The Simon & Kirby Library: Horror!

In today’s comic book shops and bookstores, it’s mostly superhero comics that dominate the shelves and racks. It wasn’t like that during the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s of this bygone era where comic book creators branched into many genres like romance, westerns and science fiction. Comic book legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby are more known for their superhero work, but they also took the comic book medium to other genres and Titan Books publishes another neat collection from The Simon & Kirby Library: Horror!

Over 50-plus reprinted comic short stories collected from their runs on Prize Comics’ Black Magic and The Strange World of Your Dreams. Many of these horror stories were drawn by Simon and Kirby’s comic book crew that included the likes of Mort Meskin, Marvin Stein, Jim Infantino and various freelancers who stop by their Manhattan office. A footnote in history, Simon and Kirby’s Black Magic comic book run was part of a witch-hunt in 1954 by the U.S. Senate in which the committee said it cause “negative effects” on the youth of America. EC Comics closed it’s door with Black Magic issue #29 and the Comics Code Authority was created to police the comic book industry.

Simon and Kirby’s Black Magic and The Strange World of Your Dreams comic book run is now reprinted in all its glory in this hardbound collection from Titan Books. Now you can read for yourself and see if these “horror” stories caused youth delinquency in 1950s America. It’s well worth the read and to look back at comic book history.