as Mainline Publications. During the fall of 1954, Simon & Kirby’s infant comics company secured a permit for second class printed matter for their subscriptions located at P.O. Box 3, Sparta, Illinois. Their editorial offices were still listed as being at 119 West 57th St, NY. In Love #3 is basically made out of Joe and Jack’s unsold newspaper strip from 1947, Inky. Most of the story consists of these strips Jack had drawn seven years before, cut up and pasted together to fit a comic book format. Most of the original art to this story still exists, and we know Jack drew an occasional panel or so in 1954 to tie it all together. The entire first and last page were drawn especially for this issue. Many people particularly like this story because some of it is autobiographical. Jack’s statement about inspiration is especially telling about himself in the last couple of panels on page 4: “A man doesn’t search for an inspiration... it explodes in his mind!!” According to the Jan.-Feb. 1955 cover-dated issues, Simon & Kirby officially moved into space rented from Alfred Harvey A new splash page (shown here) and other new art were used to fill out the Inky strips used for In Love #3. at 1860 Broadway, NY 23, NY at this point in time. Joe told me they the ’40s, ten years later a small cabal of other larger publishers conhad been loath to let Crestwood’s owners know their self-publishing spired in a series of moves to knock out some of their heaviest complans until they had gotten firmly established. “We were never really petitors. They are easy to identify as they were essentially the last ones at the 57th Street address. We had a two room office space at 1860 standing by 1957 in their Comics Code club, outside of George Broadway. We (had been) setting a pattern in play so the guys at Delacorte and Helen Meyer over at Dell Publishing who would have Crestwood couldn’t figure out what we were doing.” The March-April nothing to do with such a group. issues have an additional address of South Justinson Street, Wilmington Just as Mainline launched its initial public offering, millions of 99, Delaware. This could have been one of George Dougherty’s addresses copies of EC comic books began being returned after Bill Gaines did a right before they made their plans public. The Statement of Ownership meltdown live before the public, during nationally-televised hearings (dated Sept 1954) in Bullseye #5 lists Editor, Jack Kirby; Managing on April 21 and 22, 1954 before the Subcommittee of the Committee Editor, Joe Simon; Business Manager, Nevin Fidler; Stockholders: Jack on the Judiciary to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Senator Robert Kirby and Joe Simon. C. Hendrickson, Chairman, was interrupted by Senator Estes Kefauver, While EC had done more than any other single comics company one time Presidential Hopeful, during a general philosophical discussion besides Simon & Kirby to create a “New Trend” away from failed with the only comics publisher with the nerve to show up. In discussing super-hero dominance in comic book publishing in the last half of 93

what constitutes good or bad taste in a comic book, Gaines was asked if the cover of Crime SuspenStories #22 (May, 1954) fell into such a category.

the wave of success in the comic book business for 15 years (19401955) before hitting the rocky shore of American public opinion which had been swayed by major forces in the country bent on demonizing an easy victim—a victim that millions had been reading and now hastily swore they did not. Jack mentioned coming out of “the fog” in 1955. Perhaps that clouded his judgment in a lot of issues which crept up during 1956, and into the glory days of his work for Martin Goodman in the ’60s. Joe Simon wrote, “The sudden demise of EC Comics [horror and crime titles] had put Leader News in a financial crisis and they soon folded their tents, leaving us holding an empty sack. Mainline Publications became insolvent, an innocent casualty in the final victory by “The People” against the vile forces of Horror Comics. “After the mid-’50s comics crash, it just wasn’t fun any more. A lot of things worked in those days, a lot of things didn’t. It was a lot of fun to do for a very long time. We were very lucky.” ★

Kefauver: “Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a women’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?” Gaines: “Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.” Kefauver: “You have blood coming out of her mouth.” Gaines: “A little.” Kefauver: “Here is blood on the ax. I think most adults are shocked by that.” Shocked they were. Fueled by hundreds of anti-comics media reports which outmatched the previous public outcry of the late ’40s, Gaines’ ill-fated live TV Senate exposure, and Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, it was very easy for comics distributors under fire from local religious groups to say they were personally doing something about it by not carrying ECs—and Mainline stayed with Leader News. By the end of 1954, the huge comic book market known as Los Angeles County was passing a bill to ban comic books within its jurisdiction. Many other local governments were following suit. There was even a bill which left the floor of the California Legislature which the Governor refused to sign citing “First Amendment” scenarios. Things got very dicey rather quickly for the comics industry after a hiatus when they thought they had batted down the flames from the late ’40s. Joe Simon revealed in The Comic Book Makers that his shock over the crash is still evident all these years later. He discovered, “Comic books, which had been living high off odd villains for years, became the villain itself as America waged an unrelenting war against the depravity of the horror, violence, and crime of the big-selling magazines. The title (Justice Traps the) Guilty was too often superimposed or placed on top of a pile of comic books in photos illustrating the daily media coverage of the comic book outrage... the moral vigilantes directed their outrage to the news media, which eagerly jumped on the anti-comics bandwagon... even the once-aloof syndicated strip was finding itself caught in the turmoil [when] anti-comic book fanatics railed that any teenager could learn to pull off a crime simply by reading the Dick Tracy detective strip, which was once endorsed by FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover.” Soon, gone were the days when one in three periodicals sold in the US was a comic book. The team of Simon & Kirby had successfully ridden

