But for all the criticism that Elwood received before leaving the science fiction field for greener pastures, he was also responsible for bringing some worthy works into print, which might otherwise have languished unpublished or lain moldering in the back files of long-defunct magazines. This was surely the case with the works of Otto Binder, and for this good work if for little else, Elwood deserves credit.
Read Otto Binder’s books, but above all, make it your business to read some of his comics, especially Captain Marvel Adventures.
And join me in thanking Bill Schelly for writing this wonderful book.
1.
APPLAUSE
In all the years he was writing comic book stories, Otto Binder never dreamed that anyone would remember those stories in later years, or that he would receive any special recognition for having written them. He felt that his literary legacy, if any, would be a result of his science fiction (SF) stories of the 1930s and 1940s, starring the intelligent robot Adam Link, the immortal Anton York, and others.
As Binder surveyed the crowd of fans and admirers in a meeting room on the morning of July 31, 1965, however, he must have realized that his work in comic books was far from forgotten.
On this occasion, the man with the curly hair and cherubic smile was a special guest of the 1965 New York Comicon, sponsored by the Academy of Comic Book Fans and Collectors. He was flocked by fans from the moment he entered the ballroom of the Hotel Broadway Central.
Otto Binder at the 1965 New York Comicon. Courtesy of Dave Armstrong.
He had been one of the most prolific writers of comics not for fame or glory, but to put food on the table. In two of his three decades in that industry, he had composed some 2,227 comic book stories (and had the records to prove it). He’d produced comics scripts that became classics of the medium. Who knew they would be remembered by so many, not just by kids but by a surprisingly large number of older teenagers and adults?
One of those admirers took the microphone. His name was Jerry G. Bails, PhD. Bails was a professor of science and technology at Wayne State University, hardly one of the depraved youths whose minds were forever rotted by reading comics, as the anti-comics alarmists of the 1950s would have had us believe. Bails leaned into the microphone. “We’re honored today to have with us a gentlemen whose work spans the entire history of the comics magazine field … Mr. Otto Binder!”
In the room were colleagues: Mort Weisinger, Jim Warren, Gardner Fox, Bill Finger—all giants in the comics field. Waiting at the periphery was a local CBS television news crew, and a reporter from the New Yorker magazine, both eager to interview him. Amid tumultuous applause, the middle-aged man of medium height made his way to the dais.
Otto Binder, at that moment, was on top of the world. Yes, there had been difficulties along the way, but now, he felt that things were on the upswing. He had a dynamic, intelligent wife, an adorable teenage daughter, a comfortable home, and was working for the top comic book publisher of the day.
Excitingly, he was finding renewed interest in his influential stories written for the science fiction pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Both the Anton York and Adam Link stories were collected into mass-market paperbacks, and there was talk of sequels to be written afresh. Adam Link—the first “feeling” robot in popular fiction—had recently been turned into an episode of the acclaimed Outer Limits television show, under the original title, “I, Robot.” His science writing for NASA and in numerous nonfiction books had made him an authority on the space race of the 1960s, and had put him in touch with a whole new audience. Still, it was his extraordinary work in the comic book field that made this moment of acclaim possible.
Hard work and inspiration had been invested, and the future held much promise. But promises can be made, and they can be broken. Otto Binder, a man of sterling character and stellar achievements, would intimately know personal tragedy in the coming years.
2.
AN AMERICAN TALE BEGINS
The American experience in the first third of the twentieth century was, in many cases, that of the sons and daughters of European immigrants. These first-generation citizens of the United States had much in common: they descended from the working class in Europe who came to America for economic opportunity; they grew up learning two languages, the one spoken by their parents, and the English they learned from friends and school; and, perhaps most significantly, they had their lives shaped on the anvil of the Great Depression, which began in 1929 with the Wall Street crash, and wouldn’t end until the coming of the next major formative event, World War II.
Otto Binder shared this experience with the hundreds of thousands who were born in America of families that had passed through Ellis Island. The Binders were Germans from Austria-Hungary, the constitutional union of the two countries that existed from 1867 to 1918. After World War I, the countries were separated into the familiar boundary configurations that would remain basically unchanged until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Michael and Marie Binder, after coming to America before World War I. They had six children, but only the last one was born in the U.S.
The surname Binder, the German equivalent of “cooper” (repairer of wooden vessels, such as tubs, buckets, casks, and vats), was pronounced to rhyme with “tinder.” Yet Otto’s father Michael (b. 1869) was not a binder by trade; he was a blacksmith. His wife Marie (b. 1874) came from the Payer family, a prominent clan living in the village of Harkaw, in what is now Hungary. Michael and Marie, both Lutherans, began their family with the birth of two daughters, Marie (nicknamed Mitz) and Theresa (Tessie). Then, on August 11, 1902, they brought their first son into the world, John (whom they would call Jack). Next in line was Earl, on October 4, 1904, and then Michael Jr. (nicknamed Curley) on April 12, 1906.1 They would add a sixth child after their move to America.
The Payer family house in Harkaw, in what is now Hungary. Both of Otto’s parents were of German descent. Photos courtesy of Bonnie Mundy.
