Category Archives: Odds & Ends

Fighting American Does NOT Come to Dynamite

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Posted in 2009/08, Odds & Ends, Topic, z Archive and tagged , , , , , ,

This year’s San Diego Comic Con was the place to introduce many new projects. However the most surprising event, at least for Joe Simon, was Nick Barrucci’s announcement that Fighting American would be published by Dynamite (as seen in Comic Book Resources and Newsarama). According to Mr. Barrucci:

We started talking to Joe Simon himself, and met with him and his attorney Ted Kessler, and then the conversation went to Lisa Kirby and Lisa’s attorney Paul Levine. From there, it’s just been a very long conversation.

It is true that Mr. Barrucci started with talks with Joe Simon, but Simon turned down Dynamite’s proposal in no uncertain terms. Apparently Mr. Barrucci did not know the meaning of the word no and he proceeded anyway. Joe only found out the supposed deal when it appeared on Comic Book Resources.

Joe Simon says:

There are some penciled covers of Fighting American by Mr. Ross that are printed in the story without copyright notice. I find that damaging, as is the whole fake story.

8/3/09 Update:

Newsarama has written new information on this subject

There is an important pieces of information that I feel I should include here:

Newsarama also spoke with Lisa Kirby Monday afternoon, who informed us the Kirby estate will no longer be participating in a Fighting American project at Dynamite.

The Making of “The Best of Simon and Kirby”

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Posted in 2009/04, Odds & Ends, Topic, z Archive and tagged

As reported by The Jack Kirby Comics Weblog, Diamond has stated that “The Best of Simon and Kirby” will be out this week. I cannot verify that the book will truly be in stores so soon. Further Amazon is still listing a May 12th release. But in anticipation of its not too distant release I thought I would do a small post about how the art was prepared. Everything starts with a scan.


Stuntman #1 (April 1946) “Killer in the Bigtop”, original scan

Unfortunately the original comic book pages were not that well printed to begin with, the paper invariably has yellowed with age, and the colors faded to some extent. The original scan is not a pretty thing but more importantly it is not a good representation of Simon and Kirby’s original intent.


Stuntman #1 (April 1946) “Killer in the Bigtop”, color correction

Fortunately there is Photoshop, an application by Adobe made for manipulating images of all kinds. For “The Best of Simon and Kirby” each scan was optimally adjusted using Photoshop to remove the paper’s yellow color and correct the faded colors.

While these adjustments make the page look like new, they do nothing to correct the problems caused by the original poor printing. Problems like registration, where the different colors are shifted in relationship to one another. Or incomplete printing. While these defects were in the original comic they still are detrimental to appreciating Simon and Kirby’s efforts. Photoshop does provide tools for correcting these problems as well although not without much effort.


Stuntman #1 (April 1946) “Killer in the Bigtop”, fully restored

The final result looks much more attractive then the original scans. At their heart the images still remain scans. Flaws that did not distract from the art were left. Compare the before and after and you will see that original coloring was adhered to and most importantly the line art was unaltered. What you get is pure Simon and Kirby. You cannot get better then that.

I developed the Photoshop techniques that are so briefly outlined above by myself. Apparently others have figured them out as well. Lately a small number of books have been published using restored scans. Most notably the Sunday sections in the “Terry and the Pirates” (IDW Publishing), “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets” (Fantagraphic Books) and “Supermen” (Fantagraphic Books). They share with “The Best of Simon and Kirby” a desire to present the original masters and not some recreation by a modern artist. It is a goal that was generally ignored in the past but that I hope will become increasingly prevalent in the future.

Cover for Alarming Tales #2, My Third Attribution Attempt

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Posted in 2009/04, 7 Freelance, Artists, Harvey, Odds & Ends, Periods, Simon, Joe, Topic, z Archive and tagged ,

Alarming Tales #2
Alarming Tales #2 (November 1957)

Trying to provide the proper credit for comic book art is always filled with uncertainties in certain cases. All one can do is use what evidence is available and make the best judgment possible. The willingness to try must be joined with acceptance of the errors that will sometimes be made. Case in point, the cover for Alarming Tales #2.

