The celebrated Mr. K. does the birthday honors for one of the all-time best… By PAUL KUPPERBERG If you tried telling Denny O’Neil that he was one of the best and most influential figures in the history of American comic books, he would chuckle modestly and deflect the praise. Instead of writing a memoir, he even deflected his own often fascinating life into fiction in The Perils of Captain Mighty and the Redemption of Danny the Kid. He once credited his being hired to write for Charlton Comics in the 1960s to the simple fact that he was “a carbon based lifeform that could type.” He made his bones writing Patsy and Hedy and Millie the Model stories for Marvel in the mid-1960s, then went on to help reshape and redefine comic book storytelling through his groundbreaking work at DC Comics on Batman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, and other titles, all accomplished with a modest declaimer that all he was doing was his job. In case you can’t tell, I’m a Denny O’Neil fan, although the first time I read him, it was a story written under the nom de plume, Sergius O’Shaughnessy, in a non-series science fiction story in Charlton Premiere. But once the St. Louis, Missouri, native’s real byline began appearing in DC Comics titles like Justice League of America, Bat Lash, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern in 1968, I started to take notice. Denny, a newspaper reporter before fellow Missourian Roy Thomas convinced him to take the Marvel writer’s test, brought a journalistic sensibility to these overblown, hyperbolic tales of superhumans in impossible situations. Denny — who was born 86 years ago, on May 3, 1939 — had the touch, possessing a solid grasp of storytelling into which he wove often morally complex, social and political issues so deftly, most readers didn’t realize they had learned anything until it was too late. Editor Julie Schwartz may get the credit for putting together the team of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams in 1969, perhaps the most well-regarded creative duo of the 1970s, but that writer and artist pairing made magic all on their own. It had been more than five years since Schwartz had introduced the “New Look” Batman in 1964, making the Dynamic Duo more grounded, with a sharper art style developed by Carmine Infantino. Then came...