The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction
Their groundbreaking, action-packed superhero tales made Simon and Kirby comic books’ most popular creators in the 1940s, but when the popularity of costumed crime fighters waned, the team turned to other genres, including the science-fiction sagas that were seeing success on the big and small screens. This oversize collection leads off with the Blue Bolt, an early superhero with sf trappings who just predates the late-1940 debut of Simon and Kirby’s seminal Captain America, but the bulk of the volume comprises some two-dozen short stories from the 1950s dealing with space exploration, scientific experiments gone wrong, interplanetary visitors, and other familiar tropes. Twilight Zone–style twist endings are de rigueur, even though the pieces actually predate that show’s 1959 premiere. Although these comics fail to even reach for the relative literary sophistication of the sf titles published by EC Comics in the early ’50s—considered the genre’s gold standard—their lack of pretension, perfectly expressed in the verve of Kirby’s robust drawings, makes them arguably more appealing to today’s readers. --Gordon Flagg