“I think he should have a kid buddy”

The Library of Congress has a new exhibit featuring a recent donation, Steve Geppi’s vast collection of American comics and pop culture.

George Gene Gustines reported on the display for the New York Times. Many of the items reflect the interplay of comics and other media. For example, there’s the sheet music of a song inspired by the Yellow Kid. There’s the first mockup of the G.I. Joe action figure alongside one of the G.I. Joe comic books. There’s the storyboard for a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

But for the theme of the weekly Robin, the most important item is Joe Simon’s first drawing of Captain America, even before the hero started using a circular shield ( reportedly under pressure from the publisher of an earlier patriotic crime- and Nazi-fighter, the Shield). Created for Timely Comics publisher Martin Goodman, it labels some traits of his costume and logo.

At the bottom of the paper is this note:

Simon created this art in 1940. It shows how the popularity and practicality of the “kid buddy” was already evident to the superhero comics industry, only months after the debut of Robin the Boy Wonder.  And Simon recognized the principal benefit of a sidekick: giving the hero someone to talk to.

Supervillains Who Aren’t Really That Scary, #1

After World War 2, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, creators of Captain America, tried to get back into the superhero comics business with their own magazine, Stuntman Comics. (Discussion of what Stuntman owed to Robin the Boy Wonder here.)

That comic book lasted only a couple of issues before succumbing to market realities. Some of the material the team had prepared went back into Simon’s files, not to be published until last year’s Simon & Kirby Superheroes collection.

Among the unpublished material was a double-page spread that promised “the most insidious, cold-blooded character yet seen in comics pages!!!”

That was…The Panda!

Wielding the superpowers of…eating bamboo and not mating easily!

Kirby’s art suggests that the Panda commanded giant insects. Maybe giant insect robots. The way pandas do.

All considered, it was probably okay for this story never to have been completed and published.

Boy Commandos and a Killer in the Big Top

This cover to Detective Comics, #65, shows Batman and Robin welcoming a new team to the magazine: the Boy Commandos, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Judging by art styles, it looks like Jerry Robinson drew the Dynamic Duo, and Simon and Kirby drew the commandos.

The Boy Commandos were a logical outgrowth of a trend that started in early 1940, apparently following market research that said many readers of superhero magazines were boys. Suddenly publishers introduced Captain Marvel, Robin, and a host of other wonder boys and kid sidekicks. Simon and Kirby joined that parade, creating Marvel Boy for Daring Mystery, #6 (Sept 1940), and Bucky as a sidekick for Captain America (March 1941).

What might be even more marketable than one boy? A whole gang of boys! Gangs of kids had roared through comics since the days of Hogan’s Alley, but Simon and Kirby used them for adventures rather than humor. First came the Sentinels of Liberty/Young Allies, featuring Bucky, Toro, and a set of stereotypes. Then the Newsboy Legion, featuring a set of stereotypes. And in 1942, with World War 2 raging, the Boy Commandos—international stereotypes on a mission!

Soon that team was popular enough to join Batman and Robin in Detective Comics—they actually arrived in issue #64, possibly a last-minute addition since the cover didn’t even feature a small picture of them, just a banner. The Boy Commandos remained in the magazine past the end of the war to 1949, but they never knocked the Dynamic Duo off the cover.

That wasn’t Simon and Kirby’s only brush with Robin the Boy Wonder, however. After the war they contracted with Harvey Comics for a new superhero comic called Stuntman, with the first issue dated April 1946.That hero’s origin story starts with a crook trying to shake down a traveling circus. The circus manager refuses the crook’s demands, and the star aerialists, the Flying Apollos, shrug off the threat. But at that evening’s performance, the Apollos’ trapeze breaks. The newest member of the trio, Fred Drake, sees the other two performers fall to their deaths.

Later that night, Fred stumbles across evidence that the trapeze didn’t break by accident. He narrowly escapes being killed for what he knows, then bumps into a rich, handsome man who leads a secret life investigating crime. That man makes Fred his partner, encouraging him to fight crime while wearing a mask, cape, and brightly colored costume.

Sounds rather familiar, no? There are significant differences:

• Fred Drake is a young man, not a boy, and not related to the other members of the Flying Apollos.
• The rich man is movie star Don Daring, who dabbles in detective work as a hobby. He has no secret identity, nor much detective skill; he becomes the stories’ comic relief.
• Daring hires Fred as his stunt double at the studio—thus creating Stuntman!

Despite those differences, it’s clear that Simon and Kirby were recycling Bill Finger’s origin story for Robin from six years before.

The Stuntman comic entered a market glutted with other magazines after the end of wartime paper rationing. It lasted only two issues, so we never saw the promised arrival of Stuntboy.

Stuntman’s origin story and dozens of other comics in many genres have been restored and reprinted in the oversized anthology The Best of Simon and Kirby.

What Happened to Jack Kirby’s Panels?

Today is the anniversary of the birth of comics artist Jack Kirby. [Strictly speaking, as I type that was yesterday, but a deadline meant I didn’t get around to this post then. Rest assured, every other blog that even mentions superhero comics commemorated Kirby’s birthday on 28 August.]

I take the occasion to ask a question that often occurs to me when I look at the artist’s earliest and later work:

What happened to Kirby’s panels?

In Kirby’s early superhero comics work with Joe Simon, most famously in Captain America, the panels danced and twisted with the action. Here’s a page from Marvel Mystery, #25, featuring a hero named the Vision. The panels basically follow a 2x4 grid, but their interior borders curve and shimmy, and the fighting figures burst out of the panels in every interior direction.
By the late 1940s, however, Simon and Kirby’s layout style had grown more sedate. The Kirby Museum notes this in an entry on the team's pioneering romance comics:

by the time Simon and Kirby began working on romances they had already abandoned devices they had previously used to make their pages more exciting. Largely gone were the variously shaped panels and in their place would be a pretty standard comic grid. Also the extension of figures outside of a panel into other panels was no longer done.

Of course, romance comics were a different genre from superhero fight scenes. So here’s an example of the latter from Simon and Kirby’s Fighting American in 1953. The panel borders are straight and stuck to a regular 3x3 grid. Though the flailing figures still break through those borders, they didn’t intrude on neighboring panel space nearly as much.
Finally, here’s a page by Kirby alone from 1967, showing Captain America in battle with Batroc. Stan Lee wisely chose not to add any witty banter during these fisticuffs. In this 3x3 grid, the action is wholly contained within the panels, with the possible exception of a slice of the villain’s fist in panel 1. We see the same wide swings and punches as in the Fighting American’s fight, but they’re all cut off at the panel borders.
Perhaps Kirby liked working on regular grids all along, and Simon argued for breaking that frame. In an article on Simon’s early solo work in Silver Streak Comics, January 1940, the Kirby Museum says:

Simon does not seem to be satisfied with a standard panel grid and uses variously sized panels instead. Unfortunately it becomes a bit confusing and Joe sometimes had to add arrows to indicate the proper reading sequence.

Of course, every artist was learning the form back then, so this might not reflect Simon’s long-time preference.

Another possibility is that Kirby’s lean 1950s made him eager to be as productive as possible, and sticking to a grid saved him time in laying out pages. Perhaps different publishers preferred different styles. And finally, there’s the possibility that Kirby just came to like working within his panels instead of smashing them open. As Bully noted yesterday, Kirby knew very well how to break from his usual 2x3 grids for dramatic effect.