ALFRED HARVEY DIDN’T STAY with NYAD very long. He put to work what I had taught him and what he had learned by rifling through Leo Greenwald’s desk. Using his terrific talent for producing sample covers, sketches, and logos, he assembled some impressive presentation packages, selling himself to PDC, Publishers Distributing Corporation. Its owner, Irving Manheimer, funded Alfred’s first titles. At the same time Al, along with his twin brother Leon and older brother Robert, bought the assets of a small outfit called Brookwood Publications — they owned Speed Comics. He also bought the rights to Leo Greenwald’s Champion Comics, which he shortened to Champ Comics.
Though Manheimer was happy to back Al’s new company, he had some ideas of his own too.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ll put you in business, but I have some characters I’m taking from another publisher, and I’ll want you to do those, too.” PDC was distributing for a company called Helnit Publishing, and I think they owed him money. So Manheimer bought certain rights to The Green Hornet, and gave Alfred an advance that enabled him to purchase supplies and equipment. He put Harvey Comics into business overnight.
Alfred’s first offices were on 44th Street in the same building as Fawcett Comics. He had this idea for “pocket comics,” little books that were half the size of regular comics, but were still ten cents. I thought it was a crazy idea, but he was my friend, so I did a lot of free work for him. So did Jack Kirby. I drew the covers for Champ and Green Hornet, and we both did some covers for Speed Comics. We signed our work “Jon Henri” to avoid any conflict with Timely Comics. After all, at that point we still thought we were going to get royalties on Captain America.
Pocket Comics was Al Harvey’s first published series. Issues 1-3 all sported Simon covers.
At first the concept seemed to take off like a rocket. Pocket Comics was Harvey’s debut title, hitting the stands in 1941. I did the cover and some artwork for that first issue, while Bob Powell and Al Avison did interior features. It had the first Black Cat story ever published, written by Alfred Harvey and drawn by Al Gabriele.
But then it came to light that a lot of the pocket comics were being stolen, right off of the newsstands. They fit conveniently into the pockets of the buyers, and the vendors dropped them like a hot potato. Immediately Alfred went back to the regular comic book format.
But he didn’t give up.
Around this time in 1942, I moved out to Elmont, in Queens. I brought my parents down from Rochester to live there, as well. We were right next to Forest Hills, very near Forest Park.
Even though it was a short train ride out from Manhattan, that part of the city was idyllic. It was a Jewish neighborhood, very upscale, with beautiful brick-and-stone houses and apartment buildings, and tree-lined streets. The US Open Tennis Tournament was held in Forest Hills for many years, at the West Side Tennis Club. Some of the neighborhood’s most famous residents have included Helen Keller, Carroll O’Connor (Archie Bunker), Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Ray Romano.
At about the same time, Jack married Roz. It was a small affair, so only family was invited. At first she was Mrs. Jacob Kurtzberg, since Jack hadn’t yet changed his name — at least not legally. They stayed in Brooklyn, near Brighton Beach.
So there I was living in Queens, and Jack in Brooklyn, both commuting into the city where we were trying to figure out what we would do up at DC Comics. Then Jack Liebowitz offered to take us to lunch at a swank Hawaiian restaurant on Lexington Avenue. He wanted us to meet some of his editors, so he included Whitney Ellsworth, Jack Schiff, and Mort Weisinger. Whit Ellsworth was a cartoonist who had learned the craft by taking a course at the YMCA. He was also a pulp writer, and had been with National Allied Publications practically from the beginning. Schiff and Weisinger had been brought in from the pulp magazines, as well, to work with him on the Superman titles. We were tossing around ideas at lunch. Jack Kirby had the best idea there — he ordered three deserts.
Liebowitz had also invited Jerry Siegel to join us. Jerry was the co-creator (with Joe Shuster) of Superman, DC’s biggest hit, which made him a genuine celebrity. I think he was brought along to impress us. But if that was the case, it didn’t work out quite the way Liebowitz had planned.
