Comic Mix is reporting the death of comics icon Joe Simon on 14 December 2011, after a brief illness. Born 11 October 1913 in Rochester, New York, writer/editor/artist/publisher Simon and long-time collaborator Jack Kirby created Captain America in 1940 (and on the cover of the first issue, had him punching up super-villain Adolf Hitler). Describing his genesis earlier this year to the AP, Simon said “Jack and I read the newspapers and knew what was going on over in Europe. And there he was—Adolf Hitler, with his ridiculous mustache, high-pitched ranting and goose-stepping followers. He was the perfect bad guy, much better than anything we could have made up, so what we needed was to create his ultimate counterpart.”
Simon was the first editor at Timely Comics (which would later come to be called Marvel). Later Simon moved to DC Comics to create the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, and Manhunter and take over the Sandman feature. The “Simon and Kirby” team were the first to receive regular cover credit.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, they formed their own comics imprints, Prize Comics and Mainline Publications.
Kirby biographer Mark Evanier, quoted by MSN, said that Simon, besides being able to write and draw, also knew how to edit comics. “Joe himself was the first great real editor who brought to comics skills he’d learned elsewhere and had some perception of how to put a magazine together and how to make a professional looking publication. He had some business acumen. He knew how to talk to publishers, he knew how to make deals.”
Evanier also credits Simon and Kirby with expanding the comics market into horror, crime, humor, and romance comics in the aftermath of World War II.
In a recent interview, Simon said that creating the romance comics was a high point for him and Kirby because they “negotiated to own half of the property,” something that had been an uncertain prospect in the industry.
Titan Books published his autobiography, Joe Simon: My Life in Comics< earlier this year. A personal history of comics, The Comic Book Makers, co-written with his son Jim, was published in 2007.
Simon was the recipient of the Inkpot Award in 1998 and the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame award in 1999. He is survived by two sons, three daughters and eight grandchildren.