Titan Books continues to publish lesser-known gems from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, with tomorrow's release of The Simon & Kirby Library: Crime. It's a snapshot of a unique period in comics history, when comics were still selling like crazy but superheroes had fallen out of vogue. Alarmist senators and psychiatrists had not yet turned a watchful eye toward the comics bogeyman, and so the circumstances aligned to create the brief Golden Age of the hard-boiled crime comic.

Simon and Kirby mastered this genre the same way they had superheroes and sci-fi, and a re-read of their best works show a sense of real fun and love for their work here. The sheer joy of telling unfettered action tales comes through in some of Kirby's art, which is as playfully loose as it is masterfully expressive, and in flourishes in Simon's winks like naming a character 'Dumas Poe'.

This was also a play on the conceit of the "true crime"genre, which was widely known to be largely fictional. Simon and Kirby didn't play the game, making sure it was clear that they were writing fiction by occasionally inserting science-fiction tropes into stories. On the occasions when the stories they told actually were true - there are at least two historically accurate stories collected in The Simon & Kirby Library: Crime - the pair's adventurous, colorful storytelling is so consistent that you would never know the difference.

The real and the fictional blend into one in Simon and Kirby's fun-loving style, a remarkably expert storytelling style that shames what has become of comics. In a day and age of all spandex, all the time, and decompressed storytelling, or "writing for the trade," The Simon & Kirby Library: Crime should be mandatory reading for the comics industry. Here we have a few dozen self-contained stories, told n a wonderfully engaging, fun, noir style, averaging 6-8 pages. The violence is neither dialed down for the audience nor stylized in an effort to appear grim and edgy. It's just fun - a word that I find myself using often when reviewing the works of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two of the greatest comics talents in history.

Like comics themselves, the pair, while best known for their superhero work (they did create Captain America, after all), were in fact remarkably versatile, and as it happens, they were masters of the crime genre.

For those who bemoan the lack of quality storytelling and variety in comics, I give you The Simon & Kirby Library: Crime, an essential collection of the duo's brief but wonderful foray into "true" noir.