Another One of These Stories…

I love to share coincidences with you and I just had a good one in my life. As I will explain in more detail here shortly, I'm helping assemble a book for Harry N. Abrams Publishing, the fine folks who issued my book on Jack Kirby. This new one is called The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio. It's a big book of covers and pages produced by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby and the artists who worked with them in the forties and fifties, and everything is printed from the original art so you'll see the erasures and white-outs and pasteovers and such. Much of the artwork came from the personal collection of Joe Simon. (The book, by the way, is produced in cooperation with the Joe Simon Estate and the Jack Kirby Estate and it'll be out around the end of summer. You can advance-order a copy here if you're in a hurry.)

So today, I'm writing little notes on all the pieces in it, explaining where each one came from and who drew it and such…and less than an hour ago, I come to this story called "Credit and Loss," which was drawn by the great Mort Meskin and which ran in Chamber of Chills #24, published by Harvey Comics in 1954. It's a wonderful story but I start to wonder if it should be included in the book. The original art was in Simon's archives and Meskin was an important contributor to the Simon-Kirby operation…but Joe and Jack did not edit or package Chamber of Chills and this book is all about material that Joe and Jack created or at least supervised.

Two panels from "Credit and Loss."
Two panels from "Credit and Loss."

We have more than enough material for the book if I omit it. Then again, it's a great example of Meskin at his best. Then again, it's not a Simon-Kirby product. But wait: If it's not a Simon-Kirby product, doesn't the fact that Joe wound up with the original art suggest it might have been in some way? Ah, but is "might have been in some way" reason enough to include it with all this other fine comic art that definitely was in every way?

So I start writing out the end note, trying to word it accurately and I figure I'll read what I wrote and decide if the story stays or if it goes. And just as I finish writing an evasive, equivocating paragraph that convinces me it should go, my phone rings and it's Sid Jacobson calling. You know who Sid Jacobson is? He was an editor for Harvey Comics. In fact, he was the editor of Chamber of Chills in 1954!

I hear from this man every five or six years but he somehow picked that moment — the moment I was writing about this comic he edited — to phone me with a question about Comic-Con. I answer him and then I tell him what I'm writing at that very moment and what I'm pondering. Sid says, "Let me look up that story and call you back." Three minutes later, he calls back to say, "That story must have been sold to us by Simon and Kirby because I never met Mort Meskin. The only place it could have come from was Joe Simon."

So it's in the book. And I feel like I'm in some Chamber of Chills. Do these things happen to other people or is it just me?