MAD ORIGINALLY had been a full-color comic book started by Harvey Kurtzman. Bill Gaines turned it into a 25-cent magazine so he wouldn’t be required to run it past the Comics Code Authority. But Kurtzman left MAD and convinced Playboy’s Hugh Hefner to bankroll a magazine called Trump, which only lasted two issues. He tried again with Humbug, which was the size of a regular comic book. It was canceled after 11 issues. As a magazine MAD really took off, and at one point in the 1970s it was selling more than two million copies a month.
Mike Bleier died in 1960, about the time I got a call from Teddy Epstein. Despite our earlier disputes, Teddy knew where to go when he needed to get something done. I met with him in his office, which was now in a lower-rent district downtown. He was very excited.
“MAD magazine is doing wonderfully,” he said. “It’s got terrific sales, and I want you to put out a magazine just like it.”
“Everybody is putting out a MAD,” I said doubtfully. “Why should we do another one?”
I tried to discourage him, but Teddy was adamant. He knew a trend when he saw one, and he was certain he could make a lot of money on this one. Finally he convinced me.
“Okay, I’ll work something up,” I said. Then I went home and made one of the smartest moves of my career. I wrote up a letter confirming that Teddy wanted to publish my humor magazine. I went back to him and we worked out a partnership deal. Once again I would receive half of the profits, but this time the editorial costs were written into the agreement. He signed, and I started to pull together a creative team.
Sick gave me the opportunity to try a lot of different illustration styles.
Our artists included Bob Powell, Angelo Torres, Dick Ayers, Gray Morrow, Jerry Grandenetti, and Jack Davis. We tried to emulate MAD magazine all the way, and used to spend half of our issues taunting them to sue us. That would have been terrific publicity. But Bill Gaines was a friend of mine, and he was the big guy with the big money now. Why would he go to the expense of suing us? Instead Bill made light of it, and he never bit.
Jack Davis had broken with MAD and gone with Harvey Kurtzman. When Kurtzman’s magazines flopped, I was fortunate enough to be able to afford Davis, despite the rates we were offering.
He was tall, straight as an arrow, and good-looking with the personality of the all-American young man. Jack used to come over to my studio in Woodbury, and I would pose for photographs he would use for reference. He didn’t produce much work there, other than to do corrections or touch-ups. He preferred to work at home. Jack was considered the premiere cartoonist of his time.
I don’t think Harvey Kurtzman liked me. He and Al Feldstein had come to me when they were younger, looking for work. They brought their samples, and I looked at them. I told them the truth — that it wasn’t the style we were looking for.
“Get out of this business,” I said to them. “You’re too good for it.” But they didn’t seem to appreciate what I had to say. After Kurtzman, Al Feldstein became the editor of MAD, and as I understand it he was the highest paid editor in the magazine business. He did a wonderful job, too.
Jack Kirby was up at my house one time, and he saw some of the material from Sick.
“Hey, this is interesting,” he said, picking up a page and looking it over. “Maybe I should come in with you on it.” But nothing ever happened, and I didn’t get the impression he was upset. The truth is that I was relieved. He and I hadn’t done a lot of humor, and I wasn’t sure if his work was the sort of humor I was looking for. Plus if I brought him in, he would have had to be a partner. I already had a deal with Teddy.
With the exception of Kirby, Angelo Torres may have been my favorite artist.
At Sick, it was the writing that really set us apart from MAD. I did some of it myself, but my best move was bringing in Dee Caruso. His real name was Dominic, but he never used it. He had a writing partner named Bill Levine, and I met them through Marty Burstein (before he lost an “i”). Dee was a genius. He and Levine would write these stand-up comedy skits, and let us publish them before they used them anywhere else. Readers could take the skits and use them like a do-it-yourself act at parties. Then he would sell them to guys like Jerry Lewis and Joey Bishop, or NBC and CBS, whether we had copyrighted them or not. I didn’t know how to handle it, really, but you can’t fight over these things your whole life. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.
I kept in touch with Dee for years. He moved out to Hollywood where he wrote for Get Smart, The Bill Cosby Show, The Smothers Brothers, and Gilligan’s Island. He was the head writer for The Monkees, writing 22 of their episodes. He sent me a letter once during the Watts Riots.
“Joe, I was in a supermarket today,” he wrote, “and they had looted everything in the store.
“The only thing left was 12 issues of Sick magazine.”
Teddy Epstein got Hearst to distribute Sick, and the first issue went out dated August 1960, sporting a Joe Simon cover painting. Given the fate of the other MAD clones, we didn’t expect anything to come of it. But Teddy came to me one day.
“Guess what,” he said. “We have terrific sales.”
“That’s impossible,” I responded.
“No, really,” he insisted. “It was a great sale.”