In 1940 he and Shuster had been profiled in The Saturday Evening Post, where it was reported that they were each earning $75,000 a year. (That’s the equivalent of more than a million dollars today.) Jerry was getting a lot of publicity, and he loved it. Kirby and I would be working late at night, slaving over our drawing tables with the radio playing. Some talk radio guy would be broadcasting from a night club, and he’d say, “Oh, and here’s Superman’s Jerry Siegel coming in.” He’d bring him over to the microphone to interview him. Somehow, Jerry never talked much about Joe Shuster. Then the next night it would be the same thing from another club. Siegel would be making the rounds almost every night. I don’t know where he found the time to write a comic book.
In my experience Jack Schiff was an honest man. He didn’t much bother us, and I liked him. Mort Weisinger, on the other hand, was a very unpopular man. He’d been born in Washington Heights, the son of a garment worker — another “schneider.” There was one thing Mort was famous for, at least among the comic book crowd. As the designated “idea man” up at DC, Mort used to boast that he gave his writers their story plots. But that’s not the way it really happened. In reality, a writer would bring a plot to him, and Mort would go through it.
“Nah, that’s not what I had in mind,” he would say, and he’d give the guy a different story to work on.
Then another writer would come into his office, and Mort would look at his plot. He’d say the same thing — that it wasn’t what he was looking for.
“But I’ve got a great idea for you,” he’d say. Then he’d give the guy the first writer’s plot, and tell him to script it. This happened time and again. Word got around, everybody knew about it, yet for some reason Mort kept on doing it.
At one point Jack Liebowitz — there are too many Jacks in this chapter — moved out to Great Neck. Weisinger moved out there a couple of weeks later. The way I heard it, this was just so he could commute to work in Liebowitz’s car. Weisinger wanted to use the time to suck up to the boss.
Whit Ellsworth (who they called the company “goy” — I think everybody else was Jewish at DC) came up with a lot of the ideas for which other people received credit. The loudmouths there like Bob Kane would say they had done everything, and then people would give most of the credit to Bill Finger. But Whit, who probably suggested the ideas in the first place, never complained about it. He developed a lot of concepts and characters, and never made a lot of noise. Ellsworth didn’t do badly for himself, though. He married an actress, and DC sent him to Hollywood, where he worked on the Superman movie serials. He co-wrote the first feature-length film, Superman and the Mole Men. Then he was a producer and story editor for the Adventures of Superman television series. That was the big time.
The editors at DC — including Schiff and Weisinger — wanted everything to look “their way.” DC Comics had a reputation for the most sophisticated illustration style among the comic book companies. They had what we called very tight technique in all of their work. As a result, you could have twenty artists do a character or a series, and it would all look as if it had been drawn by the same artist. A lot of people liked that, but Jack and I were doing exactly the opposite. They tried to get us to do it their way, and we resented that — we didn’t want them changing our technique.
The first appearance of Manhunter in Adventure Comics also was the first time the signatures for Simon and Kirby appeared on the cover.
So we just kept on doing our own thing. We would produce an entire feature and just hand it in. That was that.
The first series we did was Sandman. Creig Flessel had been the artist on the original series. His stuff was beautifully illustrated, but it wasn’t selling. The character looked ridiculous to me, a guy in a gas mask, with a gun that sprayed sleeping gas to knock out the bad guys. So we just did it in the trademark Simon and Kirby style, with the skin-tight superhero costume and a sidekick named Sandy. Our stories appeared in Adventure Comics and a couple of issues of World’s Finest Comics. There were even a few that were used in All Star Comics, where he was a member of the Justice Society of America. Each issue of that title was a collection of stories starring the different JSA characters. Somehow they managed to tie our stories in with the rest.
Manhunter also appeared in Adventure Comics, beginning one month after Sandman’s debut, and in that case we took our inspiration from a movie that had been released in 1941. Man Hunt was about a British big-game hunter who stalked and nearly killed Adolf Hitler, who he considered the biggest game of all. It was directed by Fritz Lang, who had divorced his wife because of her pro-Nazi sympathies, and had fled Germany before the war. Lang was famous for movies like Metropolis and M, the terrific thriller with Peter Lorre.
We liked the idea of a hero who hunted the most dangerous game... man.
We had to have real inspiration before we would steal anything. When it comes down to it, I think there may be two original ideas in the whole history of literature. It’s like they used to say about the plum pie at Christmas. You know — there are only two plum pies, but they’re passed around to over a million people.
