Number 1360: Boyoboy: The Newsboy Legion!

Just thinking here. Have I ever seen a newsboy? I mean, an actual kid standing on a street corner, hawking papers and hollering, “Wuxtry! Wuxtry!” The answer is no. I grew up in the suburbs of a Western city, not inner-city New York, where most of the Simon and Kirby characters sprang to life. In our town the newspaper came without a "wuxtry!" but with a plop! when it landed on the driveway. The newsboy, or newsgirl, was a delivery person, a carrier on a bicycle.

Ah, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the Newsboy Legion, and their protector, the Guardian, does it? The prolific imagination of Jack Kirby was always providing characters, and his kid characters were a combination of fictional ideas of New York City street kids and the kids Kirby grew up with in the Hell’s Kitchen area of that city. In the Newsboy Legion stories Hell’s Kitchen became Suicide Slum, and the beat cop was the civilian identity of the masked Guardian. There is a real New York flavor that comes through in the stories, as Kirby and Simon practiced the advice of their high school English teachers: “Write what you know.”

This is the last in our “Boyoboy! Week,” featuring some of the kid gangs of the comics.

From Star Spangled Comics #15 (1942):

More Simon and Kirby Newsboy Legion from Pappy! Click the pics:

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Number 1204: Big woids make a fella sound smart

“Education of Iron Fist Gookin,” from Star Spangled Comics #18 (1943) is a fine example of how Simon and Kirby could break up their action-filled stories with funny business. It’s well done in all the ways Joe and Jack could craft a story, has laughs and action, and a great pay-off at the end. Gookin, the villain, is looking for a way to make his gang look up to him, to look smart by expanding his vocabulary, which he does thanks to the Newsboy Legion's most erudite member, Big Words.

This is just not something you would see in most comic books of the era, a panel where the bad guy says, “Hi, Gang!! As Shakespeare put it...slappin' cops around is like exacerbatin' de quantitative hyperbole...” It's nonsense — “word salad” —  but maybe it got a few 1943 readers to crack the dictionary.

I love these early forties stories S and K did for DC. I read them as reprints in the Fourth World series of comics DC published in the early seventies.

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Number 1028


Kubert's newsboys


Joe Kubert was only about 19 or 20 when he drew this Newsboy Legion story. The strip was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who were probably still in uniform when this episode was drawn.

The Newsboy Legion had been around since 1942, when it displaced the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy as the lead feature of Star Spangled Comics #7. Although another Simon and Kirby kid strip, Boy Commandos, appeared in Detective Comics and its own title until 1949, after 1947's issue #64 of Star Spangled the boys of the Newsboy Legion and The Guardian had gone out of business, both as newsboys and crime fighters.

Joe's art is a bit crude, but only crude compared to how good he became within a short time. He had his mentors at DC, including Mort Meskin, and Joe became a mentor with the school that bears his name. What goes around...

The Grand Comics Database credits the inks to George Roussos, and the script to Joe Samachson.

From Star Spangled Comics #50, 1945:

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Number 979


The Newsboy Legion meets the Rafferty Mob


As promised a couple of days ago, here is the second story this week from DC's Star Spangled Comics #17, 1943, this time featuring the Simon and Kirby Newsboy Legion. Don Markstein in his Toonopedia website explains the Newsboy Legion and their adult friend, the Guardian:

The Newsboy Legion is the second such feature Simon and Kirby did, debuting in Star Spangled Comics #7 (April, 1942, the same issue that introduced Robotman), about eight months after The Young Allies, their first. DC Comics, publisher of Star Spangled, showed such confidence in the new feature that they put it on the cover, permanently displacing the title's original stars, The Star-Spangled Kid & Stripesy.

The newsboys were Tommy (the leader), Big Words (who, inevitably, wore glasses), Gabby (a little guy with a big mouth. . .) and Scrapper (a little guy with big fists). They were orphans living in Suicide Slum, who, as the title suggests, made their living selling newspapers — but as the series opened, they weren't above supplementing their income with a little petty crime. Naturally, this led to skirmishes with the law, specifically, police officer Jim Harper. But Harper took a liking to the boys, and became their legal guardian in the first story. After that, they stuck to the straight and narrow. Harper was a "guardian" in more ways than one. Earlier in the story, while off duty, he'd been chased by three thugs into a closed costume shop. There, he helped himself to a set of blue tights (complete with mask), plus yellow shorts (worn outside), shield and hard hat (leaving money behind to cover what he took). Declaring himself to be The Guardian, he proceeded to bring his assailants to justice. Afterward, he maintained his new persona, finding it a convenient way to avoid all the little legalities that so badly hamper a policeman in his battle against crime (a ploy also used by The Black Hood, The Ghost Rider and The Woman in Red). He may have been the first superhero to be used as a supporting character in a non-superhero series.

I like that the boys go up against a "...GOIL!" in this story. It's never too early for a boy to learn that women are tougher than they look, and and he'd be smart to never underestimate them.

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