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.
Quite simply, Noel Sickles' 1930s run on the comic strip Scorchy Smith is the ur-text of American adventure cartooning. Though Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy led the way, Sickle's single-handed and seemingly off-handed advancement of using ink and brush-based chiaroscuro to define shadows, forms, figures, compositions and objects revolutionized and galvanized entire generations of cartoonists.
The first cartoonist who utilized Sickles' new technique was his friend and colleague Milton Caniff, who applied it to his Terry and the Pirates strip, with amazing and classic results (Caniff's writing and strip characters were better, so the graphic advancement in his strip brought the quality of comic strips to a whole new level). Nearly every major adventure cartoonist afterwards applied Sickles' new techniques to one extent or another, far too many than can be listed here: Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Don Heck, Alex Toth, Lee Elias, Wally Wood, Will Eisner, Frazetta, Johnny Craig, Frank Robbins, George Tuska, Alex Raymond...
Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles reprints every Scorchy Smith strip Sickles drew, including strips before he started and after he left. That's only the second half of this very heavy and large, nearly 400-page book. The first half functions as an excellently researched biography by Bruce Canwell accompanied by hundreds of beautifully reproduced color and B&W illustrations, ads, paintings, sketches, comics and graphics
of all kind by Sickles through his long career. Jim Steranko wrote the introduction.
I cannot recommend this fine book enough; it's an essential, foundational reference and document for any serious reader of comics and scholar of the art of cartooning. The only small compaint I have is the binding developed for the book isn't adequitely strong enough for the weight of the pages the book holds.Though I was very careful, the end papers began to tear away from the book. A book which weighs 6 and a half pounds needs much stronger binding, especially at $50.
I'm not sure where this ('60s?) Sickles illustration first appeared (can anyone help me out?).
One thing that's clear, though, is that Sickles continued to grow both in technique and in influence as an artist.
Just as his loose, noirish, chiaroscuro-based style made its big impact on Milton Caniff in the '30s (culminating in the styles of Alex Toth, Frank Robbins, Lee Elias and so many others), so this '60s style predates and sets the stage for many of today's indie cartoonists of what could be called the Fantagraphics/New Yorker school, any one of whom could have drawn the figure at the top of Sickle's illo.