That first appearance of Manhunter, in the April 1942 issue of Adventure, marked another milestone for Kirby and me. That was the first comic that featured the “Simon and Kirby” byline on the cover. In years past I had signed my own work, or together we had signed covers as “Jon Henri,” but now the cat was out of the bag. Within a few short months there were blurbs appearing on the comics, proclaiming, “New SANDMAN Hit by Simon and Kirby!”
Jack and I had become a brand.
Both Sandman and Manhunter were instant hits. The Newsboy Legion and the Guardian came next, in Star Spangled Comics. That was our new kid gang, the first since the Young Allies, and the stories had a lot of humor in them. It was the first time I really tried to write comics in the style of Damon Runyon, with tales from the streets of New York. We had the character Scrapper saying things like, “Boy, what a fight! I ain’t enjoyed a scrap like this since the battle in Murph’s Alley!” (Back then, it was all exclamation points.)
Harry the Horse would have been proud.
The Newsboy Legion also drew from my experiences selling newspapers at Bausch & Lomb in Rochester. Jack brought his own recollections of growing up on the Lower East Side — his version of the Suicide Slum. He had belonged to a gang much like the Newsboy Legion, albeit without a costumed guardian.
The kid gang concept reached its peak with our next feature, Boy Commandos. During the war, the title sold more than a million copies an issue, outstripping Captain America Comics. We were told it was DC’s top selling title, with a circulation even Superman couldn’t beat. More than any of our other features, the Boy Commandos were inspired by the Boy Allies novels.
Boy Commandos was our first attempt at an international cast. We had Andre from France, Alfie from England, Jan from Holland, and Brooklyn from — well, you figure it out. In true Damon Runyon fashion, Brooklyn carried a Tommy gun in a guitar case with a sign on it that said, “Keep Yer Mitts Off.” Captain Rip Carter was the leader of their commando squad. Like Bucky, the four kids were supposed to be the squad’s mascots, yet somehow they always seemed to go along on dangerous combat missions. Looking back, however, I’m not sure why we were so fixated on all of those kid groups. They were fun, but with so many characters, they were very difficult to do.
This was the only time the Boy Commandos appeared on the cover of Detective Comics. Simon and Kirby drew their characters, while Jerry Robinson drew Batman and Robin.
The series got its start with a twelve-page story in Detective Comics, the comic that had introduced Batman back in 1939. The first issue they were in (#64) simply had a banner that announced, “New Feature The Boy Commandos.”
We did other Boy Commandos stories that began in World’s Finest Comics just a couple of months later, and ran for years. Then the big splash came when the commandos got their own title. The first issue appeared at the same time as their World’s Finest debut, and it was a huge hit. The series outlasted World War II by four years.
When we signed our contract with DC, Jack and I knew right away that we needed to rent studio space again. We never did any of our work in the DC offices, unless it was to clean up some artwork or erase some pencil lines. Whenever there was something the editors wanted to have revised, if we agreed to change it we would always take it back to our studio and work on it there.
This time we rented studio space in Tudor City, an apartment complex on a little knoll at the eastern end of 42nd Street. It was like a gated community without the gates — a great place to work. There was a Tudor City Tennis Club, and some great tennis players of the time used to work out in our front yard, including Bill Tilden, a champion of the cannonball serve. Today the United Nations stands between Tudor City and the East River, but in 1942 our building looked out at a power plant and a stockyard where livestock were constantly coming and going. Actually, I don’t think they were going anyplace. They were coming in and getting chopped up.
There was quite an artists’ legacy at Tudor City. Noel Sickles, the cartoonist who did Scorchy Smith, had lived in the Tudor Hotel. Milton Caniff, the comic strip artist who was doing Terry and the Pirates, lived in the Woodstock Tower a couple of years before we moved in. Beginning in March 1940, Will Eisner had a studio there, from which he produced the first installments of his famous series The Spirit, a comic book supplement that was inserted into newspapers.
Our studio was in the building next to Eisner’s — the center one that faced directly down 42nd Street. One of the unique features of our large studio apartment was a Murphy bed — a mattress and framework that folded into the wall so it was out of sight and out of the way. Since Jack and I didn’t live in the studio, we didn’t tend to use the bed. But when we weren’t there, many members of the editorial staff took advantage of it for romantic liaisons. After all, it was only five blocks from the DC offices. Just a short walk. The most persistent of the bunch was an editor who was one of our least favorite people.
