Joe Simon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Joe Simon (disambiguation).

Joseph H. Simon (born October 10, 1913) is an American comic book writer, artist and editor who created or co-created many important characters in the 1930s-1940s Golden Age of Comic Books, and who served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that would evolve into Marvel Comics. His infrequently used pen names were Gregory Sykes and Jon Henery.

With his partner, artist Jack Kirby, he co-created Captain America, one of comics' most enduring superheroes, and the team worked extensively on such features at DC Comics as the 1940s Sandman and Sandy the Golden Boy, and co-created the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, and Manhunter. Simon & Kirby creations for other houses include Fighting American and The Fly. In the late 1940s, he and Kirby created the field of romance comics, and were among the earliest pioneers of horror comics.

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Simon & Kirby 3 Crestwood, Black Magic and romance comics 4 Footnotes 5 References

[edit] Early life and career

Raised in Rochester, New York, the son of a tailor, Simon attended Benjamin Franklin High School, where he was art director for the school newspaper and the yearbook — earning his first professional fee as an artist when two universities each paid $10 publication rights for his art deco, tempera splash pages for the yearbook sections. Upon graduation in 1932, Simon was hired by Rochester Journal American art director Adolph Edler as an assistant, replacing Simon's future comics colleague Al Liederman, who had quit. Two years later, Simon took an art job at the Syracuse Herald in Syracuse, New York, and shortly thereafter succeeded Liederman as art director of the Syracuse Journal American. This short-lived job ended when the Newhouse chain bought and consolidated the three local newspapers.

Venturing to New York City, Simon freelanced for Paramount Pictures retouching the movie studio's publicity photos, and for McFadden Publications, doing illustrations for True Story and other magazines. Sometime afterward, his boss, art director Harlan Crandall, recommended Simon to Lloyd Jacquet, head of comic-book packager Funnies, Inc.. That day, Simon received his first comics assignment, a seven-page Western. Four days later, Jacquet asked Simon, at the behest of Timely Comics publisher Martin Goodman to create a flaming superhero like Timely's successful character The Human Torch. From this came Simon's first comic-book hero, The Fiery Mask.

[edit] Simon & Kirby

During this time, Kirby met and began collaborating with cartoonist and Fox editor Joe Simon, who in addition to his staff work continued to freelance. Speaking at a 1998 Comic-Con International panel in San Diego, California, Simon recounted the meeting:

I had a suit and Jack thought that was really nice. He'd never seen a comic book artist with a suit before. The reason I had a suit was that my father was a tailor. Jack's father was a tailor too, but he made pants! Anyway, I was doing freelance work and I had a little office in New York about ten blocks from DC's and Fox [Feature Syndicate]'s offices, and I was working on Blue Bolt for Funnies, Inc. 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... [1]

and remained a team across the next two decades. In the early 2000s, original art for an unpublished, five-page Simon & Kirby collaboration titled "Daring Disc", which may predate the duo's Blue Bolt, surfaced. Simon published the story in the 2003 updated edition of his autobiography, The Comic Book Makers.^[2]

After leaving Fox and landing at pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman's Timely Comics (the future Marvel Comics), the new Simon & Kirby team created the seminal patriotic hero Captain America in late 1940. Their dynamic perspectives, groundbreaking use of centerspreads, cinematic techniques and exaggerated sense of action made the title an immediate hit and rewrote the rules for comic book art. Simon and Kirby also produced the first complete comic book starring Captain Marvel for Fawcett Comics.

Captain America became the first and largest of many hit characters the duo would produce. The Simon & Kirby name soon became synonymous with exciting superhero comics, and the two became industry stars whose readers followed them from title to title. A financial dispute with Goodman led to their decamping to National Comics, one of the precursors of DC Comics, after ten issues of Captain America. Given a lucrative contract at their new home, Simon & Kirby took over the Sandman in Adventure Comics, and scored their next hits with the "kid gang" teams the Boy Commandos and the Newsboy Legion, and the superhero Manhunter.

[edit] Crestwood, Black Magic and romance comics

As superhero comics waned in popularity after the end of World War II, Simon & Kirby producing a variety of other genre stories. In partnership with Crestwood Publications a.k.a. Prize Comics, they launched an early horror, the atmospheric and non-gory Black Magic, and created the masked Western hero Bullseye. Simon & Kirby are credited as well with publishing the first romance title, Young Romance Comics. In addition, Kirby and Simon produced crime, and humor comics.

Later, in 1953, they would form their own short-lived comics company, Mainline Publications.

The partnership ended in 1955 with the comic book industry beset by self-imposed censorship. negative publicity, and a slump in sales. Simon turned primarily to advertising and commercial art, while dipping back into comics on occasion. He created, edited and produced material for the humor magazine Sick, a competitor of Mad magazine, for over a decade. The Simon & Kirby tream reunited briefly in 1959 with Simon writing and collaborating on art for Archie Comics, where the duo updated the superhero the Shield in the two-issue The Double Life of Private Strong (June-Aug. 1959), and created the superhero the Fly in issue one; they went on to collaborate on the first two issues of The Adventures of the Fly (Aug.-Sept. 1959). Simon & Kirby again reteamed for Harvey Comics in 1966, updating their 1950s parodistic superhero Fighting American for a single issue (Oct. 1966). Simon, as editor, also helped launch Harvey's original superhero line, with Unearthly Spectaculars #1-3 (Oct. 1965 - March 1967) and Double-Dare Adventures #1-2 (Dec. 1966 - March 1967), the latter of which introduced the highly influential writer-aritst Jim Steranko to comics.

In 1968, Simon created the two-issue DC Comics series Brother Power, the Geek, about a mannequin given a semblance of life who wanderers philosophically through the 1960s hippie culture; Al Bare provided the art. Simon returned to DC five years later with another short-lived project, the four-issue Prez (Sept. 1973 - March 1974), with artist Jerry Grandenetti, about America'a first teen-age president. Simon & Kirby teamed one last time later that year, with Simon writing the first issue (Winter 1974) of a six-issue new incarnation of the Sandman.

In the 2000s, Simon turned to painting and marketing reproductions of his early comic book covers.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

• Simon, Joe, with Jim Simon. The Comic Book Makers (Crestwood/II, 1990) ISBN 1-887591-35-4; reissued (Vanguard Productions, 2003) ISBN 1-887591-35-4
• Official Joe Simon site
• Lambiek Comiclopedia: Joe Simon
• Comicartville Library: "The Weird, Wonder(ous) World of Victor Fox's Fantastic Mystery Men" by Jon Berk
• The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center
• Jack Kirby Collector #25: "More Than Your Average Joe"
• The Pitch April 19, 2001: "Custody Battle: Marvel Comics isn't going to give up Captain America without a fight", By Robert Wilonsky
• Alter Ego #36 (May 2004): "The Creator of Captain America Meets the Creator of the Human Torch", by Joe Simon

Preceded by: First

Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief 1939–1941

Succeeded by: Stan Lee