Alarming Tales #4
Alarming Tales #4 (March 1958), art by Joe Simon

My original take on the cover for AT #2 was that Joe Simon was the artist. Joe can be a difficult artist to identify. While he signed much of his work at the start of his career a lot of his later work lacks a signature. An even greater difficulty lies in Joe’s skill in adopting different styles. Experts have attributed some Fox covers to Lou Fine having overlooked Joe’s small signature. Joe did so good a job at mimicking Jack Kirby that much of the admittedly limited amount of work Simon did while collaborating with Kirby continues to be attributed to Jack. I do not claim to be able to identify all Joe Simon’s work; there is some late romance cover work that I do not a good understanding of and I sometimes doubt that it will ever be possible to confidently determine which Dick Tracy covers Simon ghosted. The Art of Joe Simon provides an overview of Joe’s career although I have changed my opinion about a few of the attributions in that serial post*. Among the styles Joe used was one more personal in that it does not seem to be an attempt at mimicking another artist. One of the best examples of this style can be found on the cover for Alarming Tales #4. The man in the cover for Alarming Tales #2 shares that style and for that reason I first assigned AT #2 to Joe Simon.

Alarming Tales #2
Alarming Tales #2, original art from the collection of Paul Handler

But there were problems with my original attribution of this cover to Joe Simon, the most important of which was that the spaceman look like he was done by Mort Meskin. Mort Meskin had not worked for Joe Simon since the breakup of the Simon and Kirby studio and there are no examples of Mort’s work in any Joe’s productions after that time. However when the original art for the cover surfaced I reevaluated my position. The original art clearly shows that the cover was made by joining two separate pieces of art. I therefore concluded that Joe had used an old piece of art by Mort Meskin combined with new art by his own hand. But a Simon and Meskin joint attributions was not completely satisfactory. What was the original source for the Meskin art? It was too large to be story art. The only comic that the art might have been meant for was Black Magic. Jack Kirby did all the covers for the first run of Black Magic so this left the possibility that the spaceman was originally for a splash page of a story meant for Black Magic left over from the sudden cancellation of that title.


Black Magic #5 (June 1951) “Sleep, Perchance to Die” page 3 panel 4, art by Mort Meskin

That is how my opinion stood for almost two years. Recently, however, I was reviewing some Black Magic comics when I noticed a page from Mort Meskin’s “Sleep, Perchance to Die”. The story concerns a rivalry so intense that it carried over into prophetic dreams. The protagonist was a bookish student and one of his dream involved being chases by an overgrown version of his athletic rival (but no bites from a radioactive spider). There can be no doubt that the oversized and somewhat monstrous figure was the bases for the spaceman of the Alarming Tales #2 cover. The final, and almost certainly the correct, conclusion was that Joe Simon drew the entire AT #2 cover using the panel from Meskin’s Black Magic story from 1951 as source material. While the AT #2 figure retains enough of the original that Meskin’s touch can still be recognized, a comparison between the two shows how much Simon has transformed it. This is the first case of Simon swiping from Meskin that I have seen but I am sure there are other examples yet to be found. Joe still has great admiration for Mort Meskin’s talent. The Joe Simon collection includes a group of proofs of various Meskin splash pages. No other artist received a similar treatment, not even Jack Kirby.

footnotes:

* I no longer believe Joe Simon penciled “The Woman Who Discovered America 67 Years Before Columbus” (Black Cat Mystic #60, November 1957) or the cover for The Spirit #12 (Super Comics, 1963).

“The Best of Simon and Kirby” Gets Reviewed

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Posted in 2009/04, Odds & Ends, Topic, z Archive and tagged

I guess I was not the only one to get an advance copy of Titan’s soon to be released “The Best of Simon and Kirby”. There is already a short review on the web by Mike Rogers. . Among the many complements:

Dazzling from beginning to end, The Best of Simon and Kirby is a monumental piece of comics history

So what comic book web page was Mike Roger’s doing the review? None, the review appeared in LJXpress the Library Journal’s newsletter. While I believe fans will love this book, my biggest hope is that it will give Simon and Kirby exposure outside of comicdom.

