Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary

by Schelly, Bill

  Dorothy Rubicek had been an editor with Maxwell C. Gaines at All-American Comics, and was now an editor at Timely. “She had just gotten divorced from Walter Galli, who was also in comics. Otto mentioned that there was a Dorothy Rubicek up there and that he thought she needed writers, so I went up there.”93 Woolfolk and Rubicek were married in 1945.

  Page 1 of the first story in The Marvel Family #1 (December 1945). ™ and © DC Comics.

  ™ and © DC Comics.

  With the end of the war came the first signs that the comics field was slowing down. The industry was changing. The lifting of paper allocations permitted anyone to publish as many comics as he wanted, which led to a disastrous flood of new titles, forcing the consumer to choose between hundreds of books. Many good comics got lost on the overloaded newsstands. At the same time, the market for comics on military bases around the world and in the United States dried up. Plus, the need for heroes lessened when the overt hostilities ended. While Fawcett launched both The Marvel Family #1 and Mary Marvel #1 in December of 1945, sales for superhero comics slipped significantly in the next couple of years.

  Bill Woolfolk remembers a conversation he had with Will Lieberson, Fawcett editor-in-chief, sometime in 1946. “Will came to me and said he knew I was working not only for Quality, but for other people, also. And he said, ‘It’s very tight for writers and we don’t have enough assignments. Can you cut down on the number of stories you do?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I’d be glad to.’ So, in effect, I left Fawcett at that time.”94

  Many of the smaller publishers Binder had written for in his early years were no longer in business. Looking around, Otto realized he would be left with only one major outside client: Timely Comics. From 1944 onward, Binder scripted dozens of tales for the company that would become Marvel Comics: everything from the Destroyer and Whizzer to the introduction of Miss America.

  As for working for National Comics, the publisher had sued Fawcett for copyright infringement in 1941 because of the perceived similarity between Captain Marvel and Superman. Binder naturally had trepidations about approaching National.

  From the start, the lawsuit had struck many as ridiculous. Why did National pick on Fawcett, rather than the dozens of other publishers who had Superman imitators? Only one reason: Captain Marvel’s popularity. From the outset the Big Red Cheese had challenged Superman’s sales supremacy, and this didn’t sit well with the DC brass. After all, didn’t this mean that sales that would have gone to the Man of Steel were being “stolen” by the World’s Mightiest Mortal? The court case dragged on, inconclusively, into the postwar era.

  In a later article on the lawsuit, C. C. Beck quoted David Weiss, a court reporter who had dug up documents and transcriptions of the lawsuit. “You wouldn’t believe the reams and heaps and stacks and rooms full of material that this trial produced,” Weiss said. “It’s absolutely incredible!”95 The Fawcett lawyers conceded certain similarities between Captain Marvel and Superman, but countered by showing that Superman bore similarities to earlier characters too. Every character has antecedents (perceived or real), and the issue was whether anyone could reasonably mistake Fawcett’s hero for National’s. Both companies hired teams of attorneys to advance their cause, searching through the comics of their competitor, looking for evidence of imitation.

  Cartoon by Roy Thomas from Alter Ego #7 (October 1964). ™ and © Roy & Dann Thomas.

  Even the most cursory study reveals the poles-apart difference between the way the two heroes were handled by their respective publishers. Besides, Binder and the rest of the Fawcett comic book staff deliberately didn’t read Superman comics, so that they couldn’t unconsciously “steal” an idea. But despite legal setbacks, National showed no signs of giving up. Therefore, the leading writer for Captain Marvel was unsure what sort of reaction he would get if he approached National for work. Perhaps DC would consider him persona non grata.

  Here fate dealt Otto a winning hand. Two on National’s editorial staff had been his close friends. In 1942, Mort Weisinger had moved from Standard Publications to National, and in 1944 Julius Schwartz also joined DC’s team of editors. Although Binder had lost touch with Julie and Mort in recent years, it only took a phone call to them to ascertain that they would very much like to be the recipients of Binder scripts. After all, he was a freelancer, and had no ownership in Captain Marvel or Fawcett Publications. Of course DC would want to benefit from his talent.

  Except—not on their lead features, Superman or Batman. Binder was, instead, given assignments to write for a number of National’s secondary features. This suited him fine. Otto began in 1947 with Hawkman in Flash Comics, then Johnny Quick and Green Arrow in Adventure Comics, and Robotman in Star-Spangled Comics. In 1948, he began stints on Aquaman and Tommy Tomorrow. Later he added the Shining Knight and Captain Compass to his repertoire.

  For Jack’s part, with the demise of his production shop, there was no special reason to live in close proximity to New York City. In late 1947, he and his family moved to a small farm in Warrensburg, New York, where he fancied becoming a gentleman farmer. Despite all the years working in and around the city, Jack devoutly maintained that he was just a country boy. The comics industry hadn’t worked out as well for Jack as it had for Otto, nor did he feel any special affinity for the medium, so he cast about for a new career direction. One of the first things he did after the relocation was to become a roving art teacher in the public schools in and around his new home. Jack kept the checks rolling in by continuing to draw Mary Marvel strips. When the Mary assignments tapered off, Jack branched out into the Western comics that were being produced by the ton at this time, and became most closely associated with Fawcett’s successful Gabby Hayes comic book which began in November 1948.

  Sample manuscript page. ™ and © the Estate of Otto Binder.

  With a little spare time on his hands, Otto wrote an autobiographical book in 1948 titled Memoirs of a Nobody. It’s a lightweight, breezy ramble through Binder’s opinions on the writing profession, the possibility of nuclear war, what constitutes happiness, the plight of modern man, and just about anything one might discuss at a cocktail party—but very little that was actually about his personal life. He devotes a single paragraph to his life before becoming a writer. Other than mentioning his brother Earl in connection to his writing, he doesn’t even reveal the names of his wife or immediate family. We do find out that he has two hobbies: stamp collecting and playing the accordion.

  Obviously, the details of his life would be of limited interest—thus the title. It’s more akin to the humorous hodgepodge books later written by Steve Allen, like Bigger than a Breadbox, which were made up of humorous commentary, anecdotes, and asides. One might describe the short book (about 35,000 words) as Binder’s “try-on” as a popular humorist like James Thurber.

  He writes, “I intend to keep on filling the pages ahead with all stray thoughts. Pet peeves—anecdotes—monologues—theories—denunciations—drolleries—that come tumbling out of my mind from day to day. It’s not going to have any plot, or any basic theme, or any conclusion or moral at the end. You won’t be a bit more wise, at the end, than at the start. If this book must have a purpose, let’s say I’m going to try to entertain and divert you, if you have any troubles.”96

  On page fifteen, Otto gets around to talking about his writing. “The mood is upon me to tell you something about the comics. Some behind-the-scenes facts.

  “By comics I refer specifically to all those dime magazines so dear to the hearts of the young. Of course, they are only for the young. Hardly anybody over ninety-three reads them.

  “The comics are a strange phenomenon that has suddenly sprung upon the American scene. … Why their amazing popularity among the small fry? I’ve tried to analyze it myself. I make the point that the comics are modern fairy tales. The comics hero is just as fantastic and unbelievable as any classic fairy tale character, but he has the one advantage of living in present times and dealing with on-the-spot crimes an
d evils. As such, the youngster can identify himself with the hero much more than he could identify himself with Prince Charming riding a white horse through some dank forest of long ago.”

  At one point, he muses about the writing profession. “It is more or less the accepted custom for writers to claim they hate their work, despise it, and wish they had never taken up such a godforsaken career. I can only speak for myself, but a writer, down underneath, enjoys his work. I think what a writer hates isn’t writing but the thought of buckling down to work. A freelance writer, with no ‘boss’ back of him to prod and worry him on, has to prod himself to get going. Thus the writer … is his own hateful ‘boss.’ There’s a sort of war going on within himself all the time. Shall I sit down and write this goddamned story on this beautiful day? Or shall I chuck it and go fishing? But I think that most if not all writers have pride in their work.”

  In between these more informational kinds of passages are philosophical meanderings when Binder is in a mood to discuss such things as the fate of the human race. “Whither the human race? Damned if I know. Do you? Assuming anybody cares, is the human race going forwards or backwards? If it’s going forwards, where is that exactly? Toward more machines? Bigger cities? Grander wars? Better revolutions? Greater famines? Dear me, I sound so cynical I scare myself.”

  The rest of the book is, as he warned, a hodgepodge of this and that, which is enjoyable to read, yet frustrating to anyone who wishes to learn more about Binder’s life. It isn’t known if Memoirs of a Nobody was ever submitted to a publisher. We only know for sure that it remained essentially unknown to anyone but Otto Binder until 2003.97 “I’m writing this because it’s something I want to write,” he noted. “Something that’s been simmering in me for a long time and needs an outlet.” Apparently, having written it, and not having found a publisher right away, Binder tucked the manuscript away and began working on something else.

  Meanwhile, things weren’t exactly static on the comic book front. A new genre emerged in the postwar era: crime comics. Crime Does Not Pay, the first of its type, was conceived and produced by Charles Biro in 1942. Biro was a canny businessman and talented writer-artist who worked for Lev Gleason Publications. CDNP portrayed not larger-than-life crimes such as those you’d find in a superhero comic, but crimes of a decidedly more realistic nature. Indeed, it claimed that its stories were based on true incidents. The stories could be extremely violent, but they were also more than competently well written and drawn, and provided the frisson of a “true crime” experience to the reader. It had done well during the war, but after V-J Day, sales reportedly soared upward to a million copies per issue.

  During the late 1940s, when film noir flourished at the movies, comics noir became similarly popular. Most of these comic books were probably read by soldiers returning to civilian life, who now craved something more down to earth than the superhero adventures. A number of publishers took notice that Crime Does Not Pay was a hot seller, unlike their own wilting titles, and concocted imitations of the Biro book. Some of the best were produced by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Some of the worst were perpetrated by Victor Fox, the self-styled “king of the comics,” who published the most exploitive and poorly written and drawn crime comics. At first relatively tame, and then increasingly violent and bloody, crime comics became the bane of parents and other moral guardians in society.

  Hence, a drumbeat of anti-comics rhetoric began in 1947, and its target wasn’t only crime comics. Some asserted that any sort of comic book was inappropriate for children. One of the first mainstream articles to sound the alarm appeared in Life magazine. The writer was by the man who would become the leader of the anti-comics crusaders, Fredric Wertham, MD.

  Binder was incensed by the mounting criticism of comics, which eventually seriously threatened his very livelihood. “There was a period right around the Senate hearings on comics [in 1954] when you didn’t say what you wrote for a living,” Otto recounted in an interview toward the end of his life. “For about a year, I was very careful about telling people what I wrote, when I met them for the first time.

  “I think Wertham knew he could get attention and make money criticizing comics. Just like [Senator Joseph] McCarthy and the commies. Who was going to stick up for comics? He probably doesn’t believe a word he said about comics. If he does, then he’s a real nut. If he was doing it for money, then I can at least understand his motive. … But I have a hard time thinking he really believed what he said. God, he got me mad back then. He infuriated the hell out of me.”98

  Little of this had any direct bearing on Fawcett’s titles, which carried their own “seal of wholesome entertainment.” Unlike most other companies, Fawcett resisted jumping on the crime comics bandwagon, but the attacks were giving all comic books a bad name. More and more parents weren’t allowing their kids to buy “those awful comic books,” not realizing that most contained absolutely nothing objectionable. This attitude created a chill over the comic book field as a whole.

  Then the National-Fawcett lawsuit heated up again, and Binder found himself barred from writing for the publisher of Superman comics. Who knows, perhaps Binder’s work on secondary characters had slipped under the radar of the DC brass. Now Julie and Mort had no choice but to find replacement writers for the features Otto had been handling. This was a blow, because work for National represented a significant part of his income. His last scripts for them were produced in June 1949. The work at Timely had dried up too. And he wasn’t finding openings elsewhere.

  Otto Binder was both frustrated and exhausted. He’d worked at a feverish pace since getting the assignment to write Captain Marvel in late 1941. Before that, he’d had his shoulder to the wheel producing reams of prose for the SF pulps. He had put in thirteen solid years of very hard work, with few breaks or vacations. Maybe, in the short term, the shrinking market for comic book work was a blessing in disguise. The human engine that had been operating at full speed for so long now was badly in need of rest. Binder was both physically and creatively burned out.

  11.

  GOOD-BYE FAWCETT, HELLO EC

  “In 1950, I was getting tired of comics,” Binder remembered. “You’ll get tired of anything if you do too much of it. So, for a change of pace, I stopped writing comics entirely, and got back into doing science fiction.”99 Otto’s self-described “comics funk” would last eight months. Meanwhile, he explored the landscape of the SF field with an eye to its economic potential.

  Binder’s last SF story had appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1942. By then he had finished his apprenticeship at Fawcett and was writing Captain Marvel’s adventures. But it was the appearance of “The Ring Bonanza” in Startling Stories in July 1947—which he called “an orphan story” because it had been written years earlier—that drew his attention back to the science fiction field. As 1947 drew to a close, he received a letter that further inspired him to make tentative moves to revive his SF career.

  The letter came from science fiction fan Oswald (Ossie) Train, an old friend, who got right to the point. “I have especially wanted to get in touch with you during the past six months,” he began. “I am connected with Prime Press here in Philadelphia—one of four partners as a matter of fact—and am interested in using some of your stories in book form, which they really deserve.”100 The story he was most interested in was “Lords of Creation,” which had been serialized in Argosy magazine in 1939.

  Prime Press was formed to publish science fiction hardback books in quantities as small as 1,500 copies. It was an attempt to get SF into bookstores by packaging it in the preferred format. Operating on a shoestring budget, they had only published three books when Train approached Binder. Prime Press would eventually produce books by Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, and L. Sprague de Camp. Ossie Train wrote, “I think it would be pretty safe to say that we could probably publish it within six or eight months.”101 They came to terms, and in 1949 Lords of Creation appeared. It was Otto Binder’s first book. Since it was SF,
he used the Eando Binder pen name, as always, although it was written long after his partnership with Earl ended. It was a standard hardback book with dust jacket. Many copies were signed and numbered by the author. Otto was to receive 10 percent of the retail price of three dollars per copy. Though sales fell below expectations, Binder was thrilled with the validation, and proudly bestowed copies of it to his friends and colleagues for years to come. (He may have taken some or all of his royalties in copies of the book.)

  Lords of Creation (1949) from Prime Press. Otto Binder’s first book. He continued to use the pen name “Eando Binder” for his SF writing.

  ™ and © the Estate of Otto Binder.

  The Lords of Creation book jacket offers a concise synopsis: “The adventure of a young 20th-century scientist who is buried in a Time Crypth, in suspended animation, to revive in the 50th-century. Expecting to find a supercivilization far advanced beyond ours, Homer Ellory is profoundly shocked to find that 5000 A.D. is in a Second Stone Age!” The narrative tells how Ellory defeated the arrogant Lords of Antarctica and frees the downtrodden tribal states. (The plot is similar to Robert E. Howard’s Almuric, and may have been influenced by the REH book if Binder had gotten a look at the Howard manuscript in 1939.)

  Meanwhile, another denizen of the SF field had OOB in his sights: Oscar J. Friend. After Otis Adelbert Kline’s death of heart failure in October 1946, his literary agency was renamed “Otis Kline Associates” and helmed by Friend. Oscar Friend was a talented writer and editor who knew the SF arena inside and out. In early 1949, he wrote an entreaty to Binder that said, “The SF market is hot as a country boy’s pistol right now. How long it will hold nobody knows, but we hope from now on. Anyway, while things are booming, I am asking you—if you do not have an agent for your SF material—if you will let Otis Kline Associates represent you in the book field.”102