It was still just half of what MAD was selling. But since MAD was a huge success, that left us with very good numbers. They stayed like that for the second issue, and the third. Then Teddy came back to me.
“I’m gonna switch distributors,” he said.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This isn’t making any sense. We’re doing great!”
“I’m going to Publishers Distributing Corp.,” he insisted.
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“They’re giving me a bigger advance.”
As soon as Sick transferred from Hearst to PDC, the sales went down. We published that magazine for 25 years, and it never again attained the great numbers of that first issue. We had our fans, though, and they were more sophisticated. They stuck with us. The famous comedian Lenny Bruce was a big fan. He had a standing order. Whenever we had something about him in the magazine, he bought 100 copies to send to his clients.
A sample of the material that made Jack Davis great.
Teddy was part of another group that got together to play cards, a bunch of high rollers. The comedian Don Rickles was a member of their gang, and he would join them whenever he came to New York. They’d all sit around and tell jokes about Israel.
“There’s this guy in Tel Aviv. He’s driving his car, and he’s at the square and he runs into a cop, who stops him.
“‘Can I park here,’ the driver says.
“‘No, you can’t park here,’ the cop replies.
“‘Look at all of these other cars,’ the driver says. ‘Why are they parking here?’
“‘Well, they didn’t ask,’ the cop says.”
That’s the kind of joke that those guys would tell each other.
One day Teddy talked to Rickles.
“Hey, you know, I saw your shtick last night,” he said. “We have a humor magazine called Sick. Why don’t you come and work with my editor there? His name is Joe Simon.”
“Let me see it,” Rickles said, and Teddy showed him a copy.
“This is pretty funny stuff,” Rickles admitted. “I could get involved with this, but I’d have to be part owner.”
So Teddy came back to me, and told me about it.
“Why don’t you go talk to Rickles,” he said, all enthusiastic. “He’s willing to do work with us on Sick.”
I don’t need another partner here, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
“OK, I’ll go talk to him,” I promised. At least it would be interesting. Of course, Rickles was staying at one of the top hotels. So I called him up and told him I was coming over.
“Good, I just finished my act,” he said. “I’m through for the afternoon. C’mon over.”
So I went over. When I got there, he motioned to a chair.
“Sit down, have a drink,” he said. “I saw your magazine, and it’s pretty funny stuff. You know, I could provide you with a lot of great material.” And then he took his pants off. He hung them over the back of a chair. You see, these guys were afraid to sit down because they had to keep the crease in their pants. He had another performance that evening. So he sat down with his garters showing. We talked, and he was nice — funny, even with his pants off. I had a couple of drinks with him, and I went back to my family.
Harriet wasn’t very impressed with guys like that. Nothing came of it, anyway.
A few years went by, and Teddy began having financial difficulties. He owed a lot of money to the printers. I did a little digging, and found out that Sick was doing great. It was all of Crestwood’s other magazines that were dragging it down. One day he came over to my house, and told me he was going to sell Sick magazine to Pyramid Books. It wasn’t good news, but at least I’d get half of the money from the sale.
“Sorry Joe, it doesn’t work that way,” he said. “The copyrights are registered to my company, Crestwood.” With that he left.
I wasn’t going to get a cent. It was depressing, but after a while Harriet got mad. She never got involved in my business, but this time she got into the middle of it. She kicked ass.
“Remember that contract you signed with him?” she said.
“What about it?” I said. “What good is it now?”
“Just look at it,” she said. “I’d like to see what it says.”
So I pulled it out, and read the first sentence of the letter.
“You have expressed a desire to publish my title, Sick magazine,” it said, and it went on with the terms. Teddy had signed it, and that doomed him.
So I gave him a copy
“I’m sorry, you don’t own that title,” I said. “I own the title.”
So he took it to his lawyer, Benjamin Winston, who just shot him a dirty look.
“You know, you’re a grown man,” Winston said. “You don’t sign just anything.”
Teddy tried to negotiate, and every time he called, he got Harriet on the phone. She demanded 75 percent of the money from the sale, and eventually we came to an agreement that gave us 50 percent. She was relentless, but in a very nice way. Teddy should have hated her for that, but instead he fell in love with her. When the deal was done he sent her flowers.
So we sold Sick magazine to Pyramid, and they kept me on as packager. After a few years I stepped aside, and my son Jim took over with Jerry Grandenetti as his art director. Then the owner of Pyramid dropped dead on the golf course. The company was acquired by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, a highbrow book publisher who decided they didn’t want to be in the magazine business. They sold the title Sick to Charlton in 1976.
