Joe Simon was the first guy Jack Kirby ever met who wasn’t from New York City (he came from Syracuse), but together they created most of the famous comic book characters that remain standard bearers for the industry including (but not limited to): Captain America, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Silver Surfer, Sandman, The X-Men, Thor. Kirby was the lightning-fast illustrator who dropped out of Pratt after two weeks, Simon the businessman who made sure the pair got a square deal (a mother from Kirby’s neighborhood was afraid life as an artist would land a boy “in a beret in Greenwich Village, talking to loose women”). If there’s one thing the two men would want modern fans of the medium to know, it’s that Stan Lee, former chairman and president of Marvel Comics, was “just a little wise guy… from a family that was upper-middle class [who] could do whatever he liked… say whatever he liked.” Simon and Kirby “considered him a pain in the ass [who] grew up to be exactly what we considered him.”
From an office in Tudor City (that sits where the United Nations building is today), the original dynamic duo drew thousands of pages in a tiny apartment with one large room, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. For the first time, a portion of that work has been collected and published, by Abrams ComicArts, in The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio, selected and with an introduction by Mark Evanier and an afterword by Jim Simon.
The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio/Abrams ComicArts