Captain America #600

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Posted in 2009/04, Odds & Ends, Topic, z Archive and tagged , , ,

What is with Marvel and their numbering? Captain America Comics #1 was indexed back in 1941 as volume 2 number 1. What happened to volume 1? There was no issue 1 for silver age Captain America, the first issue of that title was #100. Prior to that Captain America appeared in Tales of Suspense starting in issue #59 but he appeared in the Iron Man story for TOS #58. The first volume of Captain America did have a long run ending with, I believe, #454. It was not bad sales that ended that run but rather the desire to increase profits by issuing a new first issue for speculators to grab up, never mind it was just the first issue of an arbitrary volume. Did it work? I do not know but current run of Captain America is volume 5. But now Marvel has seen the light and will be returning to volume 1 numbering starting with issue #600. I do not know about you, but I think this concern about numbering is all somewhat bizarre.

But there is a good reason for Simon and Kirby fans to pick up Captain America #600 whenever it comes out. It will include “My Bulletin Board” an essay by Joe Simon. I was going to say that it was the first time that new work by Joe appeared in Marvel since he and Jack Kirby left the original Captain America Comics in 1942. But then I remembered Joe did a variant cover for Captain America issue from volume 3. In any case Joe is a great writer and story teller and I think fans will enjoy his latest essay.

Joe Simon’s House Is Up For Sale

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Posted in 2009/04, Artists, Odds & Ends, Simon, Joe, Topic, z Archive and tagged ,

No Joe is not being thrown out on the street; his old house at Stony Brook is currently up for sale . At $2,950,000 it is a little out of my price range (okay, okay, a lot out of my price range) but as Joe said “worth every penny”. Here is the real estate agent’s pitch:

A Rare Opportunity! A Truly Magnificent Waterfront Home In The Heart Of Stony Brook Village With Direct Access To The Water And Superior Panoramic Views In Every Season.This Property Epitomizes The Charm Of Refined Country Living While Maintaining Easy Access To All. Separate Guest Quarters Privately Situated On Property.Call For Further Details And Private Showing

The house was original built in 1910 and is therefore three years older then Joe but both have remained in great shape.

The Vigilante Rides Again

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Posted in 2009/03, Artists, Meskin, Mort, Odds & Ends, Topic, z Archive and tagged , ,

I do not know about you but I am always curious about how an artist feels about his own career. Was he happy with what he has accomplished or disappointed that he did not received deserved recognition? Even when an artist does not discuss these issues directly what he has to say is often revealing of his self evaluation. Unfortunately Mort Meskin never gave an interview and so we will probably never get a good understanding how he viewed his own work*. But if we cannot answer the more interesting question can we at least answer a lesser one; did Mort Meskin know that he had ever created a successful feature or title? With a blog about Simon and Kirby it is easy to forget that while Joe and Jack had a number of successful creations most comic book artists, no matter how talented, never did. But was there any feature created by Mort that he would have known as a success?

But how do we, or did Meskin for that matter, judge what was a success? Certainly creating a feature with its own long running comic book would be a sure sign of success. While Meskin did create Golden Lad it only ran for five issues so it was hardly a big success. Another sign of a successful feature is for it to appear on the cover of the comic. By that criterion Meskin’s Johnny Quick was a success because it appeared on the cover of More Fun Comics. However Johnny Quick only appeared on the cover a couple of times and the cover honors much more frequently went to the Green Arrow. Actually I am not a big fan of Johnny Quick, but that is my personal opinion and hardly the criteria to be used in determining if a feature like Johnny Quick was successful. Still if Johnny Quick had a limited success how about the Vigilante (of which I am a big fan)? Well no matter how popular the Vigilante was it would hardly be expected to push Superman off the cover of Action Comics. So without its own comic book and never having appeared on the cover of Action, must we admit that the Vigilante was not a success?


