The Simon and Kirby Library: Crime (The Simon & Kirby Library)
Although they’re best known for their seminal superhero sagas—they created Captain America in 1940—the team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby successfully tackled virtually every other genre comic books had to offer. This oversize volume showcases their contributions to the disreputable field of crime comics, whose gruesome excesses incited public outrage that nearly toppled the comic-book industry in the mid-1950s. Simon and Kirby’s efforts are markedly less lurid than most, but if they lacked the sensationalism of their competitors, they compensated with forceful energy and gritty drama. The pulpy scripts, with titles like “Pay Up or Die” and “Bullet-Proof Bad Man” and often based on real-life outlaws like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, are serviceable and unnuanced; it’s the explosively dynamic artwork by Kirby—who would go on to resurrect and transform the superhero genre at Marvel comics in the 1960s—that gives these tales their visceral power. The same kinetic action that made Kirby’s groundbreaking superhero tales so dynamic proves equally effective in the violent milieu of mobsters and their molls. --Gordon Flagg