Monday Cartoon Day.
One of the blogs follow religiously, is Harry Mendrick's Simon and Kirby blog over at the Jack Kirby Museum. Harry is one of the most concientious comic scholars out there at the moment, who wouldn't call a spade a spade unless it was signed all over 'this is a spade' and still had a label on it with 'made by Joe Spade, the original Spade Manufacturer'. He analyses the work of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby from the unique perspective of having the ear of the 83 year old Simon. He is also one hell of a digital restorer. So he won't be too pleased with the quality of the illustrations I am showing today. Still, I am pretty sure they are from a batch even he hasn't seen. In one of his posts, Harry mentioned the fact that Joe Simon work as a graphic editor for a newspaper for seven years in the thirties. He also did some illustrations, including a lot of sports cartoons. But since Harry is organizing much of Joe Simon's personal archives, he had also found some other types of illustrations. Of course, I couldn't let that ly and went online to find more samples.
Here is the one and only sports cartoon I could find, from the Syracuse (NY) Herald. From Dec 1 1936.
Going from there, I also tracked down story illustrations in all Dec 1936 Sunday sections of the same paper and at least one from late november. I will have to track down how far back these go, but they don't turn up in a name search so it may take me a while. The microfiche copy of the Sunday Dec 6 Syracuse Herald I had acces to, didn't have it's last section, so there may be one illustration missing. The one from Dec 13 isn't signed, but given the way it looks and it's place among the others it is safe to assume it may be by Simon as well.
Nov 29 1936:
Dec 13 1936:
Dec 20 1936:
Dec 27 1936:
5 comments:
Hey great! You changed background colors for the New Year! My eyes thank you! (For the rest also...)
Great stuff. The December 13 illustration is by Joe Simon. Joe still has the art but when the published it the cut off the signature.
Harry Mendryk
I have found many more since then, Hrry. It sems he started somwhere late in 1935 doing these. They seem to have ended early 1936. I can't find anything else in this Syracuse paper from 1933 onward, which makesme doubt if this was the paper he was working for. Do you have a name or a town? You showed political cartoons as well, which I haven't been able to find.
That should be 36/37, as the illustrations show.
Joe's career as a newspaper staff artist actually started at the Rochester Journal which, considering the dates and districts for some of the polititians, was where I suspect that Joe did the portraits. In his book Joe said he only worked for the Journal for a couple of years before switching to the Syracuse Herald. Your research perhaps suggests otherwise.
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