Sick supported my family for a long time. We put out phonograph records and paperback books. At one point I renewed all of the copyrights in my name. I did that on a lot of properties, some in my own name and some in the names of Simon and Kirby. If I hadn’t done that, the Kirby estate wouldn’t have any rights at all involving a lot of our best properties. I always did the best I could for them. I’ve got copyrights for superheroes, westerns, crime stories, science fiction, and romance.
“You know it’s the story around comic books that only two guys in the business can read contracts,” Mark Evanier once told me. “That’s Will Eisner and Joe Simon.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m so good at it.”
But there were times when it came in handy.
While I was working on Sick I kept developing titles for Harvey Comics, who wanted to capitalize on the renewed success of the DC and Marvel superhero titles. We did them under the umbrella of Harvey Thrillers. I still had a lot of my best people working for me — guys like Powell and Torres. Jack Sparling, a prolific artist who had done work for newspaper comic strips, Fawcett, Harvey, and Classics Illustrated, was producing a lot of stories for Gold Key Comics. I had him contributing to Double-Dare Adventures, Thrill-O-Rama, and Unearthly Spectaculars, where he illustrated characters like Pirana and Jack Q. Frost. Later he did a bunch of work in the DC supernatural titles and for the Charlton issues of Sick.
Harvey introduced a character called Spyman who appeared in his own title beginning in 1966. He was inspired by the spy craze of the 1960s, with movies like James Bond and television shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I drew two of the covers, and we had stories by George Tuska, Dick Ayers, and Bill Draut. A new kid from Reading, Pennsylvania, came out to my studio and showed me some samples of his work. He was a sign painter as well as a magician. He drove up in a Cadillac, and when he opened the trunk it was full of comic books. I liked his samples, and he helped me develop Spyman. But he wasn’t the lead artist, and I don’t think he was comfortable with that. His name was Jim Steranko, and shortly after that he made a big splash at Marvel, working over Kirby layouts.
Spyman #1 cover by George Tuska.
Wally Wood produced a feature called “Earthman” for Unearthly Spectaculars, and it was just beautiful. I gave him free rein. He’d work from my script if I asked, but he preferred to produce his own stuff. The strangest thing happened one time when he came to deliver some work. We were going through the pages, and I must have told him how much I liked them.
“Why are you patronizing me?” he asked me.
It took me by surprise.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I don’t even know what the word means. I never went to college.”
But he didn’t answer, and didn’t seem mad, so we just went on with the pages.
It was a little thing, and I thought it was odd. That brief incident stuck in my head all these years.
Wally did get mad when Leon Harvey got involved with the books. For some reason Leon decided he had to teach Wally Wood, one of the most accomplished illustrators in the industry, how to draw, and Wood took offense at that. It was the last we saw of him. Nothing I could say would get him back.
Unearthly Spectaculars also had work by another EC Comics legend, Joe Orlando, as well as Doug Wildey, Gil Kane, and Al Williamson. There was a story called “Hermit” that appeared in the third (and final) issue, written by a young guy named Archie Goodwin and illustrated by Williamson. Archie Goodwin quickly moved over to Warren Publishing, where they had magazines a lot like the EC comics of the 1950s. Years later he and Al did the Star Wars syndicated comic strip together.
At the same time as we were developing superheroes, we released the Race for the Moon stories in Blast-Off. I packaged a new Fighting American book with reprints and unpublished material, and arranged with Will Eisner to reprint his Spirit stories in a similar package. Will and I always seemed on the brink of working together, and this was one time when it actually happened.
Another time we almost got together was when Carmine Infantino was the publisher up at DC in the early 1970s. Carmine wanted Will and myself to take over a whole division of comic books and produce them for him. Will and I went out to dinner that night at the Harvard Club. Eisner did some quick figuring.
“You know, Joe,” he said, “we can’t make any money at this.”
And I agreed with him. So we didn’t take Carmine up on his offer.
As many good people as we had on our team, the Harvey Thrillers never really worked in the marketplace. All of the titles proved to be short-lived, but I still have the copyrights, and they may just stage a comeback. About the time they ended, I developed another superhero property that would be equally shortlived, but would become a cult favorite.
Brother Power the Geek was about a mannequin struck by lightning and brought to life. It had a lot of elements of Frankenstein mixed with the hippy culture of the 1960s. I experienced that culture through people I knew and by having an 18-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter, and 12-year-old twins, all still living at home. The stories put the Geek up against foes like the freaks of the Psychedelic Circus, and Mad Dawg and his gang. He ran for Congress and was shot into space. Over the years I think that the Geek was misinterpreted as a drug thing. It might have been a hippy thing, but there weren’t any drugs in there. I thought the hippy thing was cute, and we were doing a lot with it in Sick.
The Geek was misunderstood.
