Today is the publication date for The Art of the Simon & Kirby Studio, a new book that I helped assemble for Harry N. Abrams Publishing, one of the leading publishers of art books in the world today. To get the Amazon link out of the way quickly, you can order a copy here. Now, let me tell you what you're ordering. Here's a slightly trimmed version of something I posted here a few months ago…
Before Jack Kirby worked with Stan Lee on the Marvel Super-Heroes of the sixties, he was partnered with a great creative talent named Joe Simon. It was Simon and Kirby who launched Captain America and the Boy Commandos and the Newsboy Legion and who invented romance comics and who became one of the most popular creative forces in comics of the forties and much of the fifties. Their studio produced great comics, many of them written and/or drawn by Joe and/or Jack but also employing other top talents including Mort Meskin, Al Williamson, Doug Wildey, George Roussos, Bill Draut and many, many more.
Joe Simon saved a lot of the original art to the comics they did and just before his death in 2011, he was looking forward to assembling a big art book featuring some of that art, presented "warts and all," meaning that you'd be able to see stray pencil work, smudges and pasteovers and corrections and everything. In my 2008 book, Jack Kirby, King of Comics, I presented a Simon-Kirby Fighting American story printed right off the originals and Joe loved the look of it and the idea of letting people see the artwork, up close and personal like that. He made a tentative deal with the folks at Harry N. Abrams Books, who'd published my book, to put out a whole book like that and he asked me to be its supervisor. When the estate representing Jack Kirby's interest (which is sharing in the book) asked me also, I couldn't say no.
The project got off-track for a time when Joe passed but since he wanted it out, it's coming out.
It's a big book. The pages are 9" by 12¼" and there are 384 of them. That is not the size of the original artwork. I love those big collections that do that but I find them hard to read and harder to store. This book is meant to be read and to that end, I included as many complete stories as we could locate.
Most of those 384 pages contain artwork by Simon, Kirby or someone who worked for them. Some though have an intro by me telling a little about Joe and Jack and what they did. And some pages have an article by Joe's son, Jim on what the world of Simon and Kirby looked like from his unique perspective.
Not much to add to that. I'm quite proud to be associated with this book. The art's great and the folks at Abrams do a dazzling job of production and design and making sure the printing is first-rate.
If you're anywhere near Miami, I will be speaking about this book at the Miami Book Fair, which runs November 16-23. I'll be there the last two days signing (I'm not sure yet when or for how long) and speaking (Sunday at 2 PM for an hour). C-SPAN will be broadcasting many of the speeches at the Book Fair but I'll bet you $50 mine is not among them but the one by Lou Dobbs is.