That's a photo taken by my pal Will Murray, the first time I met Joe Simon in person. I wish I could place the year but it was a year or two after Jack Kirby died so it was '95 or '96. I'd heard so much about Joe from Jack over the years that it didn't seem like I was meeting a new friend but reuniting with an old one. There had been business-type disputes between the two former partners, Joe and Jack, in the sixties and early seventies and each had said a few things in interviews that were later regretted. But 99% of the time, both spoke with unabashed admiration and even affection for the other.
Jack didn't particularly envy the way anyone else wrote or drew comics. Respect and admire, yes…but envy, no. He was simply not competitive in that area and it didn't matter to him if someone else drew better or worse than he did. What he did envy about Simon was Joe's total command of the process of publishing comics — from making the deal in the first place to shipping the book off to the printer. Joe could write or draw or ink but a lot of guys could do that. Where he really impressed Kirby was in how he could edit and design a book, especially the covers and splash (opening) pages. Editors, as often as not in the early days of comics, were guys hired to be traffic cops and paper-shufflers. "They didn't understand the process," Jack would say. Joe understood the process. He knew how to talk to publishers or editors when he and Jack weren't the publishers or editors. He knew how to talk to printers and to the other artists, writers, letterers and colorists. I have interviewed at least two dozen writers or artists who worked for the Simon-Kirby shop. Some made better money elsewhere but that aside, all said it was the best place to work because the guys in charge were so good at what they did.
Joe was better than Jack at reading a contract, negotiating a deal and convincing a publisher or editor that Simon and Kirby knew what they were doing; that they could and should be left alone. The team got good deals because of Joe but they also — and this mattered to Jack a lot — were trusted to do their work without micro-management and often, macro-management. It usually led to good and therefore successful comics.
Where Joe envied Jack was at the drawing table. Joe was a pretty good artist on his own but all too aware he could not compete with his partner for quality or even quantity. Often but not always, Jack penciled and Joe inked. Most of those who inked Jack's pencil art over the years felt they did it best; that they knew better than anyone how to "plus" every single thing Jack put on a page and add to it. Joe especially felt that way though much of the time, he was too busy with editorial and writing so it was necessary to engage others to ink Kirby pencils. Invariably, when the inked-by-someone-else Kirby pages crossed Joe's desk for editorial processing, he couldn't resist grabbing up a brush and adding a little something here, some texture there. It probably made the work a tad better but the main reason for it was that it made Joe feel better…made it all the more "Simon and Kirby" work.
Simon and Kirby split up in the late fifties when there was no available work for them as a team and contact after that was minimal, confined mostly to when one was involved with some project that required that they readdress the terms of the divorce. Finally in the early seventies, they got together at a New York comic convention for what was supposed to just be a brief dinner. It was cordial and a few outstanding points of contention were settled, though not nearly enough. There just wasn't time to talk it all out before Joe had to get back to Long Island or wherever the Simons were then residing. As it turned out, when Joe left the convention at 10 PM to head home, he found he'd parked in a lot that closed at 9. It was locked tight 'til morning and his car was penned inside. So he returned to the convention hotel where, as luck would have it, Kirby's room had a spare bed. They spent all night talking about the old days, discussing that which had earlier gone undiscussed and they became friends again. Still, they were friends who didn't communicate very often.
The last project they did together was not, as some obits on Joe reported, the 1975 Sandman series. They just did the first issue, which was released in 1974 as a special. Simon had been editing a few comics for DC then, most notably Prez, a witty and fresh title that I think would have succeeded if it had been allowed to run longer and perhaps if it had had a different style of artwork. Sales at DC then were in general freefall and almost all new titles were axed after only a few issues — in some cases at the slightest hint of weak sales. This is one of those theories that no one can ever prove right or wrong but I believe several of the many comics DC started and quickly stopped during this period would have caught on if they'd been given more time on the newsstands. Sometimes, it just takes time for something new to get noticed and appreciated. If Marvel had been as hasty to cancel new titles as DC during this period, Conan the Barbarian would have been declared a flop and cancelled as of issue #6. DC was axing books that sold better than Conan did at first.
Joe was understandably frustrated that everything he was coming up with for DC was meeting an almost immediate demise. As something of a last attempt, he proposed a new hero with the same name as a hero he and Jack had done back in the forties, Sandman. Jerry Grandenetti, who drew most of Joe's books of this period, was assigned to draw the pilot issue…and I'm not sure if he got all the way through the story or if he was stopped after a few pages but whatever he drew, it did not meet with favor in the DC offices. The project was aborted.