Alphonse Bare was my artist on the Geek. He would come over to my studio in Woodbury so we could work together. I thought he was a terrific artist. Our sales were pretty good, but Carmine has told me that Mort Weisinger hated the book. At one point Mort was convinced that the name of our company, Mainline, was a secret code that had something to do with mainlining drugs. Apparently he tried to get Jack Liebowitz to cancel Brother Power. Whatever the reason, there were only two issues.
Alphonse lived in a little village a few miles from my house in Woodbury. It had several dilapidated houses, and his parents, sister, and his other relatives owned them, so it was like their own little compound. Although the houses were run-down, the village was still beautiful, and I would have loved to have owned a compound like that. The parents died and the place went up for sale — the whole thing. We took a look and Harriet loved it, so we were ready to put in a bid. We contacted the real estate person and I went to negotiate.
“Look, I’m gonna tell you the truth,” the woman said. “This is sinking into a [minority] neighborhood.” She didn’t use the word “minority.”
“I would advise you to skip over it,” she said, “because the price of it is just going to go down.”
It was very close to Huntington, and while I don’t know how it turned out, I’ll bet we made the wrong decision by passing on it.
We loved it in Woodbury, but with all of the kids we had a houseful. Then Harriet’s father died, and her mother Dinah announced that she was going to come live with us. So Harriet drove around and found a mansion on three acres in Stony Brook. It sat on a cliff with stone steps leading down to the beach. The living room was 65 feet long, 12 feet high, with an arched ceiling. It had eight bathrooms, and a clear view across Long Island Sound to Fairview, Connecticut. There was a horse barn, and we built a guest cottage on the second floor, with its own plumbing and bathroom. It had a fireplace, and there were raccoons living in the attic. They’d poke their noses up out of the chimney. This was the country.
The house had been built by a world-famous pianist, and after we moved in she built another one nearby. She was friendly with the Rockefellers and all of those famous people you never see but they drive up with their drivers and their limousines. This woman had a Rolls-Royce. She also had a vendetta with her son, especially after she gave the car to her chauffeur.
After all of that, Harriet’s mother never moved in. Harriet had a sister and a brother, and Dinah just kept moving from one child to the next. She was annoying in many ways, but she was a good woman.
Another benefit of living there was that it was within walking distance of the State University of New York in Stony Brook. Jim was the first to go, and while he was in college he lived in the guesthouse. He studied writing and literature, which helped him prepare for our work together on The Comic Book Makers. I think one of the best things he ever wrote was the introduction to that book. I just love it from all angles.
My first daughter Melissa.
Jim had it tough because I preferred my girls over the boys. It was a father thing. I loved all of my kids, but the twins and Melissa were my life. Overall we had a wonderful family. Harriet was a great mother — all of the kids loved her.
Melissa was next in line for university, and she and her crowd did some drug experimenting. Jennifer Grandenetti, Jerry’s daughter, was about her age, and they could be rebellious. I had a great studio there in Stony Brook, with a terrific view. One day I noticed a beautiful plant growing outside of the window. It must have been there for a while, because its tendrils already were threatening to creep inside. When I asked Missy what it was, she told me it was tomatoes.
There was a young guy who delivered the heating oil, and we had these huge Great Danes that got to know him when he made the deliveries. One morning I went out to my studio, and all of those plants were missing. They had all been torn up. The girls expressed the theory that it was the delivery man. That made sense because it had to have been someone the dogs recognized. Otherwise they would have raised the alarm.
We never pursued it, for obvious reasons. I don’t think Harriet ever knew it was pot.
Missy studied health care, and she went to work in Westchester at the Downstate Medical Center. She and her boyfriend, Michael, lived together. They had a Great Dane, and Melissa used to whisper to him. She’d go out at night to walk him, and she’d talk in a very low voice. He understood every word she said. It was incredible.
Left: The twins Gail and Lori in a promo piece for Sick’s Hector Protector. Right: Jim Simon at work in the Stony Brook studio.
After Melissa, it was Gail and Lori, the twins against the world. If I tried to discipline one of them, the other would come after me with a broomstick. I’d take them both to the mall, and Lori would go off on her own. After about a half an hour, if I hadn’t seen or heard from her, I’d turn to Gail.
“Where do you think Lori is?” I’d ask, and Gail would put her brain in motion.
“At this point Lori will be at McCann’s Shoe Store.”
“How do you know?” I’d ask.
“I just know.”
We’d go over to McCann’s, and there was Lori. That’s the way they were. Anybody who has identical twins would tell you the same thing.
The twins were always changing schools, taking my cars, looking at colleges up in Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It cost me a fortune. Lori received her bachelor’s degree in sociology. Gail became an artist, studying at several art schools. When I’d ask her, she’d say she really didn’t learn anything in school. She just wanted to stay out of civilization for a while. But she’s tremendously talented, just wonderful with colors, with the ability to know where they’re supposed to go, and how to make them work.