Jerry Robinson and Joe Simon pass away

Comics lost two of its links to the Golden Age of Superheroes this month.

Jerry Robinson died on 7 December, aged 89.  Robinson is best known as artist on Batman from 1939 to 1943, beginning inking backgrounds, and ending up as main artist.  However, he himself was just as proud of his political cartooning from the 1950s to the 1980s.  There will no doubt be eternal arguments over who created Robin and the Joker – my own belief is that there was such a melting pot of ideas between Robinson, Bob Kane and Bill Finger that it’s impossible to separate out who did what.  What is important is that Robinson was part of the creative team that brought the world Robin, the Joker, Alfred and Two-Face.  And more importantly than that, Robinson gave us the look of Batman we think of now, a weirder, darker style than Kane’s more conventional art.

The importance of Joe Simon, who died on 14 December aged 98, is almost impossible to assess.  For a decade and a half his partnership with Jack Kirby dominated American comics; historians have sometimes focussed more on Kirby, but Simon was of equal significance.  Captain America is the most famous of their creations from that period, and shows Simon and Kirby as masters of taking an idea (the basics of Cap are so similar to Harry Shorten and Irv Novick’s Shield that publisher Martin Goodman barely escaped legal action) and just doing it more interestingly and better than everyone else. At National/DC in the 1940s Simon and Kirby (and their various assistants) brought readers the Newsboy Legion, Boy Commandos, Manhunter, a revamped Sandman, etc.  Then they invented the romance comics genre, and pioneered horror comics.  Simon largely left comics in the mid-1950s, but returned to the medium from time to time, including creating Brother Power the Geek and Prez.

The world of comics will miss both of them.