Another new page used to accompany the Inky strips in In Love #3.

POSTSCRIPT: Mainline’s Charlton Output In late 1954, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby took the remaining unpublished Mainline inventory to Charlton, owned by John Santangelo and Ed Leve and headquartered in Derby, Connecticut. Charlton had been involved with the initial bindery aspects of FUNNIES ON PARADE back in 1933 and had been producing their own comic books since the mid-’40s after World War Two. Joe wrote in 1990, “Charlton was the last port of call for a publishing enterprise on the verge of going under. Santangelo and company were usually willing to continue publication of failing magazines or comic books, taking over the printing, engraving, and distribution at their own (self-contained) plant. And, eventually taking over, period. “Charlton’s rates for artists and writers were the lowest in the industry, yet the company attracted talent by giving the artists practically a free hand and all the work they could handle, assuring them a steady income.” (NOTE: The Statement of Ownership in FOxHOLE #5 lists Mainline as publisher, Jack & Joe as owners, Jack as editor, Joe as Managing Editor, and Nevin Fidler as Business Manager. All Charlton books have the Comics Code seal.)

POLICE TRAP #6 (Sept. 1955) S&K cover • “The Amateur!” (6 pages) Kirby art • “The Debt” (5 pages) Kirby art • “$64 Question” (3 pages) Kirby art • “Only the Guilty Run!” (6 pages) Kirby art • “Third Degree” (5 pages) Kirby art

IN LOVE #5 (May 1955) S&K cover? BULLSEYE #6 (June 1955) S&K cover • “Tomahawks for Two” (8 pages) Kirby art • “Killer Horse” (4 pages) Kirby art • “Coming of the Sioux!” (6 pages) Kirby art • “The Man Who Lived Twice!” (2 pages) Kirby art • “Sheriff Shorty” (4 pages) Al Gordon art

I LOVE YOU #7 (Sept. 1955) Kirby cover Title Changed From IN LOVE • “Devil-may-Care!” (6 pages) Artist unknown • “My Errant Heart” (9 pages) Artist unknown • “Memory of Love” (10 pages) Artist unknown

FOxHOLE #5 (July 1955) S&K cover • “Glide Into Glory” (6 pages) • “Lucky Stiff” (6 pages) written by Kirby, artist unknown • “Kamikaze Joe” (6 pages) Art Gates art and story • “Hip Pockets and the Paper Bullets” (3 pages) Bill Draut story and art • “Morale!” (1 page) Artist unknown

FOxHOLE #7 (March 1956) Cover artist unknown • “Express to Extinction” (6 pages) Artist unknown • “Han River Trap” (9 pages) Artist unknown • “Armored Doom” (5 pages) Artist unknown • Private Thistlewait “Major Error” (5 pages) Artist unknown

POLICE TRAP #5 (July 1955) S&K cover • “The Gun” (6 pages) Artist unknown • “The Test” (5 pages) Artist unknown • “Bad Influence” (4 pages) Artist unknown • “Short Visit” (5 pages) Artist unknown • “Alibi?” (5 pages) Kirby art

so they could constantly be recycled from place to place. For any stories listed which do not have an art identification, we would appreciate your views on who the mystery creator(s) might be. Also, anyone who can supply credits for IN LOVE #4-6, please send them in to TJKC for a future update. ★ (Thanks to Joe Simon, Jerry Bails, Bart Bush, Will Murray, Jim Vadeboncouer Jr., John Fallon, Steve Rowe, R.C. Harvey, Pat Lang, Mark Evanier, Mike Gold, Richard Morrissey, Lou Mougin, Steve Whitaker, Jeff Gelb, and Steve Robertson for levels of help piecing this history together.)

