Number 1360: Boyoboy: The Newsboy Legion!

Just thinking here. Have I ever seen a newsboy? I mean, an actual kid standing on a street corner, hawking papers and hollering, “Wuxtry! Wuxtry!” The answer is no. I grew up in the suburbs of a Western city, not inner-city New York, where most of the Simon and Kirby characters sprang to life. In our town the newspaper came without a "wuxtry!" but with a plop! when it landed on the driveway. The newsboy, or newsgirl, was a delivery person, a carrier on a bicycle.

Ah, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the Newsboy Legion, and their protector, the Guardian, does it? The prolific imagination of Jack Kirby was always providing characters, and his kid characters were a combination of fictional ideas of New York City street kids and the kids Kirby grew up with in the Hell’s Kitchen area of that city. In the Newsboy Legion stories Hell’s Kitchen became Suicide Slum, and the beat cop was the civilian identity of the masked Guardian. There is a real New York flavor that comes through in the stories, as Kirby and Simon practiced the advice of their high school English teachers: “Write what you know.”

This is the last in our “Boyoboy! Week,” featuring some of the kid gangs of the comics.

From Star Spangled Comics #15 (1942):

More Simon and Kirby Newsboy Legion from Pappy! Click the pics: