In the aftermath of the 1954 anti-comic hearings before the US
Senate, EC Comics collapsed, which contributed to the collapse of Leaders, the
distributor for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's The Fighting American.
Without distribution and with comics sales collapsing all across the industry,
their publisher was forced out of business after publishing 7 issues of the comic.
Harvey Comics brought out another issue in 1966 in an attempt to revive the
title, but that effort failed. All of these issues, and a single story that
would have been in Harvey's issue 2, are included in the Simon & Kirby Superheroeshardcover collection.
The strengths of these stories is the humor that Simon
brings to them. It seems that by this point, he and Kirby had decided to make
these tales as over-the-top as possible. Every issue contains at least one
laugh-out-loud moment, and usually every story does. There are crazy situations
and characters for Kirby to draw, including Invisible Irving, the alien
shape-shifter Space-Face, and the Martian Gulnik.
The Fighting American and Speedboy become world travelers in
these issues, chasing Jiseppi the Jungle Boy in India, fighting over oil in the
Middle East, and stopping an evil movie production in Italy.
The last story (unfortunately unpublished) tells a surreal
post-modern story in which the artist of the Fighting American comics has been
driven crazy, announcing that he is "through getting my kicks on a drawing
board! I'll live my own life of adventure ... and I'll beat Fighting American
at his own game!" The extent to which this is Kirby's own thoughts about
the comic industry (or Simon's) is unknown, but it is a fascinatingly weird
tale.
These stories show that by this part of their careers, Simon
and Kirby had come into their own as elite comic book professionals.
Source: public library.Note: Issues 1-4 were discussed here.
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