IN LOVE #6 (July 1955) No S&K art? A number of the earlier Mainline stories can be found scattered in the IW/Super reprints of FOxHOLE and POLICE TRAP, with many sporting Joe Simon covers. In the late 1950s Joe sold all the printing mats for Mainline to Israel Waldman for $1500.00. This innovative publisher had hundreds of comic books repackaged and printed up well into the 1960s to be sold in plastic bags to discount stores, thereby by-passing the newsstand imbroglios of the time. His Super reprints had no dates,

BULLSEYE #7 (Aug. 1955) S&K cover • “Duel in the Sky” (8 pages) Kirby art • “The Flaming Arrow” (4 pages) Kirby art • “The Stolen Rain God” (8 pages) Kirby art • Sheriff Shorty (4 pages) Some Kirby panels, artist unknown FOxHOLE #6 (Sept. 1955) Kirby cover • “Decision At Dieppe” (6 pages) • “Even Steven!” (4 pages) Kirby art • “Listen to the Boidie!” (4 pages) Kirby art • “The 50th Man” (3 pages) Artist unknown • “Dear Joan–!” (6 pages) Mastroserio art

(top row) Bullseye #6 & 7 and Police Trap #5 & 6. (middle) Foxhole Super Reprint #12 (1964). (bottom row) Foxhole #5, 6, & 7, and I Love You #7.

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Classifieds (10¢ per word, $1 minimum) ______________________________ NEAL ADAMS French “Conan” reprint album wanted, “Superheroes” poster (Adams also), Bowen “Shadow” bust. Brian Postman, 238 E. 24th St., #2A, NYC, NY 10010. (212)213-6242. ______________________________ FOR SALE: Captain America poster (cover to first Golden Age issue). I believe it’s over 20 years old. Mint condition, $20 postpaid. ALSO: Kamandi #1 VF/NM $30, #2 VF/NM $18, #3-5 VF/NM $8 each, #6-59 VF/NM $5 each. Please add $3.20 postage for comics. Kirk Tilander, 42 Leigh St., Warwick, RI 02889. (401)732-4285. ______________________________ JACK KIRBY Heroes and Villains set (hardcover and softcover Black Magic inked edition) and Jack Kirby Masterworks for sale. E-mail: TSmith1@wtp.net ______________________________ COMICS: Kirby, Silver Age, Heavy Metal. Stomberg, 303 S. 5th St., Oregon, IL 61061. ______________________________

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COMIC BOOK, Pro Wrestling and Movie Newsletters. Each published weekly, each only $1.75. Send check or money order to XL Entertainment Inc., PO Box 1737, Bridgeview, IL 60455. ______________________________

Warehouse find! LIMITED SUPPLY! We’ve acquired multiple copies of the rare ARGOSY Vol. 3, #2 featuring Jack Kirby’s 10-page autobiographical STREET CODE story (in pencil), plus a color STERANKO cover painting & more! 84 pages! $12 postpaid ($14 Canada, $17 elsewhere) in US funds, payable to: TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605

MARK PACELLA’S TOOTH AND CLAW reborn to rage this summer from Image. Check out the official website/ clubhouse: www.toothandclaw.com Contests/art/a plethora of paw printed pandemonium’s! TOOTH AND CLAW. A masterwork for the millennium. Thanks Jack!! ______________________________ TIMOTHY TRUMAN available for commissions! Get your favorite character! Tim is amicable to doing characters other than his own should you so desire and has done several of Kirby’s for collectors. His own repertoire includes The Spider, Scout, Grimjack, Jonah Hex, and Hawkman among others. Send a SASE for details and samples to: Larry Shell, PO Box 45, Irvington, NJ 07111-0045 or e-mail at: sheltone@ix.netcom.com. A list of Truman artwork for sale will be included with every request. ______________________________

