When you`ve been around so long that people assume you`re dead, it`s time to make a statement. Joe Simon, who co-created the classic comic superhero Captain America in 1941, is working on it.
”I`m still here,” says Simon, 76, seated at the drafting table in the middle of a boxy living room in a small midtown Manhattan apartment cluttered with artists supplies.
The walls are covered with memorabilia, like his original sketch for Captain America, with the winged helmet and star-spangled shield to defend against the Axis forces of World War II. But his passion of the moment is on the drafting table.
They`re sketches for his first new comic book project since he left the field two decades ago to go into advertising. Just as the 1940s inspired him and co-artist Jack Kirby to create Captain America, the 1990s have inspired a new character: a green and blue superhero who does battle in racial conflicts worldwide.
”When we did Captain America, Adolf Hitler was a problem. We did Fighting American to fight the Red menace. Today they`re gone and it`s the race wars,” says Simon, a benignly ornery man with thick glasses and jowls.
He thought up the idea for the new crusader while watching the Los Angeles rioting on television. ”It was really scary when the police just watched.”
In the comic book world, it`s a sure bet that the character, called Jove the UNborn, won`t stand by while race riots rage. Dispatched from his headquarters at the United Nations, the cybernetic superhero created from a mix of races will surely pull out all the fictional stops whether in Los Angeles, South Africa or Bosnia. Sometimes the character will negotiate, but other times he`ll step in with a Pow Boom Thwack!
”He`ll solve problems by instruction or destruction,” Simon says.
”That`s when the drama of our character comes in,” adds his son Jim, 40, who`s helping write the story line. ”Will he give a sock in the jaw or settle it in a more politically correct way? He`s not Captain America going in and punching Adolf Hitler in the face. The world isn`t a black and white place anymore.”
With an artistic collaborator, Jerry Grandenetti, helping to illustrate, and his son in the idea arena, Simon hopes to be ready soon to show the project to potential publishers.
”I`m going to make a comeback,” Simon says. ”I don`t know if they`ll say I`m an old fool. That`s their problem. I don`t care.”
His voice is all bravado. Behind his thick glasses, though, his eyes say he does care. Illustrating and writing comic books was his first and only love in a cutthroat field that once loved him back and still holds him in reverence.
”He`s one of the industry`s grand old men. He`s one of the pioneers,”
said Mark Gruenwald, 39, a senior executive editor of Marvel Comics who writes the current version of Captain America`s continuing adventures. ”There are only seven or eight classic characters invented in the 50 years of the medium and Captain America is one of them.”
Simon got his first job in the business retouching photographs in 1932, a year after graduating from high school in Rochester, N.Y., where he grew up. Those were days when newspapers habitually gussied up images of movie stars to hide their physical faults.
”I was an expert at women`s bosoms,” Simon says, remembering how he used to give Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis a lift.
The rise of comics
After moving to New York City, he broke into comic books as an illustrator and writer for Funnies Incorporated, where a teenage Mickey Spillane was then a writer and editor.
”At the beginning, we thought we were at the bottom of the totem pole as far as art was concerned. We were ashamed. We thought we were too intellectual to do comic books,” Simon says. ”Today you have courses on comic books. They give credit on it in universities because it`s a unique American art form. Now, no one remembers the fine art painters and we`re invited to universities and worldwide gatherings (conventions). That`s a source of satisfaction in and of itself.”
Though consolidated and legitimized into a more mainstream industry in the last 20 years, the field used to be fly-by-night. Like Jerry Siegel, who created Superman, Simon and Kirby didn`t receive any royalties from Captain America and their other characters until successful legal maneuvering over relicensing and reprints of the old classics in recent years.
Simon used to resent how comic book companies made money off his creations without paying royalties, a longtime industry peril for cartoon artists of the early days when deals were signed with little more than a handshake. In his case, the more or less satisfactory settlements have assuaged those feelings.
”Could you believe they put out stuff like this that sells for $75?”
asks Simon, picking up the lavish hardcover reprint ”Captain America, The Classic Years,” published recently by Marvel.
