Blog 2.0

By Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

July 26, 2011 -- With the arrival of the Captain America movie, Titan has released two excellent books shining a light on the character’s creators.

For those just coming in, Cap was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in a story lifted almost intact for the movie. While Kirby died in 1994, his partner is still very much with us at age 97, as demonstrated by his new autobiography, Joe Simon: My Life in Comics ($24.95).

Given that comic books more or less came into being in the 1930s, Simon’s Life in Comics is also the story of the industry. He was present for most of the major events in the history of comic books, and was the cause of a few of them. For example, Simon was the first editor at Marvel Comics (called Timely in the 1940s), where he hired a teenager named Stan Lee. Simon worked with nearly every major creator through the 1960s, co-created entire genres (including “kid gang” comics and romance books) and worked for publishers as small as Crestwood and as huge as the company we know today as DC Comics. “Simon and Kirby” was such a recognizable franchise that the duo received royalties (which was unheard of in the 1940s), were the first to have their names on the covers of comic books as a sales tool and today have an entire archives series devoted to their works.

And as much insight as Simon’s book gives us to comics personalities like Bob Kane (creator of Batman), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (creators of Superman) and Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit), he also managed to be around for a lot of non-comics twentieth century history. Which is how he managed to run into comedian Sid Caesar, actor Cesar Romero, boxer Jack Dempsey, writer Damon Runyon and other luminaries.

One can easily glean from the book how Simon managed to be so popular. His easy, affectless prose reveals an affable, flexible, generous and optimistic personality. Add to that Simon’s obvious creativity, and he was no doubt a lot of fun to be around. Since most of us will never have the fortune to meet him, this book is the next best thing.

The next best thing after the autobiography are the comics Simon created, and Titan has collected one of the oddest and funniest titles he and Kirby ever did.

Simon and Kirby left Captain America Comics with issue #10 in 1942, after an acrimonious dispute with publisher Martin Goodman. So when they heard Goodman was going to revive the Living Legend in 1953 (Cap had been canceled in 1950), it rubbed salt into a still-open wound. But the proactive Simon, always looking to turn a negative into a positive, had a brainstorm. He quotes himself as saying to Kirby, “You know, there’s no reason we can’t do our own character again. They can’t corner the market on patriotism, after all. Why don’t we show them how it’s done?”

Thus was born Fighting American at tiny Prize Comics, another star-spangled hero in the tradition of Simon and Kirby’s own Captain America … sort of. Naturally, the powerful pencils for which Kirby was known were present, and as bombastic as they ever were on Captain America. But something was different this time: a sense of humor. Fighting American was so over the top in Red-baiting, Commie-bashing, flag-waving hoo-ha that it was practically a parody of itself (and of Captain America).

“Sure, the book was full of Commies and offbeat villains,” Simon says in the foreword to Titan’s new Fighting American collection ($19.95). “But it also poked fun at the whole superhero thing.” The ever-earnest and jingoistic Fighting American (and his sidekick Speedboy) battled characters like Poison Ivan and Hotsky-Trotski with the same campy seriousness Adam West would affect in the Batman TV show more than a decade later.

The Fighting American trade paperback collects every story in the series, which ran only seven issues (with a two-issue reboot), but was still around longer than the Captain America revival, which died in 1954. (Cap wouldn’t become the popular fixture he is today until his second revival in 1964.) And even 60 years later, the humor and inventiveness shine through every page of Fighting American.

Both books offer welcome insights into both Simon and Kirby. Creating Captain America alone would be enough for most, but for this pair it was just a beginning.

 Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com.

By Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

Dec. 14, 2010 -- Titan Books has released the second volume in its library of comics by the team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and it’s like finding the Rosetta stone of superhero comics.

As most comics fans know, Simon and Kirby were the rock stars of the early comic-book industry. They created Captain America and at least two genres (romance comics and kid-gang comics), and mastered all the rest. They were the first creators to get their names on covers as a selling point, and most of their work still holds up.

The first volume in the Simon & Kirby Library was an overview. The Best of Simon & Kirby covered the team’s long history together with a chapter on each genre in which they worked. Now comes The Simon & Kirby Superheroes ($49.55), devoted to a single genre (as the rest of the library will be).

Since superheroes are the industry’s best-sellers, today’s fans will probably flock to this book. But they’re in for a surprise: Superheroes doesn’t contain Simon & Kirby’s best-known superhero work, which is still owned by major publishers, who jealously guard those valuable trademarks. So you won’t see Sandman (DC Comics) or Captain America (Marvel).

Instead, Superheroes contains runs (sometimes comprehensive, including unpublished stories) of the pair’s long-underwear characters whose series were cut short by the industry’s notorious boom-and-bust cycle, or failed for other reasons. (Reasons, I’m quick to point out, which did not include poor quality.) Each is fascinating for individual reasons:

* Black Owl (1940-41): A rare Simon & Kirby series without much humor, as Black Owl (whose silhouette resembles a certain Dark Knight) was positively grim.

* Stuntman (1946): Fred Drake was a former circus aerialist, which gave him plausible reason for both costume and abilities. He used his athleticism as a secret stuntman for movie star Don Dashing (whom he closely resembled) and as a masked crime-fighter. As a twist on the secret-identity schtick, Dashing and the Drake frequently masqueraded as each other, hopelessly confusing the men’s love interest (and sometimes the reader) and as grist for zany comedy bits.

* Vagabond Prince (1947): The character’s name comes from a play on an old myth, where greeting-card writer Ned Oaks discovers he owns the east side of Esten City (New York) due to an ancestor’s deal with local Native Americans. As the “prince” of the area, which became a slum in the 20th century (like Kirby’s childhood neighborhoods, New York’s Lower East Side), Oaks protects the downtrodden citizens from crooks and greedy capitalists alike. It’s as much social commentary as superheroics.

* Captain 3-D (1953): OK, it was a fad, and Simon & Kirby had fun with it. Wait – what’s that you say? You mean 3-D is back?!??

* Fighting American (1953-66): This character started out as an old-fashioned, patriotic hero straight from the team’s Captain America playbook. But as McCarthyism gained steam in the 1950s, Fighting American became a deliberate satire of the country’s worst paranoid fears.

* The Double Life of Private Strong (1959): A remake of the 1940s “Shield” (still owned by Archie Comics, and currently published by DC), where Simon dropped everything but the name. This Shield didn’t have a bulletproof suit, but instead played on the common (and erroneous) belief in the ‘50s that humans could only use one-tenth of their brains, whereas Private Strong could use all of it.

* The Fly (1959): The Fly anticipated the modern Green Lantern (created the same year) with a magic ring from an alien, which instead of making him a space cop, riffed on the original Captain Marvel by turning orphan youngster Tommy Troy into an adult superhero. The Fly’s insect-themed powers also anticipated Spider-Man, created two years later, and since Kirby had a hand in Peter Parker as well, there is still a dispute about how much the Wall-Crawler owes to his predecessor. (Editor's Note: While most of the characters listed here are reprinted in toto, The Fly is represented only by his first issue and three short stories from elsewhere. The entire series was reprinted in 2002 by Archie Comics, and the cover of that trade is shown above.)

In summary, Superheroes allows the reader to trace not just the evolution of these powerhouse talents over decades, but also the maturation of the industry itself through these secondary characters. And adults, then and now, can find second levels in stories for kids that included bawdy humor, social/political commentary and even the seeds of Marvel Comics (which Kirby essentially co-created with writer/editor Stan Lee in the 1960s).

Simply put, Simon & Kirby Superheroes fills in the blanks in the history of pop culture you didn’t even know were there.

Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com.