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #25 TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE KIRBY ESTATE EDITOR: JOHN MORROW ASSISTANT EDITOR: PAMELA MORROW ASSOCIATE EDITOR: JON B. COOKE DESIGN & LAYOUT: TWOMORROWS PROOFREADING: RICHARD HOWELL COLORIST: TOM ZIUKO CONTRIBUTORS: DAN ADKINS JIM AMASH ROBERT BEERBOHM JERRY BOYD BILL CAVITT JON B. COOKE MARK EVANIER JOHN FALLON RANDY FOX MIKE GARTLAND RUSS GARWOOD JEFF GELB GOLDEN MEMORIES PAUL GRAVETT DAVID HAMILTON PAT HILGER RICHARD HOWELL SID JACOBSON FRANK JOHNSON PETER KOCH GEOFFREY MAHFUZ JOE & NADIA MANNARINO / ALL-STAR AUCTIONS HARRY MENDRYCK TOM MOREHOUSE RICH MORRISSEY GLEN MUSIAL VINCE OLIVA MARK PACELLA BRIAN PEARCE DAVID PENALOSA STEVE ROBERTSON JOHN SEVERIN LARRY SHELL JOE SIMON JIM SIMON DANIEL TESMOINGT MIKE THIBODEAUX ROY THOMAS KIRK TILANDER JIM VADEBONCOEUR, JR. JAMES VAN HISE R.J. VITONE TOM ZIUKO SPECIAL THANKS TO: DAN ADKINS JIM AMASH ROBERT BEERBOHM JON B. COOKE MARK EVANIER JOHN FALLON MIKE GARTLAND D. HAMBONE RANDY HOPPE RICHARD HOWELL SID JACOBSON FRANK JOHNSON ROBERT KATZ PETER KOCH GEOFFREY MAHFUZ TOM MOREHOUSE GLEN MUSIAL MARK PACELLA STEVE ROBERTSON JOHN SEVERIN LARRY SHELL JOE SIMON JIM SIMON MIKE THIBODEAUX AND OF COURSE THE KIRBY ESTATE JAMES VAN HISE R.J. VITONE TOM ZIUKO MAILING CREW: RUSS GARWOOD D. HAMBONE GLEN MUSIAL ED STELLI PATRICK VARKER A

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Collector Comments Send letters to: The Jack Kirby Collector c/o TwoMorrows • 1812 Park Drive Raleigh, NC 27605 or E-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com _____________________________________________ (Sorry this issue was a couple of weeks late, but I was having so much fun, I decided to add an extra 32 pages to it! I hope you’ll agree it was worth the wait. Now, on to letters, the first of which is from one of our interview subjects in TJKC #24 who, unfortunately, wasn’t pleased with how his contribution to the issue turned out:) _____________________________________________ Thanks for the copies of THE KIRBY COLLECTOR containing the article “Art vs. Commerce,” in which you used selections from your interview with me. I have these comments: 1) If you had told me you were using selections from the interview in an article, I never would have agreed to it. My understanding was that you were publishing the interview or portions thereof. I deeply resent having my words presented in a context of your devising that I was not aware of. 2) Marvel Comics and Magazine Management were both part of the same division of Cadence Industries, Inc. Neither was ever a subsidiary. No decision was ever made to “spin Marvel off as a separate entity from Magazine Management.” Furthermore, doing so would not have necessitated Jack signing anything, since the transfer of ownership would have been between units under the same ownership. The papers Jack signed could only have been related to Cadence Industries’ purchase of Magazine Management/Marvel from Martin Goodman, or by litigation over the ownership of the assets involved. I seem to recall that Dick Ayers sued Cadence over ownership of copyrights at one point. Perhaps the documents in question are related to that action. 3) I joined Marvel’s staff in January of 1976. 4) Marvel’s first artwork return policy was already in place when I started there. I believe Roy Thomas instituted it. 5) Neither Gerber nor Kirby were “independent contractors.” Gerber may not have signed the one page work-for-hire agreement, but he did work for years under a work-for-hire employment agreement similar to the one Jack had. Prior to 1978, before the copyright law of 1976 took effect, requiring agreement in writing regarding workfor-hire, Gerber worked under the same work-for-hire arrangement as all other creators who worked on Marvel properties. As I recall, Gerber was removed from the strip for failure to meet schedules, and his employment contract was terminated when he initiated legal action against Marvel. 6) I doubt that Marvel’s president or other members of the board of Cadence (who were the real decision makers for Marvel with regard to major matters like litigation) were even aware of DESTROYER DUCK, much less who drew it. Few of them had ever seen a comic book up close. None of them would have recognized Kirby’s art. It’s possible that they were told by one of the lawyers, but it seems unlikely to me that they would have cared. By the way, I believe that Gerber also published another selfbenefit book, perhaps through Pacific, called STEWART THE RAT. Gene Colan asked for and received permission to draw that book, though he was under exclusive contract to Marvel at the time. I sent a memo to the bosses informing them that I was granting Gene an exception. No one upstairs complained. 7) In an aside, you say, “...contrary to Shooter’s comments, nothing in the documents supplied by him gives evidence of Kirby filing suit against Marvel.” It would have been honorable of you to mention at that point that I by no means had set out to provide you with comprehensive documentation. After the interview, I told you that I wasn’t interested in proving anything to anyone, and certainly wasn’t going digging through some fifty boxes of files from my Marvel days to find documents for you or anyone else. In my cover letter, I told you that I was enclosing “...copies of the few relevant documents easily at hand.”

That happened to be what I found in one file folder, which for some reason lost in time, had in it what I sent you and a stack of old, unrelated letters from Roy Thomas. At any rate, whether a suit was filed, filed and withdrawn, or merely threatened strikes me as a detail. There was a dispute initiated by the Kirby side. Lawyers wrangled over it for years. There certainly was much maneuvering, posturing and threatening going on. Though Kirby’s position may have had moral and ethical merit—and in my opinion, it would have made good business sense for Marvel to deal more fairly with Kirby and all other founding fathers—his position had no legal merit. It came to naught. What else do you need to know? 8) All communication with Jack during that was the least bit sensitive was done by or through the lawyers. If a letter was sent to Jack stating that “...it would be unfair to other artists to devote a disproportionate amount of time to cataloging Jack’s art,” it was written by the lawyers, and was a counter thrust in the legal fencing match taking place. If it went out over my signature, I would guess that the lawyers were trying to position their reluctance to jump through hoops set up by Kirby’s lawyers as an operational issue. I don’t remember, but I don’t doubt it. 9) No attempt was ever made while I was at Marvel by Stan, Marvel’s PR people or me to deny or omit proper credit to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, or any other contributor. In fact, Stan, Pam Rutt (Marvel’s PR director) and I would take great pains to inform media people of the proper creative credits, often to no avail. On the air, or in print, they’d still refer to Stan as if he were sole creator. Media people often misrepresent things. 10) You say, “While the Kirby battle wasn’t the main reason for his (my) dismissal, the bad press certainly weakened his position there.” Your speculation could not be more wrong. The “Kirby battle” had nothing whatsoever to do with my firing, nor did the bad press. In fact, I forced the new management (Marvel had recently been acquired by New World Pictures) to fire me—rather than quit—preferring to get the severance package. I did this by going over the heads of my direct superiors and blowing the whistle on their incompetence and malfeasance— essentially forcing the new management to choose between them and me. Not unexpectedly, I lost. At my exit interview, Bob Rehme, who had investigated my allegations, agreed that I was right about my bosses, but thought it would be easier to replace me and keep an eye on them than to keep me and replace all of them. Besides, it would look bad for New World to fire almost all of Marvel’s top executives for incompetence and various misdealing right after buying the company. My contentions were validated again when I met the incoming CEO under the Perelman regime, Bill Bevins. Speaking of incompetence and general uselessness of Galton and the other top executives of Marvel, most of whom were still there, he said, “If all of them drowned in the East River one day, it would be a month before anyone noticed they were missing.” James C. Shooter (I really appreciate Jim Shooter taking time to discuss the Kirby matter, and I’m sorry he was unhappy with the end result. It certainly wasn’t my intent to misrepresent him in any way, and my original plan was to feature a straight interview. But when I read the stack of documents he sent relating to the topic, I felt there was a lot there worth presenting, but I wasn’t comfortable actually reprinting internal legal documents, so I decided a summary article would be the best way to go.I tried to include as much of Jim’s interview as possible, while still presenting both sides of the dispute as fairly as possible, and in context of what was going on at different stages of the dispute. But in hindsight, it was insensitive of me not to consult with Jim first, and I’d like to extend to him my sincere apologies. He was very direct and forthright in answering everything we asked him, and I’m sorry if my actions have caused him to have regrets about agreeing to the interview. I hope running his response here, unedited, helps clarify any misinterpretations that came across in the article, and will further enlighten fans about the topic.) _____________________________________________

