by Mark Evanier
But with things so volatile in the news, it had to get to press in a hurry. Simon wanted to call in a whole squad of artists to draw it, but Kirby, with his usual “I can do anything” attitude, insisted he could pencil the whole book in the allotted time. Joe was skeptical, but he allowed Kirby to go ahead.
“I was lucky I did,” he later remarked. “The other guys would have been fine, but there was only one Jack Kirby.” Simon pitched in with a little penciling, and he and every artist he could round up did the inking. The result was one of the most exciting visual experiences to date in comics.
Captain America wasn’t the first comic book hero to dress like Betsy Ross had color-coordinated his wardrobe. The Shield, a product of the MLJ company, preceded him by more than a year. But the Shield didn’t have what Captain America had, which was Simon and Kirby busting clean through the panel borders and right off the page. It was the book other publishers would wave at their editors and ask, “Why don’t our comics look like this?” And did it ever sell.
Of course, the timing helped. The first issue reached newsstands on December 20, 1940. Just nine days later in a fireside chat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the U.S. of A. that war was imminent and that America must be “the great arsenal of democracy.” If ever there was the moment for a patriotic super hero, that was the week.
SHORTLY AFTER THAT FIRST issue was sent off to press, Joe and Jack found themselves involved with a rush job on another Captain. Fawcett Comics had a new super hero, the creation of writer Bill Parker and artist C. C. Beck. “Even then,” Kirby would later recall, “everyone had the sense that this might be the character who could knock out Superman.” The concept was simple but effective. A young, fresh-faced newsreader named Billy Batson had only to utter the magic word—“Shazam!”—and a bolt of lightning would transform him into the heroically empowered figure of . . . Captain Marvel.
The good Captain had appeared in Whiz Comics to great response and the Fawcett brass wanted a whole issue of him on the stands ASAP. That was more than Parker and Beck could manage, but one of the editors there, France “Eddie” Herron, had worked with Simon and Kirby back in their Fox days. He knew how good and how fast they could be.
CAPTAIN AMERICA
no. 1
March 1941
Art: Jack Kirby and Syd Shores
Marvel Comics
Above and following page
CAPTAIN AMERICA
no. 3
May 1941
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
Marvel Comics
CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES
no. 1
March 1941
Art: C.C. Beck
Fawcett Publications
At first, Joe and even Jack balked. It wasn’t a violation of their agreement with Timely. They could and did do occasional jobs for other houses, though it seemed prudent not to remind Goodman of that. Still, there was so much to do and so little time . . .
Then Fawcett waved a bonus and Jack, the man who never said, “I can’t do that,” proclaimed, “Sure we can do it.”
A hotel room just around the corner from Timely was rented, and for either a week (Simon’s recollection) or ten days (Kirby’s), they would work there or in their office, batting out Captain Marvel pages along with their other commitments. “We’d work most of the night, catch a few hours of sleep, shower, then drag ourselves in to Goodman’s,” Kirby recalled. “I’d even knock out a page or two at the office, when Martin thought I was doing his books.” One time, Kirby was doing just that, roughing in a pose of Captain Marvel, when Goodman wandered in and peered over his shoulder. Without missing a beat, Jack began adding Captain America’s flaglike raiment to the figure, and Goodman departed, none the wiser.
Simon did most of the writing and a little penciling. Kirby did a little writing and most of the penciling. Joe jobbed the inking out to every artist he knew, and some he didn’t, though Dick Briefer (another Fox escapee) appears to have done the bulk of it. The end product was inconsistent and unpolished, but the deadline was met.
Just before the exhausted duo was about to deliver the material to Fawcett, Kirby raised the question of affixing the usual Simon-Kirby credit on it. “I think this thing’s going to bomb,” Joe muttered. Jack agreed, and as a result their names appeared nowhere on one of the biggest hits the industry had ever seen—soon the bestselling comic of its day.
That didn’t bother them . . . much. They had a winner in Captain America. Sales quickly shot past the million mark, ranking the new hero with Superman, Batman, and other giants of the newsstand. “Captain America put Goodman on the map,” Kirby recalled. “His entire line went up fifty percent because of it.”
Still, not everyone loved the flag-draped hero. There were threatening phone calls and anti-Semitic hate mail. The threats were reported to the police, and everyone was puzzled that uniformed officers were so readily dispatched to patrol Goodman’s corridors. A few days later, Simon was startled when the receptionist announced that New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was on the phone, asking to speak to the editor of Captain America. “It was him, no doubt about it,” Simon explained. “He said he loved the book and he said, ‘You boys are doing a great job and the city of New York will make certain that no harm comes to you.’”
Another time, Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, “There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America.” To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived. Years later, he told an interviewer, “I once got a letter from a Nazi who told me to pick out any lamppost I wanted on Times Square, because when Hitler arrived, they’d hang me from it. It was typical of a genre of fans who have long since died out.”