When the studio was being used for its intended purpose, we often worked there with Charles Nicholas and Howard Ferguson. We had other artists come and go. For example, Gil Kane — who went on to be one of the greats — did some work for us there. And we continued to look for new talent. I remember one time when we interviewed a guy from Germany. He had a nice inking style, and his work impressed me. I must have said something to that effect.
“This inking, very important, right?” he said with a thick German accent.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It’s very important.”
“So I should be a partner, yes?” he said.
“No,” I replied. “It’s not that important.”
The Tudor City arrangement was perfect for me because I liked to work at home on my own. I was unusual that way — a lot of the other guys liked to work around their fellow artists. I was happy just doing my own thing.
Even so, I got to know a lot of the people who would wander through the DC offices, whether they worked there regularly or just came in from time to time. There was Harry Donenfeld, of course, and I think we were introduced to him every time we saw him. He never remembered. He’d walk around and talk about how he knew people in high places.
Bob Kane used to come to DC every so often. The word was that he had a big apartment in Essex House, a luxury hotel located on 59th Street across from Central Park. Supposedly his living room had tiles on the floor that formed a Batman figure. They say that when Kane moved out, the floor was demolished and ended up in the trash.
Kane would swagger into the DC offices.
“Either you got it, or you don’t got it,” he’d say.
“I got it,” he’d conclude.
As far as he was concerned, though, no one else had it. Nobody there liked him, and he took credit for all of Bill Finger’s work. Not to mention the things Whit Ellsworth and Jerry Robinson were doing.
Robinson was a terrific artist who worked with Kane as far back as I can remember. It took me by surprise, though, when I first heard that Jerry claimed he had created the Joker. I know some people who don’t think it’s true, but I have no first-hand knowledge of it, one way or the other. However, I have a lot of respect for Jerry and everything he’s accomplished over the years. All the guys in comic books back then were trying to get a newspaper strip, which was like hitting the big time. Jerry was one of the few guys who succeeded. Over the years he ran an international newspaper syndicate. And he was someone who lobbied for creators’ rights, especially in the Siegel and Shuster case. So you have to give him a lot of credit.
Bill Finger owes me money.
He owed everybody in the room money. But he was a very sweet, quiet guy — I think that’s one reason people are ready to believe that he did so many of the things for which Bob Kane took credit. Even so, I think Bill Finger received credit for a lot of ideas Whitney Ellsworth had brought to the table. People might have figured it was because Ellsworth was the company gentile. I think it’s just what happens when you work in a bureaucracy.
Even though things were going well for Jack and me, World War II was looming over everyone. It was certainly throwing a shadow over the comic book industry.
Alfred Harvey was drafted into the Army. He was forced to leave the day-today running of the company to his twin brother Leon and older brother Robert. Bob was an accountant, but he didn’t do much accounting. In fact, his first official act was to hire an accountant. Leon was the art director, having attended the Pratt Institute. At least that’s what Al told me. As far as I could see, he never showed any artistic talent. When he had to draw a hand, he put his hand down on a board, took a pen, and traced it.
When Alfred was drafted, he was stationed in Washington, DC, so he was available for decisions when they needed to be made. Will Eisner and Al Avison both ended up in the military, also in Washington. George Tuska was drafted into the Army and stationed with the 100th Infantry Division at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, drawing artillery plans. John Prentice was in the Navy, and was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. Even Jerry Siegel went into the Army in 1943. The ranks of artists and writers were depleted at an alarming rate. It was only a matter of time for Jack and me.
So Jack Liebowitz started to panic. He begged us to ramp up our production, so we would have something like three years of material stockpiled before our numbers were up. In particular we produced dozens of covers for all of our series — especially Star Spangled Comics and Boy Commandos.
It was a good thing we did it, too.
In 1943 I decided to get the jump on Uncle Sam and enlisted in the United States Coast Guard. By June, Jack was in the U.S. Army, and in August 1944 he was headed for Europe, where he was assigned to the 11th Infantry Regiment, a part of the Third Army under General George Patton. In August 1944, Jack was on a beach in Normandy, France.
One of the covers Simon and Kirby stockpiled before going into the service during World War II.