Tough to break in
Despite Simon`s legendary status among comic book aficionados, it may not be so easy for him to turn his reputation into success in today`s market, according to Gruenwald of Marvel.
”Even though comic books are going through a renaissance, it`s difficult to launch a new character,” Gruenwald says. ”His name won`t necessarily have marquee value among today`s young readers. The majority have only been reading for a few years, three or five if you`re lucky. The readership has a very short memory.”
Today`s readers may not remember Vietnam, never mind the 1940s, when Captain America appealed to a public imagination captivated by World War II. In the original Captain America story, a military scientist creates the superhero by injecting an experimental serum into a skinny but smart Army volunteer, turning him into a muscle-bound he-man.
The scientist`s charge to the new crusader was: ”We shall call you Captain America, son! Because, like you, America shall gain the strength and the will to safeguard our shores.”
A year after creating the character and completing 11 issues, Simon and Kirby left Timely and moved on to National (later DC) Comics where they had negotiated a better contract. Their next project, Boy Commandos, was an even bigger seller than Captain America during World War II.
In a prolific career in the 1940s and 1950s, Kirby, who now lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and Simon created a slew of comic book titles like Newsboy Legion, Sandman, Manhunter, Stuntman, Boys` Ranch, The Fly (not the same as the well-known movies) and Fighting American. The two men were also responsible for launching the 1950s ”romance” genre with their titles Young Romance and Young Love, which at one time sold a million copies a month to an audience of mostly teenage girls.
In the 1960s, Simon moved into political and social satire as founder and editor of Sick magazine. He left comic book publishing in 1975 for the more steady income of the advertising field after his wife, Harriet, died of Hodgkin`s disease.
”They can cure that now, you know,” he says. ”They can cure that.”
He never remarried and he raised his five children in their Stony Brook, N.Y., home with his newly dependable income doing promotion and brochures for political clients like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javitz.
Housekeeping was not complex. ”I got a pressure cooker and lots of chickens,” he says. ”We lived on chicken soup.”
Then, as now, he attended to family matters during the day and worked late into the night, often until 2 or 3 a.m. These days, some of his children (they include an accountant, a painter and a writer) drop by, as do some of his six grandchildren.
`I just had enough`
Feeling financially secure, and with his children long gone from the nest, Simon believed it was time to quit working on the advertising pamphlets that have supported him for 20 years.
”I had enough. I just had enough,” he says. ”I just decided to quit. All my friends are retired and going around everywhere and taking vacations. When you get older, you don`t like to do things you don`t want to do.
”I used to live for smoking and sex. I don`t have either today,” says Simon, breaking into a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.
In fact, he still sneaks a cigar now and then despite doctor`s orders. So what`s left?
”My mind is sharp. My hand is steady as it can be.”
Lest there be any doubt-and we`re not doubting-Simon sticks his left arm straight out in front of him, palm facing the floor. He straightens out his fingers. They are steady.
Steady tempers, though, have not necessarily prevailed as Simon and his son work together on their new superhero.
”Anytime you work with relatives, it`s too close,” Jim says. Their first project together, a 1990 first-person history of the industry, ”The Comic Book Makers,” was dedicated to Harriet, the woman missing from their lives since she died in 1973.
”Sometimes I just walk out and don`t come back until the next day,” Jim says of their typical flareups over artistic matters.
Recently, the two recently argued over their new character`s name. Jim thinks Jove the UNborn smacks of the national abortion debate. Joe sees it as a mere coincidence and doesn`t think people will make the connection.
”We`re two creative people,” says Jim. ”I respect what he says.”
”But he doesn`t respect what I say,” Joe kids. Then he admits that he, himself, is no pussycat. ”I used to have a reputation in the business as a son of a bitch.”
Joe maintains he was a hard taskmaster because the field required it.
”He always told me to stay the hell out of the business,” Jim says.
”You got to be a little nuts,” Joe adds. ”You see that, don`t you?”
