Recently Read: Golden Age Captain America Vol. 4

Golden Age Captain America Comics Vol. 4, comprising C.A. issues 13-16, spotlights the work of penciler Al Avison. Continuing after the departure of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Avison has the thankless task of attempting to emulate Kirby's anatomy, body language, pacing and idiosyncratic panel border designs. He even tries a few double page spreads. Nothing, not the art or stories, captures the innovative fun of his predecessors, though Stan Lee does have The Red Skull learning Cap's secret identity in issue 16.

Speaking of Lee, his "whimsical" series The Imp, he who lives in an ear, is plain unreadable. The series is fleshed out with the stories of a kid superhero, the U.S. war bond and stamp-selling Secret Stamp. It's enjoyable as an example of rousing WWII propaganda.

Golden Age Captain America Comics Vol. 4 has little redeeming or incidental qualities in terms of storytelling, as Simon and Kirby's issues did. As such, it's mainly for completists or those interested in the day-to-day, average product of Timely at the time.
 

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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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Original Jack Kirby Art for Black Magic No. 3, 1951

 

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Recently Read: The Boy Commandos, Vol. 1, by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

 

The Boy Commandos Vol. 1 is a much appreciated 250 pages of the first, chronological
Commandos stories created for DC by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Applying the kid gang concept to WWII, the series features kid representatives of several Allied countries, each with his own (somewhat annoying) accent.

As with Kirby's '70s WWII series, The Losers, Commandos uses WWII scenarios to tell a variety of human interest stories. One story begins with Nostradamus; another ten thousand years in the future (Kirby was often willing to employ his love for science fiction pulp in his work). Gangsters, a Japanese prisoner, a family curse, a pampered aristocrat and the French Underground are all used as story ideas; Simon and Kirby themselves make an appearance in "Satan Wears a Swastika", along with The Sandman and the Newsboy Legion.

The stories are smartly printed on non-glare matte paper, using the original colors. Much of the art is printed a little too dark, but is still preferable to modern re-coloring.

Like most comics of the period, the stories are of limited emotional resonance and can be formulaic (though Simon and Kirby, as seen above, mixed and mashed different story angles with more agility and experimentation than most). I read the book in two different sittings, giving my mind a rest with other readings. Any way you choose to read it, it's a good compilation of some of the better comics being produced at the time.

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Recently Read: The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio, Edited by Mark Evanier

The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio, edited by author Mark Evanier, is many things: it's a gorgeously designed coffee-table book (heavy enough to knock someone unconscious with), it's a nearly 400-page collection of scans of original art, and it's a roughly chronological record of the work produced by the famous studio (with an  afterward by Jim Simon, son of Joe).

No one needs an excuse to study original Jack Kirby art, and most of what's been published here hasn't been seen by the casual reader or devout Kirby fan. It's fascinating to see the '50s censors eviscerating a harmless Boy's Ranch story, and to study the studio's productions methods (very little of Kirby's art needed white-out or adjusting). 

The big news here is the amazing work by Bill Draut, penciling and inking in the school of Noel Sickles/Milton Caniff but, like Frank Robbins and Lee Elias, taking it to a different plateau. His crime stories printed here are a revelation. Doug Wildey, utilizing a lush illustrative style, Mort Meskin and Al Williamson also surprise and delight.

Reading a mixture of The Fly and Private Strong stories printed together remind the reader of how Kirby's DNA course through the entire history of comics. These stories use themes hearkening back to 1941 and would be revisited in the '70s series The Sandman and Machine Man (and one plot element may have influenced Steve Gerber's melancholy Omega the Unknown). The only small drawback, if a book this fine and essential can be said to have one, is that the stories written and drawn by Joe Simon alone are frequently incomprehensible. All in all, though, the book is emphatically recommended. 

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Don't Copy Cap!

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Recently Read: Golden Age Captain America Vol. 1

It's easy to see why Captain America was such a hit for Timely Comics in 1941. Many previous action comics had portrayed Hitler and Nazi Germany under safe pseudonyms. Here was a brash, explosive book which socked Hitler on the jaw on the cover of the very first issue! Don't read these stories for characterization; unlike Bill Everett's concurrent Sub-Mariner stories, there was none. Do read it for Jack Kirby's masterful, ballet-like and violent action sequences, in which he literally wrote the book on fight scenes in superhero comic books for decades to come (and on into the future). I was surprised to see the crossover influence of the shudder pulp magazines (like Timely publisher Martin Goodman's Uncanny Tales and Uncanny Stories pulps), with lots of creepy monsters and dungeons featured. Issue No. 4's "Horror Hospital" is a good example, with a Peter Lorre-like mad scientist who keeps a one-eyed, hunchbacked patient on a leash.

My favorite story in the volume was the first appearance of Hurricane. It's all Kirby (script, pencils and inks). Hurricane's an intriguing character and Kirby uses scenes and characters - a masquerade party and Pluto, ruler of the underworld - that he'll revisit decades later in series like Machine Man and Thor. Hurricane is a great character in his own right, but in 1998 was retconned (by Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras?) as an identity of the Eternal Makkari. What a gyp! Marvel, after Kirby's death, merged two of his self-created characters into one out of a misguided attempt to interlock every tiny, dark corner of the Marvel Universe into a cohesive whole.

Captain America co-creator Joe Simon writes an afterward in the paperback edition in which he tells how he, Kirby and Martin Goodman visited the offices of John Goldwater to hash out Cap's visual similarity to MLJ Comic's The Shield. It turns out Goodman and Goldwater had a shared history; they had both worked at one time for magazine publisher Hugo Gernsback!

