But none of those were the things that would change my life. Sandman was. And it started with the Simon/Kirby Sandman from the 1970s—wondering what would happen if you took him a little more seriously, wondering why he dressed like that, what the sand was for, whether he looked different if he was in someone else’s dream.

I talked about my ideas to DC Comics’ former president Jenette Kahn and editor Karen Berger when they were in England, and some months later wound up being invited to write a monthly Sandman comic, but to use my ideas about Joe’s work as a jumping-off point and do something else (since writer Roy Thomas would be writing his own stories using the Simon/Kirby Sandman). It changed my life, and I owe it to Joe Simon.

And I think what attracted me to Simon’s stories was how unlike anyone else’s they were, how full of life. He created strange villains: part cartoon, part caricature, part embodiment of whatever he wished to talk about. While the trends in comics were towards realism in writing, Joe Simon marched in the opposite direction, creating his own reality. One of my favorite early-twentieth-century American authors is Harry Stephen Keeler, a mystery writer who wrote stories that were, in terms of plot, dialogue, and geography, nothing like anyone else’s. He was derided for it at the time, but is now collected and remembered while many of his contemporaries are forgotten. He was an odd writer. Joe Simon plotted more efficiently than Keeler, but, like Keeler, he wrote stories that no one else could have written, and they linger in the memory and in the heart.

The oddness of Joe Simon’s work is where it gets its power.

Joe Simon stories—and the Simon and Kirby stories you’ll read in this book—make no pretense of being anyone else’s art or stories. They are in motion all the way, or almost: they begin with something happening, they pile on the event, and only end, when they end, at the final panel, or the penultimate, leaving a final panel of exposition and explanation and plot wrap almost as an afterthought: they hurtle until they stop.

Here you’ll see that pattern over and over. And you’ll see stories and characters that shouldn’t work, or rather, that under anyone else’s hand wouldn’t work, that work like a dream.

Jack Kirby was inimitable, and the Simon-Kirby team was inimitable.

These are things that people who love comics know.

But you know something else? There’s never been another Joe Simon.

The Introduction to The Simon and Kirby Superheroes, 2010.

The Spirit of Seventy-Five

The first Spirit comic I bought was the Harvey Spirit #2. I bought it from Alan Austin’s shop, which was not a shop but a basement with occasional opening hours, in those antediluvian days of 1975 when there were no comic shops, somewhere in South London.

It was the last day of school. And instead of doing all the things we were meant to do on the last day of school, I snuck out of school and got on a bus with my friend Dave Dickson, and went off to South London. Dave was a lot smaller than me, and had hurt his foot recently. (I have not told anyone this story for fifteen years. But back when I did tell it, if Dave was around he would leap in early and tell people he had hurt his foot, at the beginning of the story. So they knew.) On the way to the shop we were mugged, very badly. Badly is probably not quite the word I want to use. Ineptly might be closer to the truth. The mugger was only a little older than we were, skinny and extremely nervous. He was trailing along behind us.