Creation
Simon & Kirby, hired away from Timely Comics by DC towards the end of 1941, found themselves hired primarily due to their success on Captain America, but without their being a clear purpose to the decision, nor title to work on. Finding themselves initially embroiled in the Captain Marvel lawsuit, Jack Liebowitz gave them free rein to create or revamp DC heroes. Initially, the duo created new versions of The Sandman, and Manhunter (both of whom bore strong resemblance to their Captain America work), before deciding that "kid gangs seemed to be the way to go". Teenage sidekicks (Batman's Robin, Captain America's Bucky, etc.) were fast becoming a comics staple, intended to provide young characters with whom the youthful readers could identify. Simon & Kirby's own Sentinels of Liberty (later the Young Allies) had already succeeded in this mold, and had an influence on their subsequent creation.
Having already created the "Sentinels of Liberty" for Timely, they now created for DC the Newsboy Legion ("a Dead End Kids-style group led by a police officer in a Captain America-like blue-and-yellow costume, toting a shield"). Although America had not yet entered the war, headlines and news stories highlighted the role of British commandos, so Simon and Kirby fused the kid gang with the commando, and created The Boy Commandos.
Debuting in the pages of Detective Comics #64 (the issue #65's cover shows Batman presenting the gang but they appeared first in the issue before) cover-dated June 1942, the team became extremely popular, also appearing in World's Finest Comics (#8-41, 1942-1949) and were then soon spun off into their own title, launching with a 'Winter 1942' date. The title sold "over a million copies each month," and was one of DC's "three biggest hits" alongside Superman and Batman. Kirby drew around five pages a day of the title, but Liebowitz requested an even faster turn-around - fearing (as happened) that the two would be drafted, as had many other industry professionals. Simon & Kirby hired "inkers, colorists, and writers, striving to create a year's worth of tales" (Boy Commandos was also a quarterly title until Winter, 1945). Among those hired was a young Gil Kane, who recalls being:
- "hired to do as many Boy Commandos, Newsboy Legion, and Sandman stories as I could... they gave me scripts and they would do the splashes and they would have it inked."
Boy Commandos ran until issue #36 (Nov/Dec 1949), and was edited throughout by Jack Schiff. Among the individuals who assisted Simon and Kirby on the title (and its covers) were future-Superman legend Curt Swan, as well as Steve Brodie, Louis Cazeneuve and Carmine Infantino.
Read more about this topic: Boy Commandos
Famous quotes containing the word creation:
“We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist’s work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation. Art is the laboratory for making new men.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936)