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Mort Weisinger, Architect of the Superman Mythos

Reasearching Mort Weisinger, particularly for one not deeply steeped in the lore of fandom and just barely too young to remember his tenure in comics when those books appeared new on the shelves, represents something of a problem. Though his impact on comics definitely deserves a good monograph on his life and career, I have yet to find such a piece.

What follows derives from Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics, by Julius Schwartz, and Superman by Les Daniels, plus what material I could dredge from the Internet. I mention this because it seems somewhat overdue that a real Weisinger biography by a professional appears; his impact on the industry justifies this.

In his day, Weisinger would remake the Superman mythos in a way easy to characterize. Almost everything that attaches to the character, that people remember, and that postdates the very first Superman stories in the late thirties and early forties, comes from Weisinger's tenure. The material that Dennis O'Neil excised from the franchise belonged to Weisinger. The material retconned away from the concept by Crisis and John Byrne's work on Superman books, for the most part, originated with Weisinger or during his tenure. The material dredged up from the attic of abandoned concepts and repackaged as Awesome Comics' Supreme derives from Weisinger-era concepts. And, increasingly, the Silver Age material creeping, piecemeal, back into the franchise in new but not unrecognizable forms, derives from Weisinger's days guiding the Superman ship.

We justly credit Siegel and Shuster with creating Superman, but we recognize and remember a Superman which Weisinger built from Siegel and Shuster's foundation.

Early Inspirations

Mort Weisinger attended high school in the Bronx. Born around 1914-1916, Weisinger belonged to a generation that included his friend Julius Schwartz, Jerry Siegel, Jerome Shuster and, chronologically, Jack Kirby. The comics talents born in the teens of the twentieth century would lay the foundations for the explosion of the medium made possible by talents born in the twenties (a Who's Who of Silver Age talent would mainly contain those names).

Weisinger came to comics indirectly through fandom. However, he came through science fiction fandom, rather than comics fandom. Not only had comics fandom not yet appeared in his youth; Superman, the archetype of the superhero, and the clay that Weisinger would eventually mold, would not appear until Weisinger grew up.

He formed a fan club that would ultimately generate (arguably) the first fanzine. He solicited memberships for his science fiction fan club, the Sciencers, through one of the pulp magazines of the day (probably Amazing Stories), a club through which Weisinger would encounter (as members) Julius Schwartz,

Weisinger and Schwartz began accumulating information about the authors of science fiction stories, generally through mail, and ultimately had a body of material that they decided to publish in a mimeographed newsletter titled The Time Traveller in 1932. The Time Traveller listed Weisinger, Schwartz, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Allen Glasser as editors.

The Sciencers understood networking. They solicited subscriptions to The Time Traveller by sending subscription notices to the addresses on fan letters in science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories; while the newsletter probably attracted under fifty original subscribers, it did become an early nationally distributed fan publication. Julius Schwartz names it as the first.

Soon after its inception, the Time Traveller began to include stories. It changed its name to Science Fiction Digest in 1933 and again to Fantasy Magazine in 1934. By the latter year, the piece had begun carrying stories by A. A. Merritt, John Campbell, and E. E. "Doc" Smith, all of whom became names in science fiction, and Otto Binder, whose work would also connect him in later decades to comic books.

The Solar Sales Service

According to Julius Schwartz, in 1934 an auto struck Weisinger, Schwartz himself, and Otto Binder while the three hiked in Palisades Park. While in the hospital, Weisinger thought about the connections he had made while researching authors and interviewing editors, and decided to turn the Sciencers' hobby into a livelihood. Schwartz and Weisinger thus solicited themselves as agents of the Solar Sales Service, promoting themselves as facilitators who, owing to their personal familiarity with a number of central editors in the science fiction field, could connect more directly to these editors than authors relying on mailed manuscripts that might wait indefinitely on an editor's desk.

Weisinger defined the essence of the editor's problem: Writers did not know what editors wanted, when they wanted it. A contact like Weisinger, however, did, and could direct manuscripts to where they had the best chance of filling a hole in a particular issue of a science fiction magazine.

Solar Sales Service attracted Edmond Hamilton as an early client, later hustling the likes of Stanley Weinbaum as well.

