by Mike Favila, Reviewer

Even though Joe Simon and Jack Kirby are titans in the comics field, I’m a little embarrassed to say that I’m not as well versed on their respective bodies of work.  My uncle gave me most of the original Amazing Spider-Man run for my first comics, so I was really raised on Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr.  Nevertheless, I’ve always been curious to see more from both authors.  If I had to guess, I would say the Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction is probably directed towards both the people that experienced it as it was coming out, in addition to newer readers like me, who are still just experiencing their back catalog for the first time.

In the introduction, Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) said that story line Race to the Moon was one of his all time favorite comic  series growing up.   At first, it’s surprising to think that  a creator of the book most often credited with deconstructing the superhero genre would be such a massive fan, but it makes sense on a few levels.   To take the leap outside of the genre, you have to be willing to believe that the self imposed boundaries of a genre do not actually exist.  While Kirby and Simon are renowned for their super hero stories, this collection makes it pretty clear that they were masters of imagination in other genres as well.

If you read the book chronologically, you can tell that here is a gradual progression in the skill levels of all involved.  The stories encompass a wider, more complicated mix of emotions.  Even the lettering matures!  The letters start out in huge bubbles that take up half the page, until the lettering gets smaller by the decade, more confident that the reader can absorb the details of the narrative from the pictures.  The art (especially Kirby’s) becomes a little more detailed, the figures more packed with kinetic motion.  To this day, it’s still a big deal in how powerful the figures are rendered.  Image Comics made a fortune with Kirby and Simon as their baseline.

The collection is built like a brick and meant to outlast moths and earthquakes easily.   It comes with a nice little dust jacket, but the book looks beautifully inside as well, even without the cover.  The introductions at the start of each decade were very helpful.  They provided a little context on where America and the world was at the time, and what current events and art would have influenced these two masters as they were just hitting their creative peak.

The really I’m struck by how shamelessly filled with wonder the stories are.   The creators dared to dream up complete worlds with their own rules and gravity, without thinking about how this would affect future stories, continuity, or even the next issue.  Most of the tales are untethered, free to go in unpredictable directions.  Maybe their imaginations were so fertile and packed with ideas, that it didn’t matter that each story would have been a franchise now.  It makes you appreciate how truly creative they were, especially in this era of remixes and reboots.  Instead of spinning off an existing idea, it almost seemed as they pulled them out of the air and laid them down effortlessly.

Just recently, I watched the Time  interview with Joss Whedon in regards to the Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.   He stated that it felt like the filmmakers had already set up a post-superhero era, where the language was being deconstructed and it was a requirement that everything today be grounded in reality.   The Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction is the antithesis of that work, in that it’s not only a pre-superhero collection, it revels in its ability to separate its stories from reality.  Jack and Joe weren’t concerned about their stories being grounded.  They were concerned that their creations didn’t fly high enough.  The Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction is a great and lasting tribute to their work, and will fit perfectly in anybody’s library.

Rating:
ComicsOnline.com gives Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction 4 out of 5 space dragons!

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