Action #46 (March 1942) “Crimes in Color”, art by Mort Meskin

Well I for one am not willing to accede that the Vigilante was a failure. How could I with all the great splashes that Mort Meskin created for the character. During the time Meskin worked for Simon and Kirby he rarely provided full page splashes and nothing, full page or otherwise, like the splashes for the Vigilante. They are just marvelous. I have previously shown some but I would like to present some more here. The Vigilante allowed Meskin to more frequently portray action then he would get working for Simon and Kirby or afterwards when he returned to DC. But not all Vigilante splashes can truly be said to be action scenes. Certainly the one in “Crimes in Color” cannot be called action but look how at the dramatic tension Meskin has provided. The Vigilante has been captured by the light which also provides a shadow cast by his opponent. While the Vigilante seems ready to spring into action he seems uncertain from which direction the threat will come from. His true opponent, the Rainbow Man, is presented above as a series of floating heads that show their glee at the Vigilante’s predicament.


Action #65 (October 1943) “The Bard of Banditry”, art by Mort Meskin

“The Bard of Banditry” is one of my favorite Meskin splashes. It is true that there is no action or drama, and even the Vigilante is absent! Somehow the Vigilante hanging in effigy and the laughing Bard are sufficient to make this splash work.


Action #75 (August 1944) “Blunderbuss Booty”, art by Mort Meskin

Meskin often used oversized figures in his splashes. I suppose this was done to suggest that the Vigilante would be viewed as little more then a pawn attempting to thwart some criminal mastermind’s scheme. Sometimes I feel Mort overplays it and the Vigilante ends up relegated to a trivial role in the splash. To a certain extent this is true in “Blunderbuss Booty” splash. However the tooth grins of the three oversized figures give the art an almost surrealistic touch that I find impossible to resist.

I must admit I so love the Meskin Vigilante splashes that I welcome any opportunity to display examples. I feel they prove my point that Meskin’s art is of such high quality that today the Vigilante should be judged a success. Sadly that is not the case as Mort Meskin is still an overlooked master. He even failed to be voted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame a few years ago. How much worse it would have been when Mort was penciling the feature since there were no comic conventions, Internet blogs or letter columns where fans could voice their appreciation of Meskin’s efforts. So while the splash art has been a pleasant digression to the theme for this post, they still leave us with the question whether there was anything to indicate to Mort Meskin himself that the Vigilante was a successful feature?


The Vigilante, lobby card.

Well there is another way a comic book creation can be shown to be a success, it can be transferred from the comic book page to the silver screen. The Vigilante was also serial movie in 1947. There at the beginning of each chapter on the big screen could be read “appearing in Action Comics Magazine”. Okay we are not talking about Oscar material here. Just a movie serial aimed largely at a younger audience. No great special effects but plenty of action and cliff hangers. The movie version does seem to remain largely faithful to the comic book feature, or as much as you can expect from Hollywood. The Vigilante is not only a singer as in the comic book, but he is also a movie star. The movie Vigilante also has a side kick named Stuff but he is not a Chinese youngster but an adult man (that is him on the upper left corner of the lobby card shown above).


The Vigilante, lobby card.

Do not let this above lobby card fool you. The Vigilante does take place in modern times just like in the comics. The scene is from the opening chapter of the serial and the depicted fight turns out to be a movie being filmed that Greg Sanders, the Vigilante’s alter ego, stars in. However Sanders does seems to fight as often unmasked as he does as the Vigilante. One wonders how Sanders keeps his Vigilante identity secret or why his opponents fear the Vigilante more then they do Sanders. When one minion is captured by the Vigilante but turned over to the police by Sanders why doesn’t that criminal become suspicious? Ah but I forget myself, this is a movie serial and should not be taken too seriously. With that thought firmly in mind The Vigilante can be entertaining although not always for the intended reasons.


Real Fact #10 (September 1947), art in part by Mort Meskin

While it is true that the Vigilante never appeared on the cover to Action Comics, he did make it to one cover, Real Fact Comics #10. Meskin has his own method of depicting a slugfest; different from Jack Kirby’s but very effective nonetheless. But behind the combating figures we see a movie camera crew. The caption reads “How Your Favorite Movie Serials Are Made”. This cover is not for a Vigilante story but for a feature about the very movie serial that I discussed above.


Real Fact #10 (September 1947) “How a Movie Serial is Made” page 5, art by Mort Meskin

And Mort truly is depicting the movie serial version of the Vigilante. Page five presents a number of dramatic scenes. I can verify that what is depicted in panels 1, 2 and 4 can be found in the movie. I have not finished seeing all the chapters to the serial so I cannot say whether the other panels can also be found but there are Arabs in the movie so panel 5 is quite possible. There is also a panel on page 6 depicting Stuff escaping from a burning barn inside a rolling barrel which can be found in the screen version. Not that Meskin draws the scenes shown on these pages exactly as found in the movie, his are much better presentations. I particularly get a chuckle from panel 4 where there is a man with a rifle prepared to shoot if the ape becomes too dangerous; in the movie he is clearly a man dressed in a gorilla costume.

So Mort Meskin was well aware that one of his creations, the Vigilante, had made it to the silver screen. It was a distinction that few of his fellow comic book artists ever achieved. Although we know that Mort realized he had created a very successful feature we do not know how he felt about it. Was he proud of his creation? Or was he bitter that he received no financial reward from the movie, or even a screen credit as the creator of the Vigilante? Sadly we cannot tell. Mort Meskin self evaluation remains an enigma. We must content ourselves with the art he left behind and hope that someday he will receive the recognition that he deserves.

Footnote:

* There is a story floating around the Internet told by Jack Kirby about a conversation he had with Mort Meskin. However that is an obviously apocryphal story that reveals much about Kirby and provides no reliable information about Meskin.

Simon and Kirby Blog’s Third Anniversary

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Posted in 2009/03, Odds & Ends, Topic, z Archive and tagged

It is true; my first post was on March 17, 2006. I have a tool that counts the number of visits and hits (I am not sure what the difference is between the two) and provides information about incoming links. Frankly the statistics are just of mild interest to me since my goals for blogging concern my fascination with Simon and Kirby and not a desire to write a popular blog. Had popularity been my desire I would hardly have selected such a narrow focus for my blogging. I have never paid much mind to the very low number of visits my tool indicated I was getting. Occasionally I would be surprised by some post resulting in a jump in readership. For instance in 2006 I wrote about a cover drawn by John Byrne and inked by Joe Simon. For me it was just a mildly interesting case of an unexpected collaboration, but a Byrne web site linked to it and suddenly my readership sky-rocketed. (I always found it amusing that there is so much interested in a modern artist and so little in earlier masters; John Byrne is a talented artist but honestly he is no Jack Kirby.) After a few days following one of these unexpectedly popular posts, the number of hits would drop down and return to the normally low numbers.

That is what my first two years were like, but then something strange happened. This year after a readership jump the number of visits would not quite return to the previous value. In fact I began to notice increases even without any incoming links to popular posts. Currently my number of visits is almost an order of magnitude greater then last year. Now I know that I have not suddenly become a great writer. Further my posts continue to have the same narrow, historical focus. So if it is not me then I can only conclude that what has changed is a greater public interest in Simon and Kirby. I do not have to look hard to figure out what has caused this shift in public perception, it was Mark Evanier’s book “Kirby, King of Comics”. I believe Evanier’s book has had an impact that greatly surpasses any previous publication about Jack Kirby. And an increasing interest in Kirby has meant a greater recognition for Joe Simon as well. I also want to believe that Titan’s “The Best of Simon and Kirby” (see my previous post below) will further elevate public awareness of Simon and Kirby.

