PAUL KUPPERBERG | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

May20

PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite GARDNER FOX Comic Book Creations

Posted by Dan Greenfield on May 20, 2023

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)...

May16

THE ATLAS OF THE DC UNIVERSE: Paul Kupperberg Reveals 13 FASCINATING FACTS

Posted by Dan Greenfield on May 16, 2023

THE ATLAS OF THE DC UNIVERSE: Paul Kupperberg Reveals 13 FASCINATING FACTS

The celebrated Mr. K explains why Gotham is in New Jersey, Metropolis is in Delaware, why Atlantis got so much ink – and much, much more… — UPDATED 5/16/23: We’ve been running a lot of columns about RPGs lately, because our pal Jim Beard has edited a new book of essays about them by a litany of writers — D20 or Die! It seemed only fitting to re-present this one from June 2021, too! Dig it — and dig the links to the other columns below! — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG In 1989, I took on the assignment from hell… I mean, I accepted a gig from Mayfair Games, publishers of role-playing games (RPG) and sourcebooks therefore. This is not to say anything negative about the fine folks at Mayfair, who were unfailingly good to me during the process of working on The Atlas of the DC Universe and the earlier Doom Patrol module storyline I wrote for them (“Moonshot,” recently reprinted in the Doom Patrol Bronze Age Omnibus). This is to say that the experience of actually writing this monster was one of the least pleasant of my career (see Fascinating Fact #2, below) because of the thousands of little details that needed to be collated and banged into the proper order. On the upside, the finished product turned out to be something I’m proud of and I’m happy to see it’s been of use to my fellow creators in the DCU (see Fascinating Fact #13). Here then, are 13 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT THE ATLAS OF THE DC UNIVERSE: — 1. The cover was drawn by Blue Devil artist Paris Cullins… not that the designers gave him anything interesting to draw so that you could actually tell who the artist was. — 2. There was no internet in 1989 when I wrote the Atlas. Research was done the old-fashioned way, by going through the old stories in DC’s library, photocopying relevant pages, and compiling stacks and stacks of notes and reference material, which always ended up getting strewn all over and around the desk during the writing process, and was usually missing some vital bit of information that would need to wait until the next trip to DC for me to research it. I could have written it in one-third the time (and with none of the...

Home » PAUL KUPPERBERG