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REVIEW
Sometimes culture feels unnvervingly like a high school party.

If you've only just heard about it, you aren't invited.

To those who've only glanced at a couple of panels of Batman, comic books can feel like a stock market blur of issue numbers and sub-plots.

The key is to start small, and to start with the best.

The Best of Simon and Kirby is the first volume in the Official Simon and Kirby Library, which features the work of the revered creative team that spawned Captain America, Stuntman and The Fly.

From their first collaboration on Blue Bolt in 1940, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby dabbled in everything from horror comics to detective stories and romances.

Joe Simon said: "While other guys stuck to superheroes or whatever it was they were good at, we tried it all."

Volume One features gloriously-printed snippets from their genre-busting work, from Captain America's run in with the Red Skull in 1941 to the wartime adventure of Satan Wears a Swastika a year later, on to romances, westerns, crime dramas, horrors such as 1950s The Scorn of the Faceless People and the pair's exploits in the ridiculous for Sick magazine.