Sid Jacobson

Biographie

Sid Jacobson (born October 20, 1929) is an American writer, having worked in the fields of children's comic books, popular music, fiction, biography, and non-fiction comics. He was managing editor and editor in chief for Harvey Comics, where he created the comics Richie Rich, Hot Stuff, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Jacobson is also known for his late-career collaborations with artist Ernie Colón, including such nonfiction graphic novels as The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation and Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography.

Jacobson graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School and then New York University, where he majored in journalism. His first jobs out of school were at the New York tabloid The Compass and the horse racing paper The Morning Telegraph.

In the 1950s and 1960s, while working at Harvey Comics, Jacobson wrote songs for such pop acts as Frankie Avalon, Dion and the Belmonts, and Johnny Mathis—despite the fact that Jacobson didn't read music. It was at Harvey that Jacobson met artist Ernie Colón, whose work he edited for many years, both there and, later, at Star Comics.

After his long stint at Harvey, Jacobson moved on to become an executive editor at Marvel Comics, where he helped create the children's imprint Star Comics. During this period, Jacobson published the novel Streets of Gold (Pocket Books, 1985), a fictionalized history of his family's immigration journey from the shtetls of Russia to the United States. Jacobson was the writer for Marvel's ALF comic book series from 1987–1991.

Jacobson returned to Harvey Comics in the early 1990s, among other things creating a line of Hanna-Barbera comics, original stories based on the animated TV series characters.

In 2006, Jacobson and his old Harvey colleague Ernie Colón teamed up as writer and illustrator to create a graphic-novel version of the 9/11 Commission Report titled The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. In 2008, they released a 160-page follow-up: After 9/11: America's War on Terror. Subsequent collaborations with Colón include A Graphic Biography: Che, released in 2009; and Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography, published in 2010 by Hill and Wang in the U.S. and Uitgeverij Luitingh in The Netherlands.