Great work on the “Greatest Battles” issue! “The Glory Boat” always was my favorite Kirby story, but I never knew exactly why—after reading the takeout in the new issue, now I know why. (It struck me reading the pencil pages that young Richard must have gotten his draft notice just days before the events in the story—otherwise, why would the Sheridans need to take a sea cruise so Richard could “think things out,” as Farley says? And otherwise, why would their war vs. peace argument be raging at such a fever pitch even while they were marooned on a raft? Reading it this way, maybe the Deep Six are metaphors for the Vietcong... nah.) RL Bryant, Columbia, SC _____________________________________________ Congratulations on the last issue of TJKC. The double cover was incredible. Mignola’s inks were fantastic! The highlight of this issue was the complete uninked “Glory Boat” story. Although the comments were clever and very apropos, the reading was somewhat arduous due to the multiplicity of writers, their analyses being cut at random and, above all, the proximity of raw Kirby art which seems to fill in the complete pages with its incredible strength. Quite a difficult task for the authors! “A Failure To Communicate” Part 4 was as fascinating as the preceding ones. This series is one of the best you have ever published. These chapters truly deserve to be reprinted as a whole book for they simply and intelligently summarize Jack’s time at Marvel. Think about it. Now to some criticisms: One problem that I feel is beginning to burden TJKC is the difficulty to remain faithful to a very specific topic and to maintain your readers’ interest for a complete issue. As an example, “Kirby’s Greatest Battles”—everybody knows that Kirby’s battles are the best in comics history. You just have to read one of his super-hero stories to be convinced. One complete issue of TJKC seems (to me!) a bit long as no real news was given. I am more interested in analyses and facts than in fans’ recollections. I expected more information on those sketches of Ulysses, for example. As a consequence, “Anything Goes” issues such as #23 seem best suited in my opinion (as you already proved in the aforementioned issue that you could find a link between the different articles). My other complaint is that some of your art was cut for publication (TJKC #19, pg. 15b ; #21, pg. 4 ; #22, pg. 29; and #24, pg. 5). I know that page setting is a terrible task, that those cuts were occasional and minor (to say the least!), but consider that your readers are longing for art before articles. Jean Depelley, France (I think we’ll be sticking to theme-based issues for now, but we’ll sneak in some more ‘Anything Goes”-type issues once in a while. As for art being cut, I ALWAYS try to show the complete art, but in those instances you mention, that was all that was on my “original.” Don’t forget that in most cases, I’m working from really crummy copies—usually with little or no background information on them—and spending LOTS of computer time cleaning them up. Have mercy, folks!) _____________________________________________ The series “A Failure to Communicate” was great! Have you guys ever opened my eyes about The Silver Surfer! I had known since Stan wrote SON OF ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS that The Surfer was a spontaneous and unilateral act of creation on Jack’s part during the production of FF #48. I never realized, though, that Stan had written his own idea over Jack’s character! This has completely changed the way I look at The Surfer. Now I have a considerable sense of loss and missed opportunity about him. If Stan had written the character that Jack created, what fascinating things would have come about? The background on the story of the Beehive and Him in FF #66 and #67 was just as illuminating. For years, I had found that story both terribly interesting and somehow quite lacking, and now I understand what was missing: Jack’s real intent behind the piece, which Stan completely discarded. I’d always wondered why the three scientists of the Beehive were such shallow, superficial, unsatisfying villains, which was atypical of Stan’s writing. Stan at his best—and this was during the best period of

the FF—usually paid better attention to characters’ motivations. Now I understand that Jack hadn’t conceived these characters as simply “villains” at all, in the usual sense. The whole Ayn Rand angle, about Jack trying to capture the notion of Objectivism in a comic book plot, was incredible! Again, if Stan had written Jack’s actual concept, what might have become of Him, the character we now know as Adam Warlock? You’re really to be commended for the insights you’ve been bringing to the amazing career of our King. The KIRBY COLLECTOR is a real treat and a tremendous resource for anyone who seriously wants to study and understand comics. Keep it up! J.A. Fludd, Albany, NY _____________________________________________ TJKC #24 was outstanding! I loved the cover right off the bat. It was like the original UK pressings of the Beatles and Stones albums; no mention of the band name in sight on the front cover. If you didn’t know who they were, you didn’t know. They were so recognizable, a name wasn’t needed. That front cover with the Cyclops was stunning. The Mignola inks were perfect, and the coloring was beautiful. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that all future issues will be double covers with little to no writing on them. [A Mike Allred-inked wraparound is coming up!- Ed.] The articles were all fascinating, especially SGT. FURY and the TALES OF SUSPENSE, but what took the cake was the triple analysis of the GLORY BOAT. I’m putting in my vote right now to make this a regular feature—an issue-by-issue breakdown of the Fourth World run. It’s Jack’s monumental achievement and contribution to the world of illustrated literature. I’ve always known this stuff was great, but when I read the panel-by-panel breakdowns, it blew me away how much was really going on in the story. Unimaginable depth, on top of killer art. It made me go back and re-read the whole series. Wayne Gucker, Rancho Cucamonga, CA _____________________________________________ Here’s a Kirby Kwestion that I have been wondering about for many, many years. In the late ’70s, there was a Crest toothpaste commercial with a cosmic super-hero theme and some unusual animated villains. The BadGuys were the “Cavity Creeps.” Surely some still remember their battle cry: “We Make Holes In Teeth!” Even then I felt they were either a Kirby Kreation or at least Kirbyinspired. Were they designed by King Kirby, or someone else? Weldon Adams (You’ll just have to wait for our KIRBY INFLUENCE issue, when your Kavity Kreep Kwestion will be answered!) _____________________________________________ Thank you for printing the wonderful series of articles, “A Failure to Communicate” by Mike Gartland. Although the first three parts went over mostly familiar ground (at least to me), it was still interesting to read the evolution of Jack’s disenchantment with Lee and Marvel. However, Part Four in issue #24 not only covered information I had never heard before, it also answered some burning questions I’ve had about Jack’s run on FF since 1968! Even back then, at the age of 15, I was aware that something was off. Here we were, coming off some incredible runs featuring Galactus, the Surfer, the Negative Zone, the Kree, the Inhumans, and the Black Panther, and suddenly we’re getting rehashes of Dr. Doom, the Mad Thinker, Doom, the Mole Man, Sandman, Doom, etc. There’s even a rehash of a Star Trek plot where Ben is abducted to a planet modeled after Chicago in the ’20s! It really bugged me that after all the foreshadowing and little hints that Jack dropped into his stories and eventually paid off with big ideas, suddenly it just stopped. It was bad enough that the stories became mundane (and I use the term “mundane” only in comparison to Kirby’s usually unbelievable work; even his “mundane” stories are light years beyond most other creators masterpieces). But it seemed like the most interesting concepts he alluded to in the stories were just forgotten. Wyatt Wingfoot mysteriously drops out of sight, and Prester John, one tertiary character that really fired my imagination with conceptual possibilities, appears only in