U.S.A. COMICS
no. 1
August 1941
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
Marvel Comics
YOUNG ALLIES
no. 1
Summer 1941
Art: Jack Kirby and Syd Shores
Timely Comics
Simon and Kirby did ten issues of Captain America and super-hero comics were never the same. This is what Harvey Kurtzman, who would later invent MAD Magazine, had to say about what happened there:
Kirby was the critical element in the Simon and Kirby partnership. He was perfect for the medium. He stripped everything down to essentials. His understanding of mass and movement was uncanny, filling his pictures with so much action that they bulged beyond the borders of the panels. There was such fury and energy in the work that it couldn’t be contained. Kirby was an absolute force.
Before Simon and Kirby, the super hero was, in a sense, realistically oriented. Despite the characters’ superhuman powers, they were not drawn in action in ways that suggested how extraordinary they were. When Simon and Kirby drew Captain America though, they depicted his super-action through opposing lines that clashed and exploded all over the panels. Alongside of Simon and Kirby’s work, everything else was static, pale, anemic.
Joe and Jack were way out in front in making comic books different from strips. They had a bigger canvas and they used it, designing by the page instead of by the panel and forging a new style for a new medium. Before them, almost everyone drawing adventure comics had been replicating five syndicated strip artists—Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Roy Crane, Milton Caniff, or Chester Gould. Even Joe and Jack had mimicked all five at times.
But now they were Simon and Kirby, and others would want to be, as well. Gil Kane, who would become one of the top illustrators, would remark, “They were the first comic book artists to inspire others with their drawing.”
SIMON AND KIRBY WERE the perfect team . . . but as good as Joe was, he was not the best partner that Jack found for himself, then or ever. It was while working on Captain America that Rosalind Goldstein appeared, and a Kirby-style explosion o
ccurred. Right on the spot.
Roz, as everyone called her, lived in a second-story duplex apartment. The Kurtzbergs, thanks to Jack’s income, had moved into the first floor. One day when she saw Jack playing stickball out in the street, there was instant mutual notice. But here—let Roz tell you in her own words how it happened:
Almost the first thing he said was, “Would you like to see my etchings?” I didn’t know what the word “etchings” meant so he explained, “my drawings.” He wanted to take me into his bedroom and I thought, “Why not? His parents are in the next room, my parents are in the next room, what could happen?”
So he takes me to his bedroom and—can you believe it?—he really did have etchings in there. He showed me all these drawings, including pages he was drawing of Captain America. He showed me the first comic books I had ever seen, but I was more interested in Jack. I started wondering what he’d look like in swim trunks. He was quite a catch.
They started dating. “It was the cheapest date in the world because Roz lived upstairs,” Jack recalled. “I’d go up and have dinner with her parents, or she’d come down and have dinner with mine, then we’d go out to a movie together.” On May 23, 1942, Rosalind Goldstein became Mrs. Jack Kurtzberg. Later, when her husband legally changed his name, she would become Mrs. Jack Kirby.
They rented a place in Manhattan Beach for fifty-three dollars a month. “It was a huge apartment,” Roz recalled. “I think he was still trying to impress my folks.” At the time, Jack was making seventy-five dollars a week from his job with Martin Goodman.
Roz became more than his spouse. She was his partner in every aspect of his life, his work included. True, she didn’t write or draw the stories (occasionally, she helped with inking) but she made it possible for Jack to get to the drawing board each day and inspired him to stay there.
She consulted with him on every aspect of his career and acted as a stabilizing voice of reason when, as happened all too often in Jack’s life, that career gave him cause for anger. She cooked for him and dressed him and had four children by him. And when Jack’s umpteenth auto accident caused him to forsake driving, she even took to chauffeuring him about. From the day they married, Jack Kirby was a two-person operation.
AND SPEAKING OF PARTNERS, there was another one in his future.
Other artists and writers worked with Joe and Jack, but the most famous helper was a young man named Stanley Martin Lieber—eighteen years of age and determined to make his fortune as a famous writer of things other than comic books. But since assisting Simon and Kirby was the job he could get, he’d do comics. For a while, anyway.
To save his real name for his real career, he should have just not signed his work. Many writers then did not. But he liked seeing his name in print even if it wasn’t his name, so he came up with a pseudonym: Stan Lee.
Back when he was saving his birth name (Stanley Martin Lieber) for when he would become famous. Over sixty years later, he’s still Stan Lee.
c. 1944
He was hired at Timely via the same selection process that most comic companies used to hire their key office personnel: unabashed nepotism. An uncle, Robert Solomon, was a business manager for Martin Goodman, along with later becoming Goodman’s brother-in-law.
Recalled Stan, “Jack and Joe were virtually the whole staff. Jack sat at a table behind a big cigar and he was drawing. Joe stood up behind another big cigar, and he would ask Jack, ‘Are you comfortable? Do you want some more ink? Is your brush okay? Is the pencil all right?’ And then Joe would go out and yell at me for a while, and that was the way we spent our days. I was a gofer. I’d go for the coffee, for the broom, for Jack’s cigars. They also let me write some copy.”
