PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite GARDNER FOX Comic Book Creations
The Flash! Hawkman! JSA! JLA! The Multiverse! And so much more! By PAUL KUPPERBERG What has Gardner F. Fox done for comics lately? That’s a trick question because what Gardner Fox did for comics before he left the business to write novels in the late-1960s has never not paid dividends, especially his work at DC Comics — and especially his contribution to what many (well, me) consider the single most important comic book of the 1960s, The Flash #123 (June 1961) and the story “The Flash of Two Worlds.” (By the way, this is Hugh Everett, the quantum physicist who originally conceived of the multiverse concept and this is a portrait of Gardner Fox by Gil Kane. Coincidence…? You be the judge!) Although he got a law school degree from St. John’s College and was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1935, Fox (May 20, 1911 – December 24, 1986) turned instead to comic book writing. Mike’s Amazing World website has him credited with writing 18,868 pages over 1,630 stories from 1937 to 1973, but as I’ve discovered from my own online bibliography and researching others, that list is likely incomplete. In a talk with Jim Steranko at the 1971 New York Comic Art Convention luncheon, Fox estimated that he had written some 50 million words over the course of his career, which included all those comics as well as short stories for pulp magazines ranging from Weird Tales to Amazing Stories to Baseball Stories to Fighting Western, and on to whatever other genres there happened to be, and dozens of novels for Ace, Gold Medal, Tower, Belmont, Pyramid, Signet, and others, many of which are available from the Gardner Francis Fox Library. He won several early fan awards, the Alley Award, for his work on Adam Strange, Justice League of America, and Showcase. Fox led an interesting life. By far the best (and most entertaining) source of information on this legend is Jennifer DeRoss’ highly recommended Forgotten All-Star: A Biography of Gardner Fox (which you can order here). It’s a rare peek at a Golden and Silver Age pioneer about whom I knew little before I read it, a creator who not only wrote an array of DC characters, ranging from Batman (where he introduced such Bat-staples as the utility belt, the Bat-Gyro, and the Batarang)...
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