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Early Life

Joseph Simon, known professionally as Joe Simon, was born in 1913 in Rochester, New York. Raised in a working-class, immigrant household, he showed early aptitude for drawing and lettering, interests that he nurtured through school and local jobs. As a teenager and young adult he learned the practical side of visual communication as a newspaper and magazine artist, doing photo retouching, cartoons, and layout. Those experiences honed his speed, clarity, and eye for bold composition, skills that proved essential when he entered the young and rapidly evolving field of American comic books.

Entry into Comics

In the late 1930s Simon moved to New York City, where the burgeoning comics industry clustered around publishers, syndicates, and so-called packagers. He freelanced for multiple houses and soon became an editor as well as an artist. One of his early successes was Blue Bolt, which helped establish him not only as a versatile draftsman but as a capable story editor. While doing assignments for companies including Fox Feature Syndicate and for packagers that supplied various publishers, he met another ambitious young artist, Jack Kirby. Their temperaments and skills complemented each other: Simon excelled at editorial direction, packaging, and production, and Kirby brought explosive draftsmanship and storytelling dynamism. They quickly formalized a partnership.

Captain America and Timely Comics

Working with publisher Martin Goodman at Timely Comics, Simon and Kirby developed Captain America, a patriotic hero who debuted before the United States formally entered World War II. The first issue's striking cover captured the public mood and sold in huge numbers. On staff at Timely at the time was a very young Stan Lee, whose early editing and text features intersected with the pair's work. Even at this early stage, Simon displayed a strong understanding of branding, promotion, and the assembly-line model of comics production, coordinating freelancers and schedules with unusual efficiency.

National Comics and Wartime Service

After disagreements over compensation and credit, Simon and Kirby left Timely and moved to National Comics (later DC). There they revitalized features such as the Sandman and created popular series including the Newsboy Legion and the Boy Commandos, emphasizing hard-charging action, inventive layouts, and streetwise camaraderie. When the war intensified, Kirby was drafted into the Army, and Simon served in the U.S. Coast Guard, applying his craft to public information and training materials. The partnership endured despite wartime interruptions, and their names together became a hallmark of commercial and creative success.

Building the Simon and Kirby Studio

After the war, Simon and Kirby established one of the most productive studios in comics. They did not merely draw; they packaged complete books for multiple publishers, setting a high standard for covers, splash pages, and storytelling beats. Their roster of collaborators included talented artists such as Mort Meskin and Bill Draut, among others, who contributed to a distinctive house style under Simon's editorial oversight and Kirby's visual leadership. In 1947, seeing a gap in the marketplace, they pioneered the romance comics genre with Young Romance, soon followed by Young Love. These books became runaway successes and influenced the entire industry.

Diverse Genres and Entrepreneurial Ventures

The duo demonstrated remarkable range. For Harvey Comics and other houses they produced titles such as Boys' Ranch, which blended western myth with lyrical storytelling, and Black Magic, which explored atmospheric horror. They reinvented Captain America's spirit for the Cold War with Fighting American, a series that evolved from straight anti-Communist adventure into satire. Ever entrepreneurial, they launched their own imprint as industry conditions allowed, while continuing to package titles for publishers like Prize/Crestwood. Simon's editorial acumen, knack for cover concepts, and command of production were central to the studio's reliability and high sales.

Industry Headwinds and Transition

The mid-1950s brought upheaval to comics amid public criticism, distribution turmoil, and the advent of the Comics Code. Business disputes over profit participation and accounting at certain client publishers strained relationships, and the once seamless Simon-Kirby operation confronted shrinking markets for many genres. Around this time, the partnership wound down as each man pursued separate opportunities. Kirby moved on to other publishers and would later return to superheroes. Simon, drawing on his editorial and packaging skills, transitioned into advertising, commercial illustration, and humor magazines.

New Directions: Humor, Superheroes, and Experiments

In the 1960s, Simon created the humor magazine Sick, a satirical competitor to Mad that he shepherded for years as editor and chief contributor. He also helped spark a superhero revival at Archie Comics with The Adventures of the Fly and a new version of the Shield, bringing in artists and collaborators as needed and occasionally reuniting with Kirby for short stints. At DC, his restless inventiveness led to unconventional concepts such as Brother Power the Geek, a quirky take on counterculture that was short-lived under changing editorial priorities, and Prez, a satirical riff on youth politics created with artist Jerry Grandenetti. As the industry consolidated around costumed heroes, he continued to test boundaries of genre and tone.

Advocacy, Credit, and Reflection

In later decades, Simon increasingly focused on the historical record of comics and on creator recognition. As the value of classic characters soared, he asserted claims related to his role in creating Captain America and pushed for fair credit. The result included more consistent public acknowledgment that Captain America was co-created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. He penned reflective accounts of the medium's formative years, notably The Comic Book Makers, written with his son Jim Simon, which offered a candid look at business practices, personalities, and the improvisational energy of the Golden Age. He later authored additional reminiscences, deepening the historical understanding of how comics were conceived, produced, and sold.

Personal Life and Character

Colleagues often described Simon as organized, pragmatic, and visionary about packaging ideas for mass audiences. While Kirby's kinetic pencils drew immediate attention, Simon's strengths in editing, recruiting, budgeting, and marketing made the team a dependable hit-making machine. He balanced professional life with family, and his collaborations extended across generations of comics talent. Relationships with figures such as Stan Lee, Martin Goodman, Al Harvey, Mort Meskin, Bill Draut, Jerry Grandenetti, and DC executive Carmine Infantino traced a map of the industry's key nodes from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Legacy

Joe Simon's career spanned the entirety of modern comic books' first great century. He was there at the medium's commercial birth, co-creating Captain America, one of its most enduring icons, and helping to invent the romance comic, one of its most commercially significant genres. He built and managed a studio that set standards for production values, nurtured artists, and delivered bestsellers in crime, war, horror, western, and love stories. He adapted repeatedly as the market changed, shifting from superheroes to anthologies, from package work to magazines, from hands-on art to executive-level editorial direction. When the medium's history came under serious study, he became one of its essential witnesses, a voice tying together artistry and business.

Final Years

Simon lived to see renewed interest in the characters and forms he helped originate, including modern film and television versions of properties he had shaped decades earlier. He continued to appear at conventions, give interviews, and correspond with historians and fans, offering context about how collaboration functioned in an era before standard credit lines. He died in 2011 at a very advanced age. Tributes from across the comics world emphasized not only the power of his partnership with Jack Kirby but also his singular gifts as editor, promoter, and entrepreneur. In print and on screen, the visibility of Captain America and the durability of the Simon and Kirby brand underscore his lasting influence on American popular culture.