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In "Simon and Kirby" work, Simon only did a small amount Patrick Ford 24 April 2017 An interesting post by Richard Boucher & Darrin Wiltshire from the old Kirby-List which concerns Joe Simon and Timely. Just about all of this makes sense to me. -Fox did change characters and concepts all the time, even swapping events to fit other characters. Standard practice there. Funnies Inc. is a peculiar problem, as they had their hands in not only Timely and Fox, but Centaur and others as well. I do believe a lot of the concepts originate from this period at Funnies Inc. , and no one can seem to explain the Simon connection with Funnies Inc. to my satisfaction, another mystery that may never be solved. Bill Black tried to get Joe Simon to elaborate on this issue, but Simon dodged him. Simon did do a sort of freelance for Fox after he left as Editor, but through other artists that he "employed" as well as other writers. He was a broker of talent of many out of work or up and coming "kids" trying to get work in the industry. Birdman is interesting as he is the prototype for the Red Raven, although the work is unsigned and not by Simon, but the look and feel is Simon, I've always though it was a Funnies Inc. collaboration effort that Simon had a "hand" in, so that's what I meant by inspired. As for the Sorceress of Zoom, no I don't think it was a Simon produced effort, rather he had seen the character there at Fox, and "adopted" the look for the Green Sorceress, again, I should have been more clear on this. I'm still out on the subject of the Blue Bolt boots, Rowland's version was done after the fact. BB's costume was revised, after S & K left, and the uniform was shortly abandoned thereafter, again sorry for not making this point clear. Simon said he continued to do freelance work during his time over at Timely, he just has never came out and specifically mentioned for who. But Kirby did, saying that anyone who had paying work, was getting stuff from Simon's pool of talent that he managed. Fox was just another one of those clients, though no work from Simon and Kirby directly though. More than likely it was the "second stringers" stuff that Joe peddled to Fox and the others and kept Kirby busy on the more time critical parts. As editor for several companies, who at times overlapped in his various capacities, Joe had his hands in a lot of pies and talent, and he utilized this to his best advantage. Kirby and Simon never doing work together at Fox is not so strange when you think about it. Simon was a few years older than most of his "peers", and in his capacity of Editor, remained separate from the people he edited over, but I believed he always kept an eye out for who was good and who wasn't. Above all, Simon was a very astute business man. As I said before, Simon was not a very fast artist, and IMO, had a lot of "help" in some of his products, where he'd just go back and add the Simon touch, this was covered somewhat in a round about way in the Steranko book. I think that takes into account the scratchy interiors, if Simon was only "finishing" the work of others and putting his name on it, as he has done all along, and is well noted for it, if not ever covered in great detail. Back to Funnies Inc. Yes I too think that the Daring stories in #'s 2 through 4 are indeed back logged work from that shop, and again I think it was other people taking these inventory stories and "polishing" them up and giving them to Goodman. As for Simon working for Fox at this time, yes it's true, but I also believe he was doing under the table freelance through other people from his stable to Timely, and thus is why I use the word/phrase "handy" work, for those characters, as Simon did not directly work on them himself. Actually, I believe even when he was still at Fox, Simon was still "involved" over at Funnies Inc., again through others possibly, Joe was never one to burn bridges, time has proven this out to be true. This is why I make the connection to these other characters at Timely as being reworks (perhaps by others) of Simon's concepts, if not the actual works themselves. A few last points... Simon was talented in his "own" way, whether he's an originator or just a good business man is for others to decide. There is not doubt that he was a very large part of the Golden Age on so many levels. My sources are not "whole" parts, but between Benton, Crawford, Goulart, and Mr. Steranko and many others, the words are there like the pieces of a puzzle and just need to be weeded out and assembled. I would like to some day have the time to correlate all the statements made by others, and from Kirby, plus what Simon himself has stated and see how it all fits together. Richard.

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