With the arrival of the "Captain America" movie, Titan has released two excellent books shining a light on the character's creators.

Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in a story lifted almost intact for the movie. While Kirby died in 1994, his partner, at 97, has just released an autobiography, "Joe Simon: My Life in Comics" ($25).

Given that comic books more or less came into being in the 1930s, Simon's "Life in Comics" is also the story of the industry. He was present for most of the major events in the history of comic books and was the cause of a few of them.

For example, he was the first editor at Marvel Comics (called Timely in the 1940s), where he hired a teenager named Stan Lee. Simon worked with nearly every major creator through the 1960s, co-created entire genres (including "kid gang" comics and romance books) and worked for publishers as small as Crestwood and as huge as the company we know today as DC Comics.

As much insight as Simon's book gives us into comics personalities such as Bob Kane (creator of Batman), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman) and Will Eisner (the Spirit), he also managed to be around for a lot of non-comics 20th-century history. That's how he managed to run into comedian Sid Caesar, actor Cesar Romero, boxer Jack Dempsey, writer Damon Runyon and other luminaries.

One can easily glean from the book how Simon managed to be so popular. His easy, affectless prose reveals an affable, flexible, generous and optimistic personality. Add to that Simon's obvious creativity, and he was no doubt a lot of fun to be around.

The next-best thing after the autobiography are the comics Simon created, and Titan has collected one of the oddest and funniest titles he and Kirby did.

Simon and Kirby left "Captain America Comics" with issue No. 10 in 1942, after an acrimonious dispute with publisher Martin Goodman. So when they heard Goodman was going to revive Captain America in 1953 (the comic had been canceled in 1950), the proactive Simon said to Kirby, "There's no reason we can't do our own character again."

Thus was born Fighting American at tiny Prize Comics, another star-spangled hero in the tradition of Captain America -- sort of. Fighting American was so over-the-top in Red-baiting, Commie-bashing, flag-waving hoo-ha that it was practically a parody of itself (and of Captain America).

"Sure, the book was full of Commies and offbeat villains," Simon says in the foreword to Titan's new "Fighting American" collection ($20). "But it also poked fun at the whole superhero thing."

The "Fighting American" trade paperback collects every story in the series, which ran only seven issues (with a two-issue reboot).

Both books offer welcome insights into Simon and Kirby.