Mort Weisinger's Idea of Funny

What the? From Superboy #72 (April 1959):

Why would he put that postscript in there?  He had to know that there were plenty of Superboy readers who were still at the age where they believed in Santa.  It's hard to come up with a reason other than the obvious; that Weisinger was a first class jerk.

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A Letter from Yoe

I happened to be browsing through Adventures into the Unknown #174 (the last issue of that terrific title) today and found a letter from Craig Yoe:



I tend to agree with Craig; the earlier issues of Adventures Into the Unknown were a little too reliant on the supposed shock value of vampires and werewolves. It's interesting to see that (editor and chief writer) Richard Hughes admits to publishing a few stinkers.

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The First Letter Published in Lois Lane

Hmmm:



Hank Weisinger? I'm guessing it's Mort's son, because Mort himself was from Great Neck, as mentioned here:

For many years before and five years after that globe was constructed, Mort Weisinger drove from Great Neck towards that incredible city of towers and terrors, his mind filled not with the grandeur of the metropolis before him, but with the problems of plot... how could he get an almost invulnerable character into and out of dangerous situations this month?

Update: Two terrific comments on this post. CMN points out that Phyllis Coates only appeared in the first 26 episodes, not 52 as stated by Weisinger Pere. And an anonymous commenter points out that Weisinger's son, Hendrie (Hank), wrote a comment on a blog post here where he states:

Also, many of the letters in the mailbags he made up, many times signing my friend's names. He would often do this to plant ideas and to develop the superman mythology.

Incidentally, that blog post goes into some detail about Weisinger's difficult nature (he apparently browbeat his writers and artists), and while I don't disagree about that, I do disagree with this:

But Weisinger had very little talent -- less, say, than a writer coming up with a funny dream sequence for The Dick Van Dyke Show. The Weisinger neuroses poke thru the stories like broken bones thru skin. God, are they painful. There's no aesthetic payoff, just the fascination of the awful. But, okay, I'll settle for that.

You can detect some detachment from the time, as the writers for the Dick Van Dyke Show were far from untalented; they won Emmy Awards in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1966, and were nominated in 1965.

So too I think it is with the writer's assessment of Weisinger's talent. It can be difficult to see as an adult in 2010. Yes, if you've read Watchmen or DKR, those 1960s Superman tales seem banal and juvenile by comparison. But that's the point, we hadn't read Watchmen back in the 1960s, and we were juvenile.

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Green Lantern on Magic Mushrooms?

Just in case you thought Speedy on Smack was the first drug mention in a Green Lantern comic, check out this letter from Green Lantern #18 (January 1963):

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The World's Finest Fan Letter Ever

I don't blame Julius Schwartz for making that call. By way of background in the spring of 1968 the communist satellite country of Czechoslovakia (now know as the Czech Republic and Slovakia) experienced a wave of democratic reforms from their new leader, Alexander Dubcek. This raised hopes that perhaps there might be cracks in the Iron Curtain, but in August the Soviets responded in much the same way as the Chinese did at Tianamen Square (and as the Iranian regime is responding to the current unrest); they rolled the tanks in and started killing.



From Batman #213 (July-Aug 1969). The book that the unnamed Czech patriot raves about is indeed one of the finest comics in the entire Silver Age, and probably deserves a good look:



One of my all-time favorite covers ever; the use of a B/W negative really makes that last panel, where Batman suddenly unmasks himself, pop out.

That's the opening story, certainly on any Bat-fan's short list. The second story, the Jungle Cat-Queen, is my personal choice for the finest Batman story of the Golden Age. It's a great story, features the Catwoman, has multiple death traps and beautiful Sprang artwork.

The highlight of the rest of the issue is the terrific Sunday strip where the Penguin's real name of Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot is revealed.

So overall the dad of Vasik, Lidunka and Evicka definitely scored a classic comic. What a shame that it would be another two decades before Batman became generally available in the Czech Republic.

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Mails of Suspense

Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd take a quick look at the letters columns in Tales of Suspense #s 70-79 to see if there are any interesting patterns I can discern. There were 47 letters in all, so that's a little under five per issue.

1. Only one writer had more than one letter published in TOS in those issues: Kenny Chance of Brooklyn who had letters in TOS #75 and #76.

2. Maybe it should be called Males of Suspense? Only one of the letters was written by a female. Linda Crowe of Greenwood, Indiana, wrote in to complain about the apparent death of Happy Hogan in TOS #70.

3. The letters were all terse; I don't recall any of them being longer than about 5-6 sentences and never two paragraphs. Partly this may have been because TOS only had a one-page letter column, but also Stan obviously had his hands full with so many scripts to pop out in a month and around this time was begging his fans to keep their letters to under a page in length. A little while afterward he even tried publishing the letters without any editorial reply, although this proved so unpopular that he returned to commenting a few months later.

4. The states that had the most letter writers were New York (9), Illinois (6) and New Jersey (4). Five letters were mailed from outside the USA; three from Canada and one each from Puerto Rico and Trinidad. Actually I guess Puerto Rico is still part of the US, but it's not a state.

5. The first names were very much "white bread": Lots of Joes and Bobs and Dons and Williams. The ethnic flavor was more in the last names: Khan, Della Fiore, Zimmerman, Iacopelli, Ahokas, Martinez, etc. It was an era where people tried to blend in, rather than emphasize their heritage, and I actually disliked my name of Patrick back them because it was so uncommon. (According to Social Security, fewer than one boy out of every 200 born in the US in 1955 was given that name).

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Classic Letters of the Silver Age

Mom, what does it mean that a marriage was never consummated? Hat tip to Mark Engblom for finding this one; I had read it years ago but could never find it, probably because I was looking for it in old Lois Lane issues.

How did Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox--Doh, Robert Kanigher as pointed out in the comments--come up with the name Barry Allen?



Barry Gray is considered "The Father of Talk Radio". Allen, of course, was a pioneer of talk TV, hosting the Tonight Show back in the 1950s.

Here's a kid bucking for the editor's job:



And of course he eventually got it!

Here's how to wheedle the editor out of some original artwork:




At least he had the good sense to stop before he thanked the Donenfelds for taking the trouble to publish the magazine. Anyway, this blatant job of sucking up had its desired effect:



Oh, yeah, that was really going to help some kid in his cartooning. Snort!

Well, you know, it just might have:



Yep, old Funky Winkerbean himself. Batiuk would have been about 14 at the time this letter appeared; his strip began about 11 years later.

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Letters Columns Bring Continuity?

I've often thought this was so, but decided to take a brief look at it with this post. In the GA and the early Silver Age, DC, like many publishers, had two pages of print in every magazine, apparently in order to get a preferential rate on mailing. For many years they had used this space to print an amazing number of absolutely forgettable tales.

But ACG started publishing letters to the editor in their horror mags and apparently these satisfied the post office's requirements. DC, realizing that free letters from their fans were cheaper than whatever they paid for the text stories switched gradually, over a long period of time, to letters columns.

Superboy #68 (October, 1958) was the first issue of that title to feature a letters column. And oh, boy could you see the future of the Silver Age writ large upon that first page:



Okay, no more melting bullets with his X-Ray Vision (perhaps this is why Superboy developed "heat vision" to begin with? Superboy's adventures are taking place during WWII, so don't show the TV antennas on the roofs. Why can't he just make a couple diamonds everytime a charity needs some money? And we get an amusing letter about Supe's fascination with the LL girls, which turns out to be hugely prophetic.

These letters may not seem like much, but they clearly drove characterization for years. First, we get the careful "can his powers really do that?" that marked the Weisinger era. Next we get promo for an upcoming story. Then a time continuity mistake that DC admits is a boo-boo (as they liked to call it in those G-Rated days).

Superboy #70 had more letters of the same type:



Apparently a common enough complaint that DC decided to do a story about it, explaining that the glass for his lenses came from the rocket that carried him to earth.

And another complaint about the collapsed time problem that bedeviled Superboy:



Of course, the problem is that if you have Superboy reacting to 10-year-old fads he's going to seem awfully drab, and yet DC had to maintain the illusion that his adventures were taking place years ago, before Clark became Superman. It was a circle they never quite managed to square.

You can see the continuity being forced on the editors by the readers, or at least forced to be committed to:

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