But then someone got the idea of reteaming Simon and Kirby. Hey, what about having Jack draw it?
Jack said no…and it was nothing against his former partner. For a myriad of reasons, Jack just plain didn't want to work with other writers then. But the publisher exerted pressure and Kirby finally gave in and began drawing the same story Grandenetti had at least started on. One piece of what Grandenetti did made it into the book — an Eisner-like rendering of the hero's name on page two was cut-and-pasted into Jack's pages.
Kirby, who was officially the editor of the book, did some rewrites on Joe's script. When the issue was handed in, all lettered and inked by Mike Royer, Joe and/or someone else in New York changed a few things back Simon's way without telling Jack. Still, Joe was genuinely thrilled with what Jack had done. DC Management thought the book would flop so instead of starting on a second issue, they put out the Simon-Kirby issue as a one-shot. It was a pretty good comic and when it sold well above expectations, they hastily scheduled a regular bi-monthly series.
By this point, Simon had fallen into general disfavor at DC and had gone elsewhere and Kirby wanted to go back to writing his own material and didn't like the first script that was produced by the writer the firm had engaged to replace Joe. DC published the new comic anyway — edited, written and drawn by different folks who'd done the issue that had sold so well. Jack did agree to do the covers and they put the name "JACK KIRBY" on them in uncommonly large letters, which I suspect was a mistake. If you splash Jack Kirby's name big on the cover and then offer a Kirby imitator inside, readers feel baited and switched…or at least they did then. In any case, the book did not sell. Kirby was practically ordered to begin drawing the insides along with the covers…which he did as of #4, hating every minute of the assignment. His ordeal didn't last long. Sales had been disastrous on the first three and when the numbers began to trickle in on #4 showing only a modest bump, the distributor insisted on killing the title.
Kirby found himself blamed for the failure…and oddly enough, Simon did as well, though he was nowhere near the premises when the poor-selling issues were published. One of the ways in which Joe and I bonded the day we met in person was via a discussion of this scapegoating. The day before in the DC offices, I'd gotten into one of my frequent (like, every time we were in the same room) arguments with a man named Sol Harrison who had been DC's Production Manager and later became its President. Sol had many fine accomplishments to his name but he tended to believe that anything done in the DC offices by folks on staff was magnificent and that if a comic flopped, it had to be because those fallible outsiders had screwed up. Simon and Kirby, he insisted to me, had screwed up on Sandman.
We debated that to no resolution but someone had told Joe what I'd said and we chuckled over it. I reminded him of the old Jackie Mason routine where he took stage and said, "Last week I played a club and the girl singer who was on before me was so bad that right in the middle of my act, they started booing her. They couldn't forget how lousy she was. Do you know that some people walked out on her while I was still performing?" Joe laughed and from that moment on, we were friends. He was a guy with pretty thick skin but the failure of Sandman had been a real emotional thing for him since it represented the finale of the Simon-Kirby team. And Joe was very proud of the Simon-Kirby team.
I visited him every time I went to New York after that. We'd usually meet for lunch at the Ben Ash delicatessen, which is across the street from the Carnegie — pretty much the same food but not as crowded. Once when I told him my lady friend would be joining us, he arrived with flowers for her. To this day, she often reminds me that Joe Simon brought her flowers and that I never do. My defense is that I'm just not as classy as Joe Simon. Which is true. Odds are you aren't as classy as Joe Simon, either.
There were other things I learned or could still stand to learn from Joe. He was always thinking of new ideas and new ventures. He was shrewd. He was not afraid to do battle.
People thought he was litigious and he did file a number of lawsuits during his lifetime…but he entered into them judiciously, usually winning and/or settling for fair amounts. He did not initiate them blindly out of anger as some do. At one point, he wanted me to help him sue a publisher he felt had wronged him but ultimately decided against it. "I'd win in a second but never collect a nickel from the guy," he said and later developments proved him almost certainly correct about the money end. Just after the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld died, Joe told me how much he admired him.
"Because he drew so well or because he lived to be almost a hundred?" I asked.
"Neither," Joe replied. "Because when he was 95 years old, he sued his agent."
That was Joe Simon…who when he was almost the same age sued Marvel Comics and collected a modest (but worth the effort) settlement. He was a smart guy right up to the end and in case it isn't obvious, someone I really, really liked. His recent death at the age of 98 did not of course come as a shock but the point is it was his body that was 98. Inside that, he was younger than most of us. And probably a lot smarter.