A BIRTHDAY SALUTE: The celebrated Mr. K pays homage to the illustrator’s Golden Age artistry… — UPDATED 5/1/24: The late Win Mortimer was born 105 years ago, on May 1, 1919! Perfect time to reprint this piece from 2021. Dig it. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG Sometime around 1982, I don’t remember exactly, I was up at DC Comics’ offices at 75 Rock, dropping off some scripts and waiting to pick up a check from editor Julie Schwartz. He was off somewhere when I showed up, so I dropped my briefcase in his office and loitered in the corridor to wait for him. Well, I never made it to the corridor. While I was putting my briefcase down, I’d glanced at the stack of art boards laying on top of Julie’s in-box. It was the pencils for a Supergirl story by Winslow Mortimer that I had scripted for an upcoming issue of Superman Family. I scooped the pages from the desk and started flipping through them. It was the Master Jailer story from either #219 (June 1982), “Prison Bars Do Not a Cell Make,” or #220 (July 1982), “Battle Beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.” I had never seen the artist’s pencils before, only the finished pages after they had been lettered and inked by Vince Colletta. I’d always liked Win Mortimer’s work. I grew up on his mid-1960s output for DC Comics, mostly humor strips like Plastic Man, Stanley and His Monster, Fox and the Crow, The Adventures of Jerry Lewis and Scooter, but he also worked on the occasional superhero book like The Brave and the Bold and the Legion of Super-Heroes. I’d also spot stories by him in Gold Key horror titles like Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery and Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Mortimer was already assigned to the Supergirl strip when I took it over from Martin Pasko with Superman Family #217 (Aug. 1982). I was thrilled to be working with him. One of the best parts of breaking into the comic business when I did in the mid-1970s was that most of the artists I grew up reading and admiring, many of them the founders of the business from the 1930s and 1940s, were still at their drawing boards. Winslow Mortimer was born 105 years ago (May 1, 1919 – January 11, 1988). The...