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marcyewebb's review
4.0
Joe Simon’s death in 2011 casts an unfortunate shadow over this book - Simon ends the book with a ‘Prologue’, feeling his work is not complete. Reading in 2019, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s passings carry another shadow over it. What is otherwise a great overview of the newspaper, comic book and magazine industry and growing up Jewish in New York in the 1910s and 20s, the rise of Nazism (including the rally in Madison Square Garden) and the challenges of World War II, censorship and the CCA, DC, E.C., Archie and Harvey, the difficulty of publications to stay afloat and creator rights vs. copyright legislation, feels if anything too short. In the last couple of chapters, decades of court hearings, work restoring and reprinting older work, attending comic conventions and awaiting the release of ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ are compressed into a couple of sentences at best. No sooner are we at 9/11 than we are at 2011.
That said, this is no major criticism, because this book offers insight not only into the creation of characters (Captain America, Prez, romance comics as a genre, even Spider-Man), but into the personalities and lives of both Simon and Jack Kirby, and Charles Hearst, wonderfully rendered. There’s so many great illustrations and comic art that it becomes a valuable reference. It just ends up feeling unfortunately incomplete at less than 250 pages, becoming a thesis statement for Simon’s entire life when as the title suggests, it should just be about the comics. Had Simon lived longer, I do wonder if he would have published any follow-up volumes. However I do want to chase up some of Titan’s reprint books now.
That said, this is no major criticism, because this book offers insight not only into the creation of characters (Captain America, Prez, romance comics as a genre, even Spider-Man), but into the personalities and lives of both Simon and Jack Kirby, and Charles Hearst, wonderfully rendered. There’s so many great illustrations and comic art that it becomes a valuable reference. It just ends up feeling unfortunately incomplete at less than 250 pages, becoming a thesis statement for Simon’s entire life when as the title suggests, it should just be about the comics. Had Simon lived longer, I do wonder if he would have published any follow-up volumes. However I do want to chase up some of Titan’s reprint books now.
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