PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite MORT WEISINGER SUPERMAN FAMILY Innovations
A BIRTHDAY SALUTE: The celebrated Mr. K tours the world of a comics visionary, who was born 109 years ago… — UPDATED 4/25/24: The late Mort Weisinger was born 109 years ago, on April 25, 1915. Perfect time to “reprint” this 2022 column by Paul Kupperberg. Dig it. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG It was a surreal moment in 1978, early in my career in comics when, as the assistant to DC Comics’ public relations director, I was assigned to write the company’s official obituary for Mort Weisinger (April 25, 1915 – May 7, 1978). Mort Weisinger wasn’t the reason I fell in love with comics, but his editorial reign on the family of Superman titles — Superman, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen — was a major factor in developing my love for the medium in general and for Superman in particular (as well as in coming up with concepts that would later fuel my budding comics writing career). And Weisinger, as I was to later learn, had planned it to happen from the start! As a (then) 40- or 45-year-old man, Mort knew he could only guess at what his 8- to 13-year-old audience wanted to see in a Superman story. Or he could ask them. His son Hendrie was 7 years old in 1955 and in a 2019 interview on Comic Book Historians, recalled how his father depended on him as a springboard for ideas: “His job as story editor of Superman, in many ways, I was his editor. Because every single morning, he would wake me up, and it would always be the same, ‘How’s this for a cover?’ or, ‘How do you like this situation?’ He would describe a situation that Superman is in or with Lois Lane.” Mort would also hand out comics to the neighborhood kids and solicit their opinions and ideas for Superman. One of the elements of keeping his titles fresh and the readers interested was by continually adding new elements to the Superman mythos. Mort’s most important contribution to the character was the introduction of the feeling of family into the series. At first, Superman was the sole survivor of his people, alone in the universe, until the writers started to coalesce a little “work family” around him at the Daily...
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