THE SANDMAN

With The Sandman by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (302 7x10-inch pages, color; DC hardcover, $39.99) historic comic book stories are finally being reproduced as they should be: these pages have been photographed (or, digitally scanned) directly from the original comic books — no bleaching out the color to create scabrous faux black-and-white “art” for clumsy retouching. And the paper they’re printed on is a breed of newsprint. Other reprint tomes have done the same, I ween, but it’s nice to have one in my very own hands at last; this volume presents the Simon and Kirby Sandman in as close to the state of the original issues as possible. The results are sometimes flawed: blemishes on the original comic book pages are reproduced here, exactly; where colors fade or black lines smudge, the same happens here. But that scarcely matters to those of us who buy old comic books in order to read the stories and luxuriate in contemplating the art of pioneering masters: we’re happy with the way the material appeared initially, so a book like this that reproduces that initial appearance exactly is just fine.

The book is introduced by John Morrow, whose TwoMorrows publishing house has produced since 1994 The Jack Kirby Collector, making Morrow one of the world’s experts on Kirby. Morrow tells how Simon and Kirby, wanting to leave Timely, for which they had created Captain America, for more lucrative profit-sharing at DC Comics, made their deal with DC and then moonlighted trying to create new features while still doing Captain America during the day — until Martin Goodman found out and summarily canned them.

The reason for buying this book, however, is not Morrow’s history: it’s the Sandman stories as they first appeared, narrative and art, March 1942 to December 1945, in Adventure Comics, Nos. 72-101, with a couple from World’s Finest (Nos. 6 and 7). And the art is some of Kirby’s most exuberant and animated, ample evidence of the visual excitement that so inspired the rest of the four-color pulp artists in those days of yesteryear. Kirby always did the pencils, but Simon wasn’t always the inker. By Simon’s own testimony in his autobiography, The Comic Book Makers, Kirby was inked by a parade of freelancers and moonlighters. My guess is that Simon inked the first story or so here, then surrendered the brush to others; by the end of the book, the kind of feathering that Simon did has disappeared, and the modeling is done by chips of black shadow, a distinctive Kirby trait.