When I started this blog I had not even considered how long I would write about the Simon and Kirby studio. As this blog enters its fourth year I have still only scratched the surface. If nothing else there are many chapters to go in my serial post The Art of Romance. My new serial post, The Little Shop of Horrors, has just started. Although I believe that It’s A Crime has now gone past the time when the Prize crime titles were produced by S&K it still deserves some more chapters. And I do not intend that all my future posts will be limited to those particular serial posts. There are many other fertile grounds to cover.

The Romance of Money

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Posted in 1 Early, 2009/02, Artists, Kirby, Jack, Odds & Ends, Periods, Topic, z Archive and tagged , ,


The Romance of Money (1937) page 1 (cover), art by Jack Kirby

Early in his career Jack Kirby was employed by Lincoln News. There Jack worked on a number of strips for syndication but he also did the art for a give-away to be used by banks, “The Romance of Money”. Since this publication has a 1937 copyright date, some have designated it as Kirby’s first comic book work. Well I guess it all depends what the reader’s definition of a comic book is. “The Romance of Money” is a small book (5 by 6.5 inches) that is just a little larger then half the size of a normal comic book. It is only 24 pages long including the covers. The cover and all interior pages are printed on the same type of paper. The paper is not newsprint, has a nice white color and is a heavier stock then what is found in a typical comic book. The interior of the book is printed in black and white while the front and back covers also include a single color, cyan.


The Romance of Money (1937) page 5, art by Jack Kirby

The subject of this book is, not surprisingly, money. The approach taken is very similar to the old Ripley’s Believe it or Not comic strips. Except for the covers, each page presents a number of related subjects. Despite the presence of a H. T. Elmo signature, Jack Kirby did all the artwork. Horace T. Elmo was not an alias of Jack’s but rather the owner of Lincoln News. Art with his signature appears in both pocket books and comics up to at least 1957. Most of what I have seen are gag cartoons. However considering how Elmo signed work actually done by Kirby, I would be cautious about attributing to him any of the art with his signature.


The Romance of Money (1937) page 19, art by Jack Kirby

The inking in ROM is incredibly detailed, particularly considering the small size of the publication. The Elmo signature is so small that I suspect that originally a larger sized book was planned. I have never seen a comic book printed with such fine lines although I have seen numerous cases where even less detailed work failed to print properly. Either a letter press was not used or the printer was particularly skilled. The higher quality of the paper compared to that normally used in comics may have helped as well. Frankly the fine pen work is uncharacteristic of Kirby and raises the question as to whether Jack did the inking. At this point in his career it is hard to believe that Kirby would have been given the luxury of only providing the pencils. On the other hand the inking is rather poor in some places (for instance the portrait of Charles Dickens on page 19). My belief is that this is in fact Jack’s inking but he was inexperienced with the fine pen work that he was attempting (perhaps at the direction of H. T. Elmo).


The Romance of Money (1937) page 6, art by Jack Kirby

Most of the work Jack did for Lincoln News had cartoon-like imagery which can sometimes be hard to relate to his later comic book work. The more realistic style used in “The Romance of Money” makes for easier comparisons with the work from much of Jack’s career then the rest of what Jack did for Lincoln News. While Kirby had a long way to go some of his stylistic traits can already be detected. Note for example the wide strides of the running couple in the bottom scene of page 6.


The Romance of Money (1937) page 13, art by Jack Kirby

“The Romance of Money” was republished in 1942 using the same artwork. I understand that the older and later versions can be distinguished by the cover but I have heard two reports of how this can be done. One is that 1942 version used red ink for the color instead of cyan. The other explanation is that the 1942 issue uses colored paper for the cover. Unfortunately I am unable to say which explanation, if any, is the correct one.


The Romance of Money (1937) page 23, art by Jack Kirby

More About the Comic Con Simon and Kirby Lithographs

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Posted in 2009/01, Odds & Ends, Topic and tagged , ,

The New York Comic Con web site has a page of show exclusives. If you scroll way down, or better yet do a search for |”Titan (1514)”, you will find the two lithographs that will be offered at the Titan booth. I previously provided images of both but those were of the restoration I made, not the final product. I looks like they did a great job.