Mort Weisinger
|
|
Mortimer Weisinger (1915-1978) was an American magazine and comic book editor.
He is most famous as the editor of the Superman line of comic books for DC Comics during The Silver age of comic books. He also co-created such long-running features as Aquaman and Green Arrow, as well as Johnny Quick, served as story editor for The Adventures of Superman television series, and compiled the often-revised paperback 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get Free.
His tenure in this position was marked by a reliance of an complex milieux of supporting characters like Supergirl and Krypto and gimmicky plot devices like endless varieties of kryptonite, Lois Lane trying to prove Superman was Clark Kent, and "imaginary tales" that featured events deviating wildly from the comics' status quo.
He also encouraged a static picture book style of illustration with villains who were more naughty than truly evil and dialogue often redundantly described the visual action. Superman himself was usually depicted as so impossibly good and with such godlike power that many stories had to continually play on his weaknesses to present reasonable challenges to the character.
In the 1960s, the Superman comics maintained a reasonably tight internal continuity but related little to the rest of the DC Universe. When Julius Schwartz succeeded Weisinger, he started to change this. He also tried to eliminate gimmicks like kryptonite and partially depowered Superman to allow for a more flexible story world. However, the influence of Weisinger's style proved too strong and most of the gimmicks returned, albeit in a modestly more sophisticated fashion. It wasn't until 1986 that Superman continuity was significantly updated and relaunched by John Byrne.
It remains true that, under Weisinger's editorship, (before the Batman TV series) the Superman comics were the most popular in the world.