Safe to say that comic books would've been a whole lot different were it not for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. If they weren't, as Mark Evanier notes in one of the interconnecting essays contained in The Best of Simon And Kirby (Titan Books), the first writers and artists to take advantage of the visual possibilities of a comic book page, they were arguably the first true giants. Bringing an unmatchable boyish energy to the medium, Simon and Kirby produced comics that popped right off the page.
Spanning the duo's career as two of the hardest working talents in the comics biz, the 240-page Best opens with their groundbreaking superhero work from the early forties, then takes us through examples of the twosome's various genre comics (scifi, war, romance, crime, western, horror, and sick humor) from the forties and fifties. With perhaps the exception of the Mad-styled humor entries — closer to Al Feldstein's Panic imitations than to the divine insanity that was Harvey Kurtzman's creation — each section shows two artists at the top of their game, finding new ways to expand the medium.
Much of the earliest work presented in this handsomely produced coffee table book collection is the hero stuff: Captain America, Sandman, and the Vision. With the oldest pieces you can see the two struggling to see how far they can push the parameters of comic book tier storytelling — the Vision entry, for instance, contains a page where one of the panels seems to slip out of the sequence altogether — though the learning curve is pretty steep. In the Sandman adventure, created a year after the Vision story, we're provided a full-page brawl between NYC cops and Viking gangsters that practically kicks you in the face. In the Stuntman episode from 1946, the two are producing the kind of panoramic shots that Kirby would make his trademark in the sixties Marvel comics. Compare the panel displaying the story's circus performance with a similar image in an early Hulk comic introducing the Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime. If anything, the Stuntman panel is even more dynamic.
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