Of their life in Austria-Hungary, Jack would tell of being taught to draw at the age of four by an uncle who was a school teacher, probably the same uncle—Ted Payer—who appreciated the arts and took six-year-old Jack to the Budapest opera. Michael Binder Sr. immigrated to America in 1906, the year his namesake was born, to prepare the way for the rest of his family. Perhaps there were already relatives in America who had entreated him to come to the new land. In 1910, the family received word from its patriarch to come. Mother Binder and her young brood crossed the ocean and continued by land until they were reunited with Michael Binder in Bessemer, Michigan.
Bessemer is located in Gogebic County, part of Michigan’s upper peninsula. It is situated on the iron range that runs from northern Michigan to Minnesota. Iron had been discovered in the reddish-brown hills in 1880. The president of the Milwaukee Lake Shore & Western Railroad, which had built a line into the area, named the town after Sir Henry Bessemer, discoverer of the smelting process. In the mid-1880s, Bessemer had a mining boom, and became a “wide open town” with fifty saloons and little regard for the law. It had calmed down somewhat since then. Gogebic County had a population of 23,333 in 1910.
The choice of Bessemer as a destination suggests that the Binders had relatives already ensconced in the area. The significant event of the Binders’ time in that city was the birth of their last child, a boy, whom they named Otto Oscar—the product of his parents’ reunion. The first American-born citizen in the Binder clan entered the world on August 26, 1911.
Otto Binder rarely spoke of his childhood. One of the few times he did was in Memoirs of a Nobody, an unpublished book he wrote in 1948. “I still remember the day, as a boy, when I had my first malted milk,” he wrote. “I even remember the flavor: cherry. I can picture the counter, and the girl who served it, and the slightly-bent straw. I will never again in my life taste anything that sweet and nectar-like. It was out of this universe.”2
Around the time Otto was about to enter grammar school, the Binder family pulled
up stakes and moved to the small town of Randolph, Nebraska, in the northeast part of the state, where they opened a blacksmith shop. They may have wanted to escape northern Michigan’s cruel winters. Or perhaps there were too many blacksmiths in Bessemer, and a newspaper ad (“town needs smithy”) took them to Randolph. Or, it’s possible anti-German sentiment had flared up in the Michigan outpost town, for the United States was on the brink of entering the Great War in Europe. Such prejudice was known to sully the lives of German immigrants in those xenophobic times.
Maybe this was part of the reason Otto later admitted his first and middle names were something of a problem for him as a youth. He wrote, “I dislike my first name intensely. Otto. And … my middle name is even worse. Oscar. I think given names are very important. They have a subtle power for good or bad, in molding a person’s personality and future fortunes. My contention is that both ‘Otto’ and ‘Oscar’ are bad names to bear in an Anglo-American country. Both those names are soul-wilting in childhood. Each alone is bad enough. But the two together, as in my case, is simply dreadful. Do you hear me? Dreadful!
“In later life, of course, a name is not nearly so damaging to the psyche as in youth. But the damage is already done by then, as far as your own personality goes. A name that brought many wincings, during the sensitive period of childhood, has already left its scratchings on your brainpan. You overcome it all, yes, but you’ve jumped an extra hurdle that didn’t need to be there in the first place.”3
Nebraska is a farming state, mostly corn and wheat. Randolph made the additional claim to being “the honey capital of the world,” due to the many beekeeping operations in the area. It was a small but thriving town located along a railroad line that served all of Cedar County. A photograph of Main Street at the time of the Binders’ arrival shows that the roads were unpaved, and the horse and buggy was still the main way people got around.
But progress had come to Randolph. Electric and telephone wires went up in 1910. A Carnegie library, built in 1916, was undoubtedly frequented by young Otto, who learned to read at any early age and loved the worlds that books opened up to him.
Jack, at fourteen years old, became his father’s assistant in the blacksmith shop, sometimes with the help of his younger brothers Earl and Curley. Due to the summer heat, the Binders often worked at night and slept during the day. On days off, Jack or Earl would take Otto fishing at Logan Creek or one of the other local waterways. For the rest of his life, Otto’s favorite recreation—other than reading—was fishing.
Jack Binder developed a passion for a career in the arts. The eldest Binder son possessed an innate drawing ability. He would take pencil to any kind of paper that made itself available, even used butcher paper after the blood had been wiped off. The idyllic, placid small-town life of Randolph held few opportunities for someone with artistic ambitions, so he and Earl decided to see what the big city had to offer. In 1920, the year Warren G. Harding was elected president on a campaign to return “normalcy” to the nation in the aftermath of war, eighteen-year-old Jack and sixteen-year-old Earl set out to seek their fortune in Chicago, the metropolis of the Midwest.
Before long, the Binder boys secured work in a printing plant, and were singing the praises of the Windy City to their parents and siblings. In 1922, the family was reunited when father Michael, mother Marie, and the four other children moved to Chicago too.
Otto as a youth had led the carefree life of a small-town Tom Sawyer. Now he would experience the onset of manhood in the bustling streets of a big city—just in time to witness the Jazz Age in the city known for corrupt “machine” politics and mob violence. It was the era of Prohibition—the time of bootleggers, speakeasies, and the growth of organized crime.
Despite those dark tinges, the 1920s were characterized by a generally booming economy, fueled more and more by the availability of credit to the average American, and great optimism for the future. The Great War (“the war to end all wars”) was over, and the nation was looking forward to an era of peace and ever-increasing prosperity.
The Binder family managed to make a down payment on a two-story brick house at 3648 North Luna Avenue, one of a number of look-alike houses built not long before they arrived, and began a new life as urban denizens.
In order to economize, everyone—including Jack and Earl—lived under that one roof for years to come. Jack quit the printing plant job, at the encouragement of his boss, who thought he had too much potential to waste himself in a dead-end job. The money he saved by living with his parents enabled him enroll in the Art Institute of Chicago. The boys’ uncle Ted Payer, who lived with them, is remembered as the family member who most encouraged his nephews’ creative aspirations.
As for Otto, what did a teenager do for escapist entertainment in 1926? Radio was quickly growing into a viable medium, but wouldn’t really flower for several more years. The movies, on the other hand, had reached great artistic heights by the mid-1920s, even with the lack of synchronized sound. Robin Hood and The Black Pirate starring Douglas Fairbanks, along with other swashbucklers of the era, offered rollicking high adventure—and there were even the visionary thrills of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis available, if one had the nickel or dime to gain admittance.
Weird Tales #1 (March 1923). Weird Tales® is a registered trademark owned by Viacom International Inc.
There were also many books for the younger reader available in this era. The Hardy Boys met their first chums in 1927, but they were preceded in print by many juvenile “series books,” such as those featuring the energetic Rover Boys and the inventive Tom Swift. By his teenage years, Otto was reading the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, and Jack London, but it was the scientific fantasies of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells that most firmly gripped his imagination. Science was making great strides at the time, with the discovery of radioactive isotopes, the invention of radar, and early television prototypes. Both the technical and the imaginative aspects of space travel fascinated young Otto.
As for more casual reading matter, this was the golden age of the magazines: Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, The American Mercury. But the real fun was to be had in the pulp magazines like Argosy, All-Story, and Adventure. These were the best of a growing field of pulps that offered exotic, vicarious thrills in stories that took readers around the world. In 1912, a new writer had blazed onto the scene with his creation of John Carter of Mars, and then Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle: Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs ushered in a new era of headlong adventure, and was followed by a small army of imitators and competitors.
Otto had a special memory associated with his discovery of Burroughs’s work: “We all know how a bit of music or a whiff of some odor will bring back deep-seated memories. One Christmas, as a boy, the phonograph was playing ‘Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,’ the classic German Xmas-tree song. At the same time, I was reading one of my gift books—John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The two—the song and the story—became inextricably combined. Whenever I hear ‘Tannenbaum,’ I don’t see Santa Claus. I am instantly whisked to the planet Mars.”4
Amazing Stories #1 (April 1926). Amazing is ™ & © respective copyright holders.
The Binder family home, as it looks today. For a science fiction fan, the address 3648 Luna Avenue was made to order. Most of the stories written by Otto and Earl as “Eando Binder” were written here, starting in 1930. Courtesy of Russ Maheras.
A new pulp magazine appeared on the newsstands in 1923, when Otto was twelve years old. Weird Tales offered a juicy mix of horror and fantasy that immediately caught his attention. In the next several years, two of the great fantasists of the twentieth century—H. P. Lovecraft (creator of the Cthulhu mythos) and Robert E. Howard (originator of Conan the Barbarian)—would establish their reputations in its pages, and they weren’t the only talented writers appearing there. “The Unique Magazine,” as it was billed, was one of a growing number of pulps that specialized in a particular category of popular fiction.
> Then, in 1926, came a pulp dedicated to science and what editor Hugo Gernsback termed “scientifiction.” It was called Amazing Stories. Coming seemingly out of nowhere, this magazine would captivate the imagination and incite a sense of wonder in generations of young, intellectually curious readers.
Thus, when fifteen-year-old Otto Binder’s eyes first landed on the cover of Amazing Stories—with its debut issue in April 1926—it was love at first sight. Here was a magazine designed just for him, and it arrived at a time when he was beginning to wonder how he would make his way in the world. Would the realm of science hold his future?
Otto was somewhat shy. He didn’t lack ambition, but his drive paled next to that of his older brother Jack, nine years his senior, whom he greatly admired. Jack was a dynamic, intelligent fellow with considerable ambition and a take-charge attitude. In 1927, Jack met the daughter of a local dairyman at a picnic. He and Olga fell in love and were married that same year. Jack worked for her father as a milk deliveryman. The regular income was welcome while they were beginning their family, which would over the next fifteen years include five children (in order of birth, Jacqueline, Edward, Ronald, John Jr., and Bonnie). Jack continued with his art in his spare time. Everyone knew he would make good in the art field somehow, but the stock market crash of 1929 forced Jack to stick with delivering milk far longer than he’d intended. He did, however, manage to do some artwork for Weird Tales at this time.
Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary Page 3