Moving to the Editorial Side

Weisinger may have held a very romantic and fannish view of editors of science fiction publications, one which depicted them as larger-than-life figures, holding the power of life or death over the careers of science fiction authors (themselves greater than human). Or, on the other hand, he may have simply recognized a potential for vocational growth by moving to the editorial side of the business.

When a major title, Wonder Stories, went under, Charles Gernsback, its editor, sold it to Standard Magazines, who chose to reissue the magazine as Thrilling Wonder Stories. Weisinger contacted Leo Marguiles of Standard and asked him who Marguiles intended to assign as editor to the magazine. Marguiles suggested that he might hire Gernsback for this, but Weisinger convinced him that the failure of the magazine made that option dubious, and suggested his own name. Weisinger therefore became editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

As an editor, Weisinger actually shaped the development of science fiction. He diagnosed his younger readers as less interested in the hard-science approach and more inclined toward the fantastic side of science fiction, and rejected a number of stories from John W. Campbell on these grounds. Weisinger recommended omitting much of the hard scientific facts and beefing up the more pulpy content: more action, more beautiful females, more thrills. In some ways, this approach would make science fiction more accessible to a mass audience, though some critics might liken the method to making health foods more palatable by coating them in chocolate. However, given the palatability of the less-hard-science approach, and the fact that hard science fiction survived as a sub-genre, we need not see his enthusiasm as particularly subversive to the form.

Weisinger occasionally contrived clever means of promoting works. When he received a manuscript from (then-)unknown Alfred Bester, a longish piece of demonstrable quality but which, by its length, tended to stray from conventional story formats, Weisinger created a fictional contest to solicit manuscripts, then published Bester's piece as the winning manuscript. Robert Heinlein wrote an early story to submit to this contest, but, considering the word rates, decided to send it to Joseph Campbell's Astounding instead. Thus one event may have catalyzed the careers of both Bester and Heinlein.

Steering Talent to Comics

The science fiction market began to contract a bit by the dawn of the forties, and some talents had, in their early success, taken to lifestyles - like living in Manhattan - that their output could no longer support without some fortification through diversification. Therefore, when Alfred Bester came to Weisinger looking for some additional work, Weisinger steered him towards comics, eventually steering him into a role as writer for Green Lantern stories at All American / DC Comics. Bester's connection to All American Comics would, ultimately, serve to draw Julius Schwartz into the business when All American needed a new editor and Bester contacted Schwartz, lobbying him for the job, in 1944.

In, Out, and In as a DC Editor

Weisinger himself agreed to make the leap to comics when DC began hiring editors in 1941 to handle their expanding product line. However, he spent little time in the position before World War II pulled him into military service, with colleague Jack Schiff moving into the editorial position he vacated.

Before his induction - and, perhaps, before America committed to the war after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor - Weisinger created two Golden Age superheroes who would not realize their full potential for some time: Green Arrow (and his sidekick Speedy) and Aquaman. These characters would, though unable to sustain their own books in the long term until two generations had passed, become fixtures of the DC line through their inclusion in Justice League of America at the dawn of the 1960s.

At war's end, Weisinger returned to the company. He might have expected to come back to find no position for himself available in some businesses, but DC's product line had continued to expand through 1945 and the company gave him another editorial seat with no need to displace Schiff. Again, it needed editors.

Whitney Ellsworth, who served for a time as DC's editorial director, became involved with the radio and screen adaptations of Superman materials and ultimately moved into the domain of writing for television, a move which allowed Weisinger to assume the role of supervising editor in charge of the entire Superman line of books by 1950. Weisinger, from there, would guide the concept for two decades.

Weisinger would also serve as a story editor for the "Adventures of Superman" television series. So, then, Weisinger would achieve a multimedia credential decades before the common man would hear the term "multimedia."

Wesinger's Impact on the Superman Franchise

Weisinger, much unlike modern comics talent, did not dwell on as-yet-uninvented concepts like retroactive continuity changes, deconstructive antiheroes, superhero-comics-as-romance-comics, superhero-comics-as-political-invective, or big-guns-and-thongs. Instead, he recognized, and catered to, his audience.

He knew that kids read his books and he strove to find ways to make the books appeal to them. He sought the kind of gimmicks that younger readers might find inspiring to the imagination; he sometimes tested ideas against children's criticism and even solicited input from children in the sense of what they would like to see in a Superman comic.

Such an approach seems foreign, and perhaps subversive, to the modern model. Modern fans who clamor, from the fringes, to see material like graphic same-sex love scenes in Wonder Woman, or who consume the entire Avatar Comics line, would obviously sneer at such an approach, possibly accusing Weisinger et al of the unconscionable crime of peddling baby comics or treating readers like children. Such accusations, to my mind, suggest more about the accuser's insecurities than the material targeted by such verbal bombast.

Though today's comics serve an adult (and aging) readership as a central component, one should at least consider the benefits of reaching a younger readership. Such readers might, one would assume, purchase comics five or ten years down the road. Can contemporary comics in the modern model replace the readers they lose to indifference, aging out of the market, or death? This question remains central to the future of superhero comics, and Weisinger understood the answer in a way that often eludes modern editors, writers, and fans.

"The Weisinger Era" of Superman Books

With experience in handling Superman in more than one medium, Weisinger would continue expanding that hero's line of books in the 1950s. Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen dawned under Weisinger's direction, as did Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane, two books generally viewed as canonical Silver Age pieces, the latter having provided a springboard for artist Curt Swan to oust Wayne Boring as the central Superman artist for a generation, and the latter providing a kind of "I Love Lucy"-like kitsch about a scheming female with designs on Superman.

With Weisinger providing central guidance to the Superman line of books, these pieces began to behave in the manner of the modern shared universes of superhero comics. Characters and concepts that Weisinger introduced in one book would affect the rest of the line in such a way that readers could view the Superman line as an interconnected whole, which represented a significant change from the superhero comics model of the Golden Age. As well, more and more remnants of Krypton began showing up in Superman titles, plus a variety of rocks from the destroyed planet, including the mineral-as-plot-device red Kryptonite.

Weisinger, however, seemed able both to inspire and to repel talent. Curt Swan claimed that dealing with the man caused him recurrent headaches and temporarily drove him out of the business altogether. Otto Binder, similarly, may have retired from the business in 1958 mainly to escape dealing with Weisinger. When a financially troubled Jerry Siegel returned to DC and the Superman line, Weisinger put him to sturdy service at standard rates; Swan, again, recalled that Weisinger tended to bully Siegel, possibly to inspire him to better work, but, again, possibly simply because Siegel's circumstances made him unlikely to walk off for such mistreatment.

However, as much as Weisinger might have tended to domineer during his peak, he found that other forces in DC could move him as well. Consider the case of the creation of the Justice League at the dawn of the sixties. Bob Kane and Mort Weisinger, respectively, thought that including DC's most recognizable creations, Superman and Batman, might overexpose the characters. Both sought to keep the heroes off the covers of Justice League of America, and, if possible, out of the book altogether. Had these men had their way, a Justice League very similar to that of Waid's JLA: Year One might have appeared in print originally, not just in revision.

Weisinger, according to Schwartz, wanted Superman left out of the Justice League of America (except, perhaps, in the occasional end-of-story one-panel appearance), possibly owing to fears of overexposure of the character and possible market saturation. Thus, by his concerns (as the story goes), Weisinger nearly made of the Silver Age Justice League a version far more consistent with the post-Crisis interpretation found in works like Waid's JLA: Year One.

Weisinger left a stamp - or, indeed, a series of stamps - on the Superman franchise. He invested the premise with a heretofore unrealized set of strange accretions. He moved the stories to an unprecedented weirdness that no subsequent writers or editors would even attempt to approach. During his tenure, a reader truly did not know what to expect to happen in a Superman book. The connected mythos vastly expanded during the heyday of his directorship, with Supergirl, a variety of super-pets, the Bottle City of Kandor, the Bizarro World, and other elements becoming more prominent. Kryptonite enjoyed a population explosion, both in amounts and types. Strange situations like Supergirl attempting to marry Superman off to her otherworldly double Superwoman demonstrated that the franchise feared not to tread near the mildly depraved.

Weisinger's science fiction roots, which he had turned, at some point, towards a more science-fantasy approach, seemed very clear during this period.

Furthermore, Weisinger's imprint would reshape the style of the franchise, particularly through elevation of Curt Swan to the principal artist of the Superman line. From Jimmy Olsen artist, to principal cover artist on the Superman books, to main artist on the central Superman titles, Swan became the defining look of Superman for the sixties and seventies, replacing the barrel-chested and lantern-jawed Wayne Boring Superman with a more genteel, humane, and realistic-looking version.

