The Sandman by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

The Sandman by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby by Joe Simon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Sandman by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby collects 20+ Sandman stories from Adventure Comics in the 1940s plus Sandman #1 from the 1970s.

I scored this on Shopgoodwill a while back. I read two or three of the stories in reprints in Adventure Comics digest about 40 years ago so most of it was new material. All the stories are written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jack Kirby. Simon inks the 1940s stories and Mike Royer inks the lone 1970s story.

Ordinarily, I'm not a huge fan of Golden Age super hero comics but these were pretty good, no big shock considering the creative team created Captain America a couple years early and went on to create the romance comic genre. Plus Kirby was the architect of the early Marvel universe. Anyway, Simon and Kirby weren't happy with the deal they had at Timely and jumped to DC.

Charged with revitalizing a poorly received character, Simon and Kirby ramped up Batman and Robin style antics of Sandman and Sandy. The stories are all ten pagers and Sandman and Sandy usually battle ordinary crooks, although crooks with gimmicks are not unheard of. There are no supervillains, though, and no recurring characters beyond Sandman and Sandy.

The stories are pretty simple but entertaining in a bad guys getting punched in the mouth and hauled off to jail sort of way. They remind me of Batman and Robin without the Batcave or any gimmicks beyond their wire-poon guns.

Kirby's art naturally isn't as refined as it would be twenty years later but there are still flashes of brilliance. I wonder how much of the heavy lifting was left to Joe Simon's inks. Sometimes the inks make Kirby's figures kind of grotesque and everyone seems leaner and lankier than they would years later. Again, this is 20 years before Kirby revolutionized comics at Marvel.

My favorite story in this is easily Santa Fronts for the Mob. The mob recruits a brutish wrestler to play a department store Santa so they can follow him on deliveries and rob the rich people's houses. Sandman and Sandy punch a bunch of bad guys and "Santa" helps them. Good stuff.

The reproduction is kind of muddy. I'm blaming it on the paper since the Archives editions came before this and the Plastic Man reproductions from the same time period are clear as a bell.

Four out of five stars. For basic super hero action from the Golden Age, it doesn't get much better than this.

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