Stan’s debut was a text story in Captain America no. 3, and before long they let him write actual comics. Joe and Jack took a liking to the young man, though he drove both of them to occasional distraction with his questions and by practicing on his ocarina around the office.
MORE DISTRACTING TO JOE and Jack was an increasing certainty that they were being swindled on the profits they were to receive on Captain America and other books. Goodman was claiming almost every expenditure in his office as an expense to be charged against the budget of Captain America. This reduced his profits (on paper) to near nothing, and he paid Simon and Kirby their shares accordingly. “Hollywood Accounting,” they’d call it in another time and place. “Martin was making a fortune and bragging about it,” Jack recalled. “At the same time, he was claiming his best-selling book was making only a tiny profit.”
It seemed like a good deal to get out of, and a good time to do so. Simon phoned Jack Liebowitz, who ran DC Comics, the industry leader, and was delighted that Liebowitz knew of Simon and Kirby and would welcome their presence in his line. Quietly, lest Goodman get wind of it and boot them out before they were ready, Joe negotiated what would be for a time the richest deal ever for guys who wrote and drew comics. Stan Lee found out and was sworn to secrecy with the promise of being included in the new venture.
Then Goodman found out. Stan would forever deny having snitched, and Joe and Jack would forever not believe him. Still, someone blabbed so Simon and Kirby were ordered off the premises. Goodman installed a brother in the editor job for a few weeks, then stuck Stan behind the desk while he looked for someone permanent. Sixteen years later, when Jack returned to the company, he’d be hired back by its editor in chief, Stan Lee.
ADVENTURE COMICS
no. 73
April 1942
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
DC Comics
STAR SPANGLED COMICS
no. 7
April 1942
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
DC Comics
ADVENTURE COMICS
no. 90
February 1944
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
DC Comics
SIMON AND KIRBY WERE welcomed to DC Comics, but not by everyone. They’d be running their own studio, hiring artists and sometimes writers, producing stories for the company as outside suppliers. However, some of the inside suppliers objected. The most vocal was an editor, Mort Weisinger, who didn’t like that his company was publishing comics that didn’t go step-by-step under his editorial purview. He insisted on buying scripts from his writers and giving them to Joe and Jack to draw. Joe and Jack insisted on making paper airplanes out of them.
Jack would later recall the period as one of his happiest: “They tried for a while to control us, but we knew how to do comics. Finally, they let us do whatever we wanted. They were thrilled with everything we did, and the readers were thrilled. Weisinger was the only one not thrilled.” Simon and Kirby produced four strips for DC: two original, one revamp, and one revamp that was so different it was virtually an original.
This last was Manhunter, a strip that had been featured in Adventure Comics. The old version was a plainclothes detective in the manner of radio’s Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons. DC was going to drop it altogether, but Joe and Jack thought the name was too good to waste. They did a full teardown making him into a big game hunter who donned a mask and switched to hunting another kind of animal—the human criminal—when a friend was killed.
The plain revamp was Sandman, also of Adventure Comics. This one had started life as a Green Hornet imitation, then turned into a road company Batman, Robin clone and all. Then Joe and Jack came along, adding weirder villains and a dream/nightmare theme. Even Paul Norris, the artist they replaced on the feature, was impressed with how much life and excitement Simon and Kirby could bring to a weary premise.
The two original creations were both kid gangs, a notion Joe and Jack had just begun to dabble in at Timely with a strip called Young Allies—though actually, Jack had been dabbling in it since his childhood. DC’s Star Spangled Comics accommodated the Newsboy Legion, a band of tough street kids, not unlike those who’d once elbowed Jakie Kurtzberg aside when he tried to pick up newspapers to sell. A police officer, who in his spare tim
e liked to put on a super-hero suit and call himself the Guardian, kept them out of trouble.
Best of all was the other kid gang, the one that went into Detective Comics, right behind Batman. It was so good that almost immediately Liebowitz decided to give it a book of its own, a distinction only Superman and Batman had then achieved at the company. The Boy Commandos were four teens gathered from around the world by an adult named Rip Carter to form a fighting squadron and aid the war effort. One was from France, one was from England, one was from the Netherlands, and there was one from Brooklyn who sounded and acted a lot like Kirby. (Every teen gang Joe and Jack did had one member who resembled Kirby. The one in the Newsboy Legion was named Scrapper.)
Everyone was impressed by the dynamic stories and art, and even more impressed by the sales. Simon and Kirby were at the peak of their game, the top of their profession. Jack would call it, “The best time of my life apart from one minor detail.” Only to Kirby would World War II be “one minor detail.”
Joe Simon, Martin Bursten, and Jack Kirby
For some reason, they’re looking over a Boy Commandos page even though both Simon and Kirby agreed that their friend Bursten, who occasionally wrote for their books, never worked on Boy Commandos.
Above and following pages
BOY COMMANDOS
no. 1
Winter 1942
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon