Mort Weisinger — BrandWiki

Mort Weisinger

birth name	Mortimer Weisinger
birth date	April 25, 1915
birth place	New York City, New York, U.S.
death date	May 7, 1978
death place	Great Neck, New York, U.S.
write	y
edit	y
notable works	Action Comics Superman
awards	Inkpot Award (1978) Eisner Award Hall of Fame (2010)

Mortimer Weisinger ([1] April 25, 1915[2] – May 7, 1978)[3] was an American magazine and comic book editor best known for editing DC Comics' Superman during the mid-1950s to 1960s, in the Silver Age of comic books. He also co-created such features as Aquaman, Green Arrow, Johnny Quick, and the original Vigilante, served as story editor for the Adventures of Superman television series, and compiled the often-revised paperback 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get Free.

Biography

Early life and SF fandom

Weisinger was born in the

Early career

After high school, Weisinger attended New York University, where he worked as editor of the college's newspaper and magazine, but left before graduating. With Schwartz, he approached the editor of Amazing Stories (T. Connor Sloane) and "sold his first story": 'The Price of Peace'.[4] In late 1934, Weisinger suggested that he and Schwartz "ought to go into the agency business," noting (according to Schwartz) that the duo had "...got to know a lot of writers and artists and so on... [Mort explained] 'When a writer writes a story he lives out of town, and he mails it to Amazing Stories. If it's rejected, it has to go all the way back to California. So he sends it to Wonder Stories. Then it goes back and forth, because they send it blind. They don't know what the editor wants. Now we talk to the editors, and he can find out if they want an interplanetary story of about six thousand words, or if they want this or that. Then we can relay this information to the writers. And of course we can become their agents and collect the usual fee of 10%.' "[4]

Schwartz concurred, and they formed the Solar Sales Service ("We always believed in alliteration," noted Schwartz[4]), the first literary agency to specialize in the related genres of SF, horror, and fantasy. Edmond Hamilton was the agency's first client, and Otto Binder soon followed.[4] Solar Sales eventually represented many prominent SF and fantasy writers, including John Russell Fearn, Alfred Bester, Stanley Weinbaum, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury. But while Schwartz continued the agency into the early 1940s, Weisinger moved on; he took a job with the Standard Magazine chain, publisher of a range of pulp magazines. Standard had acquired writer-publisher Hugo Gernsback's defunct Wonder Stories and added it to Standard series of "Thrilling" publications (Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Western, and others). Weisinger became the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories,[5] and bought stories by Hamilton and others from his former partner Schwartz. Weisinger was soon editing a range of other pulps by Standard, including Startling Stories and Captain Future, and "was in charge of no fewer than 40 titles" by 1940.[5]

National Periodical Publications (DC Comics)

Army service

In March 1941, Weisinger moved from Standard Magazines to National Periodicals (later DC Comics) primarily as editor of the Superman and Batman titles.[5] Among his earliest jobs, however, was the task of "dream[ing] up some new characters" – these resulted in the line-up of More Fun Comics #73, and took the form of Aquaman, Green Arrow, Johnny Quick and Vigilante.[5] Weisinger's fledgling career was soon interrupted when he was conscripted in 1942,[6] and he served as a sergeant in Special Services. Stationed at Yale (and rooming with Broderick Crawford and William Holden), he wrote scripts for a U.S. Army "radio show called 'I Sustain the Wings' " in New York City.[5]

He met and married (Sept. 27, 1943) his wife, the former Thelma Rudnick. They had two children, a daughter, Joyce, and son, Hendrie.

Superman innovations

Weisinger returned to his job at National after his discharge from military service in 1946, and resumed his editorship of the Superman comics, the Batman titles and others. His tenure was marked by the introduction of a variety of new concepts and supporting characters, including Supergirl, Krypto the Superdog, the Phantom Zone, the bottle city of Kandor, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and a variety of types of kryptonite. Attempting to rationalize Superman's powers, it was under Weisinger's watch that the "concept that in a world circling a yellow sun [as opposed to Krypton's red sun] his [Superman's] powers are multiplied" came to be introduced to the Superman mythology.[5]

Realizing that "Batman was my favorite [character]," Weisinger realised that the crucial difference was that "Batman can get hurt."[5] In order to better allow the reader to identify with the invulnerable Man of Steel, Weisinger frequently featured stories in which "Superman lost his powers and had to survive on his natural wits."[5] Pitted against Superman's wits was Lois Lane

The Adventures of Superman

Weisinger "eventually gave up editorship of Batman and many of the other magazines and concentrated on the #1 superhero," both in the comics and elsewhere.[5] In the early 1950s, he was "called out to California by Whitney Ellsworth . . . to work as story editor for the Superman TV series."[5] Weisinger recalled in 1975 about this experience that On the way out to the coast, we sat in a roomette on a train with a tape recorder and plotted about fifteen stories for the series. I met George Reeves, the actor who played Superman and was one helluva nice guy – very, very unaffected. The amazing thing was that when you met Reeves you said, 'My lord, it's Clark Kent!' It was like seeing Clark step out of the comic pages into three dimensions.[5] Through Weisinger's previous "experience with television," Reeves landed "a guest star spot, "Big Red S" and all, on the I Love Lucy show."[5]

Weisinger's influences on up-and-coming writers in SF and comics also extended, by these means, to television.

Superman editorship

Weisinger was sole editor of all of the Superman titles from 1958 until his retirement from comics in 1970.[7]

Many of Weisinger's ideas came from talking to kids in his neighborhood, asking them what they wanted to see, and then attempting to riff on those ideas. Such talks inspired him to create the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen spin-off titles "over a lot of opposition" from the management who "protested that the characters weren't strong enough."[5] Weisinger later bought a story from Jim Shooter while unaware of the writer's age,[8] and hired him for a popular run on "The Legion of Super-Heroes" even after discovering that he was only 14 years old.

Weisinger encouraged a static picture book style of illustration in his stories, and was known for reusing previously published stories as new story ideas. A noted example of this is a 1950s story featuring Superman encountering an alien being he thought might have been his long-lost brother; this was reused in the early 1960s as a Superboy story introducing Mon-El

Management style

Weisinger was criticized by some for having a micromanaging attitude and a heavy-handed, overbearing treatment of his writers and artists. He was well known for his abusive treatment of the DC employees. Indeed, his son also confirms he was abusive to restaurant waiters as well.[10][11][12] Criticism has also been leveled at Weisinger for quashing creativity by dictating storylines. Jim Shooter, who wrote for years under his editorship, praised Weisinger's "rules" for writing comics but criticized his rigid adherence to them: "Mort's rules always worked, story-mechanics-wise. Easy, idiot-proof, safe. Trying things that explored the frontiers beyond the confines of Mort's rules was tricky—fraught with opportunities to fail—but if you were daring, if you had the necessary depth of understanding and the skills, you could do wonderful things."[13] Weisinger has commented, "People have always accused me of being an egomaniac as an editor because I always gave the writers my own plots. I did that for a reason. If I asked a writer to bring in his own plots, and he spent a weekend on four of them, and I didn't like any of the four, then he's wasted a whole weekend. ... The least I could do was to think of a plot for the writer and if he liked it – I'd never force it down his throat – we'd kick it around and evolve a story."

Articles and books

In addition to his SF agency and extensive editorial work for DC Comics, Weisinger found time – particularly after his retirement from DC – to write a considerable number of articles for a wide variety of magazines. Weisinger was reported, in 1975, as having "had articles in The Journal of the AMA, Reader's Digest, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post... [and] Parade."[5] His articles ranged from one on the Comics Code for Better Homes and Gardens to an article entitled "How Ralph Edwards Fools 'Em" for which he "accompanied Edwards on several This Is Your Life escapades to get the story of how the clever impresario suckered the celebrities whom he was to honor on his popular '50s show."[5]

Weisinger occasionally contributed articles to the writers' magazines – Writer's Digest, The Author & Journalist, etc. – from the 1930s through the 1950s. From 1934-35, for Writer’s Review, he produced gossipy reports on the activities of pulp writers.

Weisinger had a particular interest in beauty contests, writing an article for Parade on "why certain finalists in the Miss America pageant can never win the crown," as well as a "best-selling novel" entitled The Contest (published in hardback by World, and in paperback by New American Library).[5] Weisinger had once been a "judge in a preliminary Miss America contest," through which he "learned the inside story," later travelling to Europe with the then-"world-famous host of the real-life contest," a friend of Weisinger's at the time who refused to talk to him again after reading the resulting novel.[5] For the author, however, The Contest netted a $125,000 movie option and "printings in several foreign languages."[5]

Weisinger's best known book was "a compendium of freebies available to anyone" entitled 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get For Free, first published in 1955 and which (as of 1975) had "gone through 41 paperback printings and sold over three million copies."[5] Weisinger's book was praised by Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Book, and earned its author a place in "Who's Who".[5]