the last half of FF #54, tells tales of legendary Avalon, and is never seen again. It would take a team of artists and writers years just to explore some of the barely touchedupon ideas that Jack gave Marvel before throwing up his hands in exasperation. I guess we just have to be thankful that he was professional enough to continue giving us great work, even if he held back his best new concepts. Bruce Younger, Rochester, NY _____________________________________________ #24 produced an unforeseen change of mind for me. The excellent commentary by Adam McGovern revived a thought I’ve had many times—that of “taking care” when analyzing a Kirby story deeply. I’ve felt for a long time that many go too far finding too much meaning/subtext in even his simpler, often hastily-produced work (I still feel this). I also felt there are two reasons why Jack himself made it difficult. First, his wording sometimes let him down, leaving impressions he never intended. Second, it seems there are times he hadn’t really thought through his subject, thereby meaning conclusions we make about him will be doubtful or plain wrong. Two of Jack’s top masterpieces—NEW GODS #6 (“The Glory Boat”) and #7 (“The Pact”)—provided examples of both. I remember well the letters in NEW GODS #8 where some fans got entirely the wrong message from “The Glory Boat.” It seemed to them that Jack was saying that “even pacifists will, in the end, resort to violence” rather than “pacifism is not weakness or cowardice and is strong when it counts” (which we’re sure was Jack’s true intention). Why the confusion? As Adam pointed out, it was all because of some poor editing on Jack’s part of his own wording. I wonder where else readers have missed the point because Jack hadn’t written the best wording. Sometimes, he even tripped himself up with his words. The first time I was aware of this was in COMICS SCENE Vol. 1, #1 (1981), page 14, where Jack was asked about Marvel at the time. “I find nothing new in them. They are more prone to give messages by people who have no message to give. I know my work never gave messages, it was just pure entertainment. “ You can almost hear Jack take a breath between the last two sentences as he comes to terms with what he’s said. “Messages”? Like the “message” in “The Glory Boat”? Or does he just mean “good” stories, by people interested in more than just the “slam-bam, continuity-correct” consciousness of the mid-’70s onward? Surely he meant “ideas and creativity”—that the creative people are no longer at Marvel (because of their policy towards work for hire), therefore there’s nothing new. But it seems his own poor choice of words (“messages”) backed him into a corner where he said what he didn’t really mean and ended up aligning himself with the very type of creativity he was decrying. A lesser example is in TJKC #10, page 26 where Jack says that his plans would ‘‘electrocute you in the mind” and Stan corrects him with “electrify, Jack, electrify!’’ His frequent inability to eloquently say what he meant must have been a great frustration to him (especially when he felt at odds with Stan Lee, a master of words). It also means that he may very well have known what he wanted to say in a story—or felt it at gut level but was unable to verbalize it well, and hence left a “lesser” understanding on the printed page. Why else would he put in all those quotation marks, except that he can’t think of a better way to say what he was saying/feeling? Now here’s the bit that changed. I also felt that whereas Jack had some brilliant thoughts and concepts, he sometimes wasn’t as deep as we’d expect. His other classic, NEW GODS #7: “The Pact” was my greatest example. Wonderful stuff yet, I felt, with the strange contradiction of having Izaya in the opening sequence as a warmonger who knew little of peace. This was a character of “heavenly” New Genesis? Certainly strength and challenge and nobility are part of “heaven” or perfection or whatever else of which New Genesis is symbolic—but war? The land as a logistics map? Aching spirits? Never having sung? This was meant to be the stuff of “Orion’s” soul, not those born on New Genesis. Lightray says as much in “The Glory Boat”, page 10, panel 3. I knew New Genesis wasn’t to be literally perfection any more than Apokolips was totally evil, yet it seemed to me that Izaya’s warlike passions

