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Recently Read: The Newsboy Legion, Vol. 1, by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
The Newsboy Legion, created in 1942 for DC, may not be one of Jack Kirby's greatest comic book series (though don't count that out), but it's surely one of his most personal. The Legion are a kid gang trying to survive in a rotting tenement neighborhood called Suicide Slum, selling newspapers and trying to avoid mob activity as Kirby himself did growing up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Like the Legion, Kirby found camaraderie and support in a local boy's club (which still exists today) and the exploits of Tommy, Scrapper, Gabby and "Big Woids", juvenile delinquents under threat of being sent to reform school, were pure Kirby; he knew this world. The idealized figure of "copper" and advocate Jim Harper/The Guardian, an adult and part-time vigilante who not only cares about the kids but actively argues in court to protect them, has a poignancy that still resonates eighty years later. Kirby loved these characters so much, he brought descendants of the group back in the first issue he created of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, when Kirby returned to DC in 1970.
Unlike his other WWII kid gang series for DC, the Boy Commandos, which could whimsically swerve into science fiction, the Newsboy Legion is grounded in the streets and a world of poverty (one scene of a sick lady in bed takes place in a run-down room quite like the one Kirby and his family lived in), though one story imagines what New York would be like if the Nazis took control of it (a real threat when these stories were being written and drawn).
The Newsboy Legion Vol. 1 covers half of the Legion stories created in the '40s. They're printed on wonderfully non-glare paper and, if slightly too dark in places, are perfectly readable. Kirby was drafted into the U.S. Army about halfway through the volume, and so the last stories in the volume reflect the inventory Kirby and partner Joe Simon were tasked by DC with creating, knowing that WWII drafting was imminent. Kirby has only partial involvement with the last story he draws in the book and a still awkward and green Gil Kane takes over for the last two stories. Vol. II continues with stories drawn by Kane, Joe Kubert and others until Kirby returned from the warfront.
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