Sid Jacobson, comic book writer with range, dies at 92

Sid Jacobson, a veteran comic book writer and editor whose work took him from the opulent, fanciful world of Richie Rich to the real-life terrorist attacks of 9/11, died July 23 in San Francisco. He was 92.

His death, in hospice, was caused by a stroke after a case of the coronavirus, his family said in a statement.

From 1952 until 1982, when the company went out of business, Jacobson was a writer and editor at Harvey Comics in New York, which published the adventures of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich and Wendy the Good Little Witch, as well as crime, horror and romance comics.

At Harvey, he met artist Ernie Colon, who became a frequent collaborator. “Wherever I worked as an editor, I always hired him,” Jacobson said in an interview after Colon’s death in 2019. “We were very close. We were like brothers.”

The two teamed up to tell a graphic-novel version of the 9/11 Commission’s report, which examined the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The report, the result of a government study headed by Thomas Kean, former governor of New Jersey, became a bestseller, if a dense one, in 2004. So did “9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation,” published in 2006. Jacobson called the effort “graphic journalism.”

The adaptation “packs a great deal of information within a vibrantly accessible format,” Julia Keller noted in a review in the Chicago Tribune.

“Particularly striking,” she added, “is the point at which the authors create a series of pages tracing the fate of all four planes, moment by moment, in a horizontal grid that makes the frenetic pace of the unfolding horror suddenly comprehensible.”

Jacobson and Colon would go on to create other graphic nonfiction books: one about America’s fight against terrorism, in 2008; biographies of Che Guevara (2009) and Anne Frank (2010); and, in 2017, “The Torture Report: A Graphic Adaptation,” which presented the findings of a Senate select committee’s investigation into the torture of terrorist suspects by the CIA.

Sidney Jacobson was born Oct. 20, 1929, in Brooklyn, one of two children of Reuben and Beatrice (Edelman) Jacobson. His father worked in the garment district in Manhattan, and his mother was a homemaker.

He is survived by his son, Seth; his daughter, Kathy Battat; and three grandchildren.

Jacobson studied journalism at New York University and graduated in 1950. Two years later, his sister, Shirley, was dating someone who worked for Harvey Comics. He used the connection to get his foot in the door and eventually became the company’s editor-in-chief.

“It was called Harvey Comics, but he pretty much ran the company,” Angelo Decesare, a writer and artist who got his start at the company in 1978, said of Jacobson. “Everything flowed through him.”

Jacobson was involved in the plots and writing of Richie Rich stories at the peak of the character’s popularity, when he appeared in several different books.

“They came out with Richie Riches like they were printing money,” said Jonny Harvey, a grandson of Leon Harvey, whose twin brother, Alfred, founded the company. (Leon and their older brother, Robert, became executives there.) He added: “They had to come up with so many gags about Richie involving money. Sid would work with the writers and go back and forth. It was pretty collaborative.” (Jonny Harvey is director of “Ghost Empire,” a forthcoming documentary about Harvey Comics.)

After Harvey Comics folded, Jacobson found work at Marvel, where he became editor of Star Comics, an imprint for younger readers that began in 1984. Star produced a mix of licensed characters, including the Ewoks and Muppet Babies, and original series such as Planet Terry, a space adventure about a boy trying to reunite with his parents, and Royal Roy, about a rich prince. But Harvey Comics felt that Royal Roy was too close in theme to Richie Rich and sued. (Royal Roy ended after six issues, and the lawsuit was dropped.)

In addition to writing and editing comics, Jacobson wrote novels and songs. “Streets of Gold,” a fictionalized version of his family’s Russian-jewish immigration story, was published in 1985; “Another Time,” a novel set during the Depression, was published in 1989. He also wrote “Pete Reiser: The Rough-and-tumble Career of the Perfect Ballplayer” (2004), a biography of an often-injured major league outfielder of the 1940s and ‘50s noted for playing with reckless abandon.