The recent edition of Time magazine (May 7) has a very short article about a new Hulk movie. It provides a time line which starts with:

MARVEL COMICS: Created in 1962 by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby …

It is nice to see a national publication take the time to get the credits correct. Too often in the past Stan Lee alone would have been called the creator.

JOE SIMON – LIFE LESSONS, is scheduled to be on CNN Monday, April 16 at 10 am and 2 pm. The interview was conducted by CNN’s chief medical correspondant, so I assume it will be covering more then just the recent death of Captain America. At 93 Joe is still active and in good health. I know that they filmed Joe working on a Captain America piece so you might get a chance to see him at work. He still has very steady hands. They also know that they took Joe out for a visit to one of his old work places.

I forgot to post that the winner of the Anniversary Contest has been picked and notified. To those who failed to win, I am sure I will be running further contests in the future.

Do not forget to enter my first anniversary contest. The prize is a issue of Foxhole #5. Admittedly a little beat up but very readable. Here is a chance to read some of the stories that I have been posting on. All you have to do is send me an email (hmendryk at yahoo dot com, you know the drill just replace at with ‘@’ and dot with ‘.’). Say Anniversary Contests in the heading and include a shipping address. I will pick a winner at random on March 25. Good luck.

Next week I shall blog on another pre-Implosion western done by Jack Kirby. Really nice stuff.

Another post will be a Simon and Kirby I never thought I would write about. Would you believe a screen play? That is right a screen play call “Fish In A Barrel”. Not a concept outline but a finished three act script, although it has never been produced.

As I mentioned in the past, there are a lot of blogs on comic books. My interests are not as wide as that covered by these blogs and I have only limited free time with which to investigate them. But I do take the time for those blogs that link to me. My philosophy is that if they find my blog of interests I am likely to find something of interest in their’s.

Well one such blog is a new one by Ferran Delgado. I have previously exchanged email and scans with Ferran and he is also a member of the Kirby list. The posts are written in Spanish, which unfortunately I cannot read. But he has some interesting images anyway. Ferran has been doing restorations of Jack Kirby’s Sky Master Sunday syndication strips. The archives for January (Enero) contains a lot of examples of this work. It looks like Ferran is doing a beautiful job. I cannot wait for it to be published, even thought that will be in Spanish as well. In the mean time we can all enjoy the images he provides in his blog. So I would like to welcome Ferran to the blogosphere and thank him for what he has provided. Check it out.

Having finished Foxhole I am sure I will do a similar review of some of the other S&K titles. I just do not want to immediately launch into another one. Instead expect a post about writer Jack Oleck in the near future. Also something about some early Kirby westerns. Foxhole has got me thinking about Kirby’s war comics so I think it might be interesting to examine some of his other works in that genre. This is much more then I can handle in one week so look for those posts throughout the next few weeks.

Also the first anniversary of the Simon and Kirby Blog is approaching. The monthly archives on the right might lead you to believe that this blog started in February. But when I started I used that month as a convenient place to keep things like my checklists which I knew I would be periodically updating. My first post was actually done on March 17. A year of musing on Simon and Kirby productions. Over this time I have had serial posts on The End of Simon and Kirby, The Art of Joe Simon and Early Jack Kirby (the conclusion of which has been postponed but is definitely in the works). Beyond that are an assortment of posts on various topics. I do not have a definitive count but it is something like 160 posts total. But despite all that writing I feel I have just scratched the surface. There is a whole lot more I want to write and learn about.

I do want to do something to celebrate my anniversary. So I am going to have a contest with a copy of Foxhole #5 as the prize. This is a low grade copy (probable a Good) but it is complete. Here is a chance to read some of the stories that I have been posting on. All you have to do is send me an email (hmendryk at yahoo dot com, you know the drill just replace at with ‘@’ and dot with ‘.’). Say Anniversary Contests in the heading and include a shipping address. I will pick a winner at random on March 25. Good luck.

For me this year’s Comicon is an improvement, I got in. That is not to say I was very happy how they handled it. There was only one small entrance into the show. This meant that even with tickets (the show was sold out so you had to have tickets) it took an hour to get in. For some special events (like Stan Lee’s signings) you had to go outside the show to get tickets. Having spent over an hour on line I was not about to go out again and have to wait on line once more.

Once in the show the crowds were generally manageable. They did have wider aisles so generally it was not too hard to walk around. That is except for Artist Alley. That was a disaster. Narrow walkways made passage painfully slow and difficult.

