A prolific artist and editor in his own right, Simon remains best known for his longtime collaboration with artist Jack Kirby. The pair created multiple characters and genres for the burgeoning comics medium in their early careers before Simon moved on to life as a solo editor and artist before earning acclaim as a biographer and historian and battling Marvel Comics over the copyrights on his and Kirby’s most famous creation: Captain America.
Thoughts from Mark Evanier as well.
I also need to write something about Joe himself. He was an amazing man, too often wrongly viewed as just the “business” side of Simon and Kirby. Jack was the better artist — even Joe admitted that — and Jack had that ultrahuman work ethic that allowed him to labor at the drawing table all day and all night. But if you asked Jack who did what in the Simon-Kirby parlay, he usually said, “We both did everything.” That was true. Joe wrote, Joe drew, Joe inked. And he especially excelled in managing the money end of things because he understood publishing and contracts and such matters — a rare skill among comic book creators.