One of the many things I love about doing this blog is that its readers often pitch in to answer questions that baffle me or add additional info. This morning, I mentioned a man named either Rome Siemen or Rome Siemon who lettered oodles of comic books for Western Publishing's Dell and Gold Key Comics and who has gone largely unsung in comic book history. Several of you snapped into action and did online research. At the moment, I have info I received from Joel Thoreson, Harry McCracken, Judge Magney and Eric Costello. Here's what we now know…
His name at birth was Jerome Emil Siemon and at some point, he lopped off the first two letters of his given name. He was born August 8, 1900 and died on October 6, 1969. He hailed from Moline, Illinois where he worked as an elevator operator and a member of the house orchestra at the LeClaire Hotel, which is still around and now an apartment house. He continued to work in the hotel industry in various capacities while pursuing a cartooning career.
At some point,he relocated to Los Angeles. I'm going to guess that he did that for the same reason as 90% of those who wanted to be cartoonists and moved to L.A. around then: To see if they could get a job with Walt Disney or at least one of his competitors. A lot of folks who wound up working for Western Publishing's Los Angeles office came to town for that reason and often, someone at Disney sent them to Western.
But that's just speculation on my part. All we know is that in the late forties, he was in L.A. and doing work for Western, primarily as a letterer but I believe someone in the Western office recalled him also as an occasional inker. In 1951, he managed to sell a newspaper strip called "Little Moon Folks" to be syndicated by the Associated Press News Press but it and some other cartooning gigs he had didn't last long.
I should explain something here. Western Publishing produced the editorial content for — and handled the printing for — Dell Comics until 1962. Thereafter, Western published its own comic books under the Gold Key logo and Dell set up a new division to produce whatever comics they published. If you need to know more about this, I wrote an article you can read here.
Western operated out of two offices, one in New York and one out here. The "out here" office was originally in downtown L.A. but as the line expanded, they moved into their own building on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills on the same block as the local branch of the Friar's Club. Later, when the company downsized a bit, they moved into the Max Factor Building on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. When the company got even smaller, they moved into a building in Burbank right across from the Forest Lawn cemetery…which is where Rome Siemon was buried.
Mr. Siemon probably worked in a staff capacity at the building on Santa Monica Boulevard and went freelance, working from home, when they moved to Hollywood. He eventually became the main letterer of comics produced out of that office which included all the Disney books, the Walter Lantz books, the Edgar Rice Burroughs comics and many others. There were also non-licensed comics produced out of the L.A. office including Magnus, Robot Fighter and Space Family Robinson.
There were a few artists who worked for Western's L.A. office who usually lettered their own work, including Alex Toth, John Carey, Mike Royer and Warren Tufts. Most did not letter their own work and I would venture that in the sixties, about 80% of what came out of that office was lettered by Siemon. The editors I worked for there starting in 1971 spoke glowingly of his skill and reliability, which is not to say they were in any way unhappy with Bill Spicer, who largely took over Siemon's position.
And that's about all I know about Rome Siemon, though it's more than I did when I woke up this morning. A little more info about him can be found here…and again, my thanks to the readers of this blog who did some searching. A guy who did as much work as he did deserves to be a little better known.