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Recently Read: Young Romance 2

Anyone who disparages romance comics probably 
A. hasn't read any and is instead thinking of Roy Lichtenstein paintings and, more importantly, 
B. hasn't read any created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the enterprising gents who created the genre in comics.

The stories compiled in Young Romance 2, originally printed from 1947-1949, are dense, compelling little dramas; they could be short films churned out by Warner Bros. in the '30s. They deal with class systems, espionage, culture clashes, small town bigotry, post WWII societal problems, gossip, poverty and prejudice. They're hard-hitting, sometimes spectacularly violent. These aren't your laughable '70s DC romances drawn by Vince Colletta. Kirby crams detail into each panel as if he's directing a 1918 silent film; the art has much more in common with his late '70s Marvel comics like Machine Man than any of the '60s comics he's most known for.

The hardbound book is beautiful. Unlike what's promised on the front and back cover, the restorations published within aren't scanned from the original comics with printing dots intact. Instead, they were exposed to a solution process which eradicated the colors, leaving the black art behind. Once digitally enhanced, the result is black and white art amazingly faithful to the original. Although I prefer editor Michael Gagne's restorations from the first volume, the new process makes for immanently readable stories, using a color palate faithful to the original comics and set against a nice light beige background.

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Recently Read: The Best of Simon and Kirby

The Best of Simon and Kirby is a 2009 sampler of the comic book work Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created; the publisher, Titan, has continued publishing in-depth Simon and Kirby collections, each centered on a different genre.

This is possible because, beginning in the early '40s, Simon and Kirby published work in nearly every comic book genre and, in the case of romance comics, created the genre themselves. They weren't first on the ground with superhero comics, but the high energy and high impact work by Kirby on the duo's Captain America made Superman's art look anemic and it set the tone for superhero comics for the next seventy years.

Joe Simon wrote a foreward for the book (he died not long after the book was published) and historian and friend of Kirby Mark Evanier wrote informative introductions to each chapter. This large (nearly 240 pages), beautifully designed and printed book is helped immeasurably by the painstaking restoration work of Harry Mendryk who, along with Michael Gagne,is doing the best Kirby restoration work for print. The coloring is faithful to the original comics and the book is published on matte paper, not the hideous, glossy, light-reflecting stuff used for so many years in reprints published by DC and Marvel.

Genres represented are superheroes, war, crime, romance, humor, horror and science fiction. As fans of Simon and Kirby know, the crime and romance stories are nearly always strong, reflecting the hard-hitting, raw and passionate emotions displayed in the early '30s Warner Bros. movies Kirby loved.

The only genre in which Simon and Kirby aren't successful is humor; their work geared for that market just isn't very funny. That's an odd fact when you consider how funny Kirby could be within the context of more serious comics, from Boy's Ranch to The Fantastic Four to Captain Victory.

It's also clear that Joe Simon on his own just doesn't hold up in this context. A Runyonesque story he created on his own, "His Highness the Duke of Broadway", is painfully illustrated and the work printed here from his '60s Mad Magazine ripoff, Sick, is flat and embarrassing. In over forty years, I've yet to read a funny issue of Sick.

Still, there's lots of good work to plow through here (it took me weeks to read it) and if you're unfamiliar with the team's work of this period, I recommend this sampler as an entryway into their world.

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Speaking of Young Romance, The Best of Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics...

It would have been great if editor Michel Gagne had listed credits for the material in his Young Romance: The Best of Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics.

The two western stories included weren't penciled, or inked by Jack Kirby. My vote is for Jack Davis, while another comics fan suggested Bill Draut. In any event, it ain't Jack Kirby.

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Recently Read: Young Romance, The Best of Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics

A beautifully restored (by Michel Gagne) overview of Simon and Kirby's romance output, from 1947 to 1959.

As we know from previously reading Simon and Kirby romance comics, the early years are the hardest hitting, with dense, detailed, almost claustrophobic art, social concerns comics hadn't addressed before and characters you care about who seemingly stepped out of '30s Warner Bros. films.

The post-code stories, by contrast, are glib, short, drawn quickly (i.e. cranked out) and border-line bizarre in their heightened abbreviations of romance story tropes and formulas.

There's been recent discussion online as to whether Kirby wrote these stories. I don't think there's any doubt he wrote most of them. The book is filled with his cadences, word choices, sentence structures, rhythms, ideas, themes and very deliberate ways of expressing himself. 

Specifically, much of the writing here sounds quite like the unpublished romance comics Kirby wrote and drew for DC in the early '70s. For better or worse, Kirby's writing sometimes had an unintentional formality, a sometimes awkward, didactic way of expression that was uniquely his, God love him for it. Who else could have written, "The years that bound us were snapping cords of living tissues that inflected horrible pain upon us both as the hand of death reached to sever the last remaining strand..."? From "The Town and Toni Benson!"

Or, try this line on for size: "I didn't see the descending blow! Its devastating impact was transmitted to me through its unfortunate recipient." From "Sailor's Girl".

And: "My meeting with Sophie Morrison Scott recalled to my mind the jungle sequence of an old movie in which the unarmed native having been frozen into immobility by the ominous low rumble of sound behind him, turns slowly about - and watches with terrible fascination the stealthy movements of the tigress as her sleek, cat-like shape emerges into full view...peering out of Sophie's blase mask was a predatory animal poised to spring..." Great stuff, from "The Town and Toni Benson!"


I highly recommend this book, published by Fantagraphics.

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Times Have Changed, Baby!

From "Old-Fashioned Girl" (Young Romance #34), reprinted in Young Romance: The Best of Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics, ed. by Michel Gagne.

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