should have risen only after Avia’s death and that Jack hadn’t thought properly through his character at all. Then, my interest piqued again, I reread it—and found that after all these years, I had misunderstood. Jack saw the New Gods of New Genesis as very similar to the Old Gods UNTIL the Great Clash. They weren’t evilly intentioned like those of the shadow planet, but were “aimlessly noble”. It wasn’t until after Izaya changed and began to actively aspire toward true peace and goodness and following the Source that New Genesis became symbolic of “heaven”. So Izaya is not really out of character at all. I thought Jack just got sloppy, but maybe he had thought his concept fully through after all (maybe this is another case regarding his wording). And maybe Jack—even here—really is meaning something for his “mythology for modern times”—about how the pursuit of “good” and resistance of evil is much harder and takes more effort than being “aimless,” and often “good” people aren’t rallied to promote “good” until threatened by evil. (Or maybe I’m reading too much into it just like I criticize others for.) Anyway, the point of all this was to tell you that reading TJKC #24 and then being inspired to reread “The Pact”, then being challenged in the “brain department” (now there’s a Kirbyism, quotations and all) was a joy— and continues to be. Shane Foley, Australia _____________________________________________ I hope you good people don’t wait another twenty issues to do another “Anything Goes” -type issue. #23 was a delight! It was great going from article to article not knowing what the next writer was going to cover. I couldn’t believe there was so much to that CAPTAIN NICE TV GUIDE ad I saw so long ago, but leave it to TJKC to cover it in its entirety! At this point (in my view), you became a real fanzine by admitting some fan art! RBCC, SQUA TRONT, SPA FON, BATMANIA, and all of the old guard at one time or another had some fan art in it. This made for a different type of feature in your pages and I’m sure Jack would’ve loved it! I certainly did. Do it again some time, okay? I disagree with the SOUL LOVE stuff being “forgettable.” All of Jack’s material was memorable in some way or another and being black, I’ve always been kinda flattered that the “King of Comics” took a chance with black characters and books like THE BLACK PANTHER and SOUL LOVE. The dialogue is weak, I’ll admit, but the spirit was there. Thanks for putting that one in. It capped off a great issue for me. #24 didn’t thrill me in the same way. I suppose there’s only so many ways you can look at Kirby’s fights but it got repetitious fast. Since no one has looked at Sarge and the Howlers before, I got a kick out of Mr. Alexander’s piece and the two list articles. (I love list articles!) I didn’t learn much from this issue but the “Glory Be” section was so well put together (and different) that it didn’t matter. The cover was awesome! Thanks for being there, men! You’re up to #25 now and the future’s looking good! Now, if only someone would cover the adventures of Pvt. Strong and the Fly.... Damon Horn, Fremont, CA NExT ISSUE: It’s our GODS theme issue, as we explore the spiritual side of Kirby’s work! We start with color Kirby covers plus ExTRA COLOR PLATES, featuring original NEW GODS concept drawings (watercolored by Kirby himself)! Inside, we’ll take a look at how Kirby was influenced by the Torah, and the Old and New Testaments in his work on the FOURTH WORLD, GALACTUS, the SILVER SURFER, and others! There’s an unpublished Kirby interview, and we’ll also examine his mythological influences, from early work up to THOR! Plus we’ll feature a new interview with WALT SIMONSON as he prepares to take over the reins of the NEW GODS! And throughout, we’ll present plenty of rare and unpublished art from MISTER MIRACLE, NEW GODS, ETERNALS, THOR, and more! (#26 ships in October, as we take our usual extra Summer month to catch our breath.) DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 9/1/99.

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