It’s not the San Diego show but I think it could be. However San Diego was a show that grew into what it is today. New York has had to start up running. The show’s management has made improvements but they have to make a whole lot more. If they don’t do so quick enough I am afraid the Comicon will never go much beyond what it is today.

I went to a couple of interesting panels. One on a movie that is being made of Will Eisner’s Spirit. Frank Miller was not there, but he will be directing it. Boy talk about mixed feelings. Frank is great and Sin City, both the graphic novels and the movie, were masterpieces. I look forward to the movie 300. The panel made it sound that the Spirit movie was going to be on the dark side. But the Spirit resides in Central City not Sin City. We shall see.

Also a panel on the Marvel Bullpen. Ralph Macchio, Gene Colan, Joe Sinnott, Fabulous Flo (sorry I do not remember her last name) and of course Stan Lee. Very entertaining and off course Stan stole the show. Not that he did this in a mean spirited way. Often Stan would redirect questions aimed at him to one of the other panelists. During questioning from the audience many of the speakers prefaced their questions with gratitude to Stan for all that he did. At one point Lee said that he did not deserve all the credit. That there were other artists that were important to Marvel’s success such as Jack Kirby, etc. He then added something to the effect of “but of course I was the most important”. Now if you read this it may make Stan sound bad. But to hear and see it delivered it was something else entirely. Nothing in the original questions required him to say anything about Jack or the other artists. His remarks about the importance of these artists sounded absolutely sincere. In his statement about his own importance Stan was obviously hamming it up and it was clearly meant to be a joke.

As for Simon and Kirby I did not see much original art. There was the cover art for the Harvey Fighting American. That is a bit of a puzzle for me because Joe still has “original art” for this cover made from stats. Why would he have done that if he still had the original art? My guess is that the art had already passed from his hands. Maybe Kirby had it or maybe it was already belonged to a collector. I did see once piece that was an important clue as to the identity of an artist that worked for S&K or perhaps Simon alone. I will post more on that if clue turns out to be valid.

The Comicon has thrown my scanning schedule out of whack. But I do have some more Foxhole ready that I can post on next week. Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll be able to wrap Foxhole up.

Well next weekend is the big N.Y. comic convention. Last year I was one of those who spent a couple of hours on line only to be turned away. I did help Joe Simon with his appearance the next day. But helping Joe kept me so busy that I really did not get to see much. Joe will not be showing up this year and I have bought my ticket in advance. Hopefully things will work out better this time. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any Kirby panel. Where is our east coast Mark Evanier? I will be on the look-out for anything of interest concerning Simon and Kirby. We will see if I find anything worth posting about.

I have scans ready from Foxhole #4 so even with the convention going on I am sure I will be posting on that issue. I hope my readers do not mind this review of comics which have so little Kirby art. The artists who worked for S&K may not have been in Kirby’s class (who was?) but they are talented nonetheless. Focusing on this one title has helped me clear up some attribution errors I have previously made. My biggest surprise was how often Joe Albistur shows up. S&K really relied on him a lot during this period. I plan to give this sort of treatment to the other Mainline titles and Win A Prize.

Recently I have been trying to inventory Joe Simon’s collection of original art. It is so great to look at so much stuff, including the art from Foxhole that I have been posting about. One of the surprises is how much work Joe did with DC during the ’70s. When I posted on the Sandman #1 cover I mentioned that the comic art was given the job number SK-2. Well DC also used JS numbering for work that Joe provided and they go up into the mid 300’s. Much of it was for romance comics Young Romance and Young Love. There are a few pieces, some with JS job numbers, that were “Written Off”. I suspect this means that DC felt they would not publish them even though they paid for the work. I suspect that they were concerned about getting Comic Code approval.

I have been very busy scanning and restoring Foxhole comics. So you next week you can expect something on that sadly neglected Simon and Kirby title. Unfortunately I failed to find time to do the scans I need to complete my Early Jack Kirby serial post so that will be delayed for a couple of weeks. But next week I also hope to post on an Astonishing Jack Kirby story. Also a curious Joe Simon and Jim Steranko connection, not historically significant but one I did not see coming.

This entering posts only on the weekend seems to be working well for me. In fact I may be doing about the same amount of blogging, I just post what I have done at one time. The only drawback is that recent posts may actually get scrolled to the next blog page. This seems to have happened to my Foxhole #1 post, so be sure you do not miss it.

Next week I hope to do the final chapter of my serial blog, Early Jack Kirby. But if that does not work out I should be able to get my first of a set of posts on Foxhole. Who knows maybe I’ll have both done?