Work Quote by Joe Simon

Joe Simon’s brusque shrug of an answer is more revealing than it pretends to be. On the surface, he’s dodging a name-check question; underneath, he’s sketching the chaotic, factory-floor reality of early American comics, where “editor” was often a job title without much practical authority and creators learned to self-police because deadlines, budgets, and page counts did the real supervising.

The repetition is the tell: “editor... editor... editor.” Simon chews the word until it loses meaning. That’s not just impatience; it’s a quiet indictment of how these companies were structured. Yes, there were editors “on paper,” but the creative labor happened in a blur of penciling, scripting, inking, rewriting, redesigning. If you were competent and fast, you became your own quality control, your own continuity manager, your own fixer. In that environment, asking “Which editor shaped you?” is almost a category error, like asking which traffic cop choreographed a stampede.

The subtext carries a second edge: authorship and power. Simon, a foundational figure in the medium, is staking a claim to autonomy in a business notorious for treating creators as interchangeable hands. “The question has no answer” reads as both literal and defiant. It refuses the romantic myth that great work emerges from tasteful institutional guidance. In his world, the institution mostly provided paper, pay (sometimes), and pressure; the editorial voice was survival, internalized.