Victor Fox
Born April 13, 1893 in Nottingham, England, Fox Publications founder Victor S. Fox was a stockbroker for the Allied Capital Corp./Fox Motor and Bank Stocks, Inc./American Common Stocks, Inc., on Park Avenue in New York City when he was indicted on Nov. 27, 1929 for mail fraud and related illegal "boiler room" activities. It appears unrecorded whether this resulted in a conviction.
Historian Jon Berk has written that Fox went on to become an accountant/bookkeeper at the publishing firm that would become DC Comics, where he was privy to sales figures that convinced him to launch his own comic-book company. Fellow historian Gerard Jones, writing in his book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, was unable to find documentation of this.
Artist Jack Kirby said of Fox, "Victor Fox was a character. He'd look up at the ceiling with a big cigar, this little fellow, very broad, going back and forth with his hands behind his back saying, 'I'm the King of Comics! I'm the King of Comics!' and we would watch him and, of course, smile a little because he was a genuine type".
Writer/artist Joe Simon commented on Fox, "He was an accountant for DC Comics. He was doing the sales figures and he liked what he saw. So, he moved downstairs and started his own company.... I happened to get a job; I went over to Fox and became editor there, which was just an impossible job, because ... there were no artists, no writers, no editors, no letterers — nothing there. Everything came out of the Eisner and Iger shop. ... He was a very strange character. He had kind of a British accent; he was like 5'2", told us he was a former ballroom dancer. He was very loud, menacing, and really a scary little guy. He used to say, 'I'm the King of the Comics. I'm the King of the Comics. I'm the King of the Comics.' We couldn't stop him".
Read more about this topic: Fox Feature Syndicate
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