The End of the Ride

Weisinger never rose to a point where consensus placed him above opinion, yet these criticisms seem rather unimportant or ephemeral in comparison to the science-fantasy setting he created from the Superman kernel. Some contemporaries recall his tendency to bully; others claim he had a tendency to usurp credit for the ideas of his subordinates; and his old friend Julius Schwartz credits him with a tendency to stretch the truth to the point that he deserved the epitaph "Here lies Mort Weisinger - again."

Weisinger kept the Superman books at something of a boil - some might view this period as a relentless chain of serial absurdities, tongue-in-cheek gags, and overall weirdness unmatchable in a day where comics would become too self-important.

A changing of generations would occur in comics in the late sixties. Marvel Comics, having somewhat reinvented the style of the superhero form, had begun absorbing larger and larger chunks of the market share. DC, though expanding again into television - through cartoons of dubious quality, dating as they did from the era of the nadir of American animation - recognized the threat Marvel posed, and tried to keep their own properties from becoming too conceptually moribund.

DC, in the late sixties, started bringing in young talent. Weisinger, in particular, began implementing this policy in an attempt to keep DC vital and viable, but the policy, in some ways, also allowed the new talents (generally unbeknownst to themselves) to serve as scabs to displace surly old tenured talent with whose services DC wished to dispense. Wayne Boring, for instance, did his last work for DC and then that company saw an influx of young talents born in the thirties and forties, artists and writers who had grown up with superhero comics, including Cary Bates, Elliot Maggin, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Dennis O'Neal, Jim Aparo, and Roy Thomas. Many of these figures came from fandom (like Weisinger had himself) and/or from Charlton comics.

Weisinger, in these days, would have an impact on both DC and Marvel through this policy, impacting the latter company through his bellicose management style. As Thomas recalls, an inability to deal with Weisinger inclined him to leave DC and move to Marvel, where he would assume a high position on its editorial side and write too many comics to count, before returning to DC over a decade later.

If some remember Weisinger as a purveyor of workplace unhappiness, he seems to have consumed some quantity of his own product. Weisinger developed an ulcer. He sought counseling. He recognized his own unhappiness and attributed it to playing a tributary role to an imaginary person. Weisinger, describing this last period of Superman work, claimed that he became increasingly fond of stories where Superman would lose his powers altogether and have to solve problems in the way an ordinary man might.

Weisinger retired from his role as Superman editor, and from comics, in 1970, where his old friend and fellow pulp-era science fiction fan Julius Schwartz would assume the role of Superman editor until his own retirement in the eighties. Though by the seventies DC would distance itself considerably from the Superman mythos Weisinger created, fans would continue to recognize this as the most dynamic period of the character, recognized in contemporary tributes such as the derivative, Weisinger-themed Supreme intermittently published by Awesome Comics.

Other lights would then have their day, for a time, and writers would attempt more to cater to an adultish and aging readership, doing little to appeal to younger readers. However, this strategy would eventually undermine the new readership of superhero comics altogether; and we might note that the industry could, today, use some editors with Weisinger's vision, even if the modern superhero synthesis remains hostile to his aesthetic style.

When Weisinger retired, DC did not just replace him with another editor, though Julius Schwartz did assume his title. DC replaced him with a gang of editors, with Mike Sekowsky (Adventure Comics), Murray Boltinoff (Action Comics, Superboy, Jimmy Olsen), Nelson Bridwell (Lois Lane), and, of course , Julius Schwartz (Superman, World's Finest) attempting collectively to fill his shoes.

Compared to the Weisinger-era Superman, a reader who can compare both might note that the later, Schwartz-era product appeared somewhat bland and tame. One sees relatively little of the anything-utterly-absurd-can-happen component that made sixties Superman stories so amusing; no one's head turns into a giant ant head, no one becomes a giant purple gorilla, no one marries a Bizarro Lee Harvey Oswald, or the like. The silliness of the Cap'n Strong stories, in an understated way, approaches a sixties Superman story, but official Superman material mostly steers clear the dangerous comics of the absurd that Weisinger managed to control for years.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 206. Completed 17-DEC-2000.