MY CAPTAIN AMERICA

Episodic memoir recounting the close relationship between grandfather and grandchild—and an unusual grandfather at that.

Joe Simon, whom Margulies called “Daddy Joe,” was a legend in the comic-book industry; he created Captain America and many other characters, including an early take on Spiderman, to say nothing of a Mad simulacrum called Sick. For the author, Daddy Joe “was the man who loved to have a cigar every night, a fan blowing the smoke over a drawing table spattered with ink and paint and out his studio apartment window,” a man who could be counted on for both support and fun. As she recounts, this became ever more important as her adolescent scorn for her parents and their one-bedroom apartment mounted and as her rebellion took a short-lived chemical turn (“I was already buzzed from the vodka, so the first two drags of the cigarette left me light-headed and queasy”)—though, as she cheerfully confesses, “I was not built, genetically, to be a bad girl.” The emotion runs fast and thick in such moments. For his part, Simon was always ready for adventure, and he emerges as quite a character. For students of pop culture, the best parts of the book find Margulies recounting such things as the creation of Simon’s first comic book (a Western) and the arrival of his best-known character with a cover depicting the Captain punching Hitler square on the jaw, and this a year before America entered World War II. Margulies also has a nice take on Stan Lee’s appropriation of Simon’s creation to create his own Spiderman, a useful rejoinder to other accounts. There’s also a nice continuity in the author’s buying her daughter “an array of Captain America items” to connect her to her great-grandfather after he departed for what he called “the Great Art Department in the Sky.”

Though sometimes overwrought, fans of comic book history will enjoy this affectionate look backward.