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Samson Destroys the Mask of Fire on Fantastic Comics #8, at Auction

Joe Simon's brief tenure at Fox Feature Syndicate produced a number of memorable covers for the publisher, like Fantastic Comics #8.

Published Mon, 25 Sep 2023 11:48:05 -0500

by Mark Seifert

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As we've noted when discussing one of the most famous comic book covers of the Golden Age, Lou Fine's covers for the first five issues of Fantastic Comics can be connected to interior Samson stories in the title. Immediately after that, covers were often less grounded in a particular interior storyline, but could nonetheless still be spectacular. When Eisner-Iger Studio left Fox Feature Syndicate publisher Victor Fox due to non-payment issues, Joe Simon stepped in to fill the gap. As Simon would tell Will Eisner in 1974, "Jack was getting $15 a week over at Fox, pasting and touching up artwork. I came in as an editor and my job was to fill the void that was caused by Eisner & Iger leaving Fox."

In filling that void, Simon created a number of memorable covers for Fox during this period, though his methods were of course different than that employed by Eisner-Iger Studio, where Samson's interior stories were drawn by Alex Blum, likely written by his daughter Toni Blum, with Toni giving Fine guidance on the matching covers on this title and possible others.

An aspiring playwright who joined Eisner-Iger Studios along with her father around 1938, Blum was detail-oriented. According to her husband and Iger Studio artist William T. Bossert in later years, Blum worked with artists by providing an outline and then advising them on page breakdowns and points of emphasis, noting "She'd write an outline, and she'd help [the artist] break it down page-by-page. Then she would get the pages back, and she would pencil in the actual dialogue on the page. Then the lettering man would letter the dialogue. … She'd say, 'This is supposed to be on the fifth page and you have it on the second page. You're giving away the whole story in the beginning.' So she had to re-do the whole story as it went along."

It's unclear whether the Fantastic Comics #8 interior story by Alex (and probably Toni) Blum were in Fox inventory at this point, or if Victor Fox had poached the creators along with others for freelance work outside working for Eisner and/or Iger — a tactic that Fox was known to use. But the upshot of this is that Simon's very specific and intriguing "Samson Destroys the Mask of Fire" cover has no interior-story counterpart. Which is a shame, because it's imagery that has made Simon's cover popular with collectors to this day. A fascinating and intense Fox Feature Syndicate cover by legendary creator Joe Simon, there's a Fantastic Comics #8 (Fox, 1940) CBCS VF- 7.5 Off-white to white pages up for auction in the 2023 September 28 The Fox Comics Showcase Auction #40239 at Heritage Auctions.