“Otto and I talked about a lot of other stuff. What he mainly tried to do, which I appreciated, was to cheer me up. Oddly, because I was in such a fog, I don’t remember very much else about staying at their house.”164
Just as fandom offered balm when Space World failed, so Otto Binder helped the young writer adapt to the vagaries of the comic industry in New York City. Despite his own problems, Otto remained sensitive and helpful to others. He could not have known that Roy Thomas would eventually succeed Stan Lee as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, and be in a position to give him work in the future.
Otto Binder’s hospitality to members of fandom extended to just about anyone who got in touch with him, especially when they seemed sincerely interested in more than a superficial way. Such was the case when he invited two teenagers, Michael Uslan and Robert Klein, to visit him at his home on April 25, 1965.
Michael Uslan recently recounted his memories and impressions from that visit. “[Bob and I] lived in New Jersey then, on the Jersey shore. And here was this amazing guy … who had been doing everything from Captain Marvel to Superman [who] was living, virtually, in our backyard. So we tracked him down, and I guess for a couple of fourteen-year-olds, we sounded sane enough that he said, ‘Yeah, come on up.’ It was like a Sunday, and what was going to be an hour or two visit turned into the entire day.”165 Michael’s parents drove the boys over there, and were entertained by Ione while Otto answered their questions for a projected fanzine interview, while ensconced with the boys in his upstairs office.
“His wife Ione couldn’t have been nicer. She just looked perfect, nicely dressed. You could tell that she was the rational, reasonable, down to earth one who just dealt with everything, like getting Mary off to school, and those sort of practical things. She seemed very together.” Uslan said, “Mary was gorgeous. Every time we saw her, we just couldn’t take our eyes off her. She had long blonde hair, and was a very pretty girl, and sweet—obviously, the apple of her parents’ eye. Though I found out later we were about the same age, at the time I assumed she was older because she seemed … a little bit more sophisticated than us.
Mary Binder. Courtesy of Michael Turek. Photo retouched by unknown artist.
“We basically stayed in that room the whole day. My parents were downstairs with Mrs. Binder. She kind of entertained them while we just stayed on and on and on and on. This was something my parents knew I tended to do.”
Michael emphasized that Otto really enjoyed talking to them, and answered all of the boys’ prepared list of sixty-eight questions as completely as he knew how. “He loved it, and despite how long I was there, it didn’t seem as though he wanted us to go. Before we left, he had piled comic books onto us. He gave us a lot of stuff he said he had doubles of. ‘You guys would really enjoy this,’ he’d say. One comic book I distinctly remember being given was the first issue of Captain Marvel Junior! He said, ‘Here, I’ve got an extra one of these. And you boys should have Captain Marvel tie-clasps. …’ It went on and on. He just loaded us up with cool stuff, like carbon copies of scripts for the DC comics he was then writing, all autographed to us. Also a copy of his Careers in Space book, which interested me a lot. It was a phenomenal day, one that I’ll never forget.”
Another young fan who spent time with Otto at his house was Louis Black, who lived in Teaneck, New Jersey, just one town over from Englewood. (The Binder home was next to the Englewood side of the border shared with Teaneck.) “While reading Alter Ego #7, I discovered that Otto Binder lived in the town next to mine,” Black recently wrote.166 In the letter in that issue, Binder mentioned living in Englewood. Black looked up his address in the telephone book and wrote to him, asking if he could visit. “Over the next few years there were times I was there every weekend in a row for months,” he remembered. “Other times my visits were more infrequent. More often than not, when I arrived at his house, Otto would be working. I would sit on the bed reading [his pulp and comic book stories] for hours until he finished. Then we would visit. He’d give me background and context to whatever I’d just read, creating a sense of the life he had been leading at the time, as well as the SF and then comic book communities and business.
When Otto Binder met with young fans Michael Uslan and Robert Klein, he gave them a copy of Captain Marvel Jr. #1 as a gift, among many other items. ™ and © DC Comics.
“When I came to visit, I would always head right up to the room. I have no memory of any other part of the house. Ione was usually friendly but our interactions were brief. She usually kept to herself. Mary was very pretty and very friendly. She would go out of her way to talk to me.
“One thing was a little odd,” Black said. “I remember the house as dark … Otto working all the time … Ione in the background. But Mary was as a ray of light—luminous. Smiling, always with friends over or waiting to go out, she seemed to live in almost a different world.”
Otto evinced a real interest in Black. “Around 1965, just as we began to hang out, the comic business started to boom,” Louis recalled. “At one point [Otto] was so busy he offered to let me write some of the one and two page fillers he was doing for Harvey and Gold Key. One of the few times I remember him really mad at me was when I turned in one of those scripts. He drove over to my house to lecture me because it was so sloppy and unprofessional.”
One of the comic books published during the superhero boom was titled Captain Marvel—but, it had nothing to do with the erstwhile Fawcett character. Publisher Myron Fass decided the name was up for grabs, so he gave it to his newly invented character, the star of a comic book series inaugurated in early 1965. Binder wrote, “I’m afraid the publishers of the new Captain Marvel have run themselves into trouble. Somewhere, they got the idea that using the title [on] a totally different hero was legally okay. But I don’t think it is. Unfortunately, my agent Roger Elwood was the one who wrote the CM book, which will mean trouble for him too. It was rather ridiculous to revive the name Captain Marvel, as if that alone would attract readers. It is the character and the stories that count, and those in the new book are … well, let us say sub-mediocre.”167
Captain Marvel #1 (1966) was a misguided attempt to capitalize on the name of the erstwhile Fawcett hero. ™ & © respective copyright holders.
Binder’s avuncular friendship with Black continued. “After a while, we began to go to SF and comic events in New York City together,” Black said. “I had been visiting the city since I was twelve, so I was quite comfortable there. Driving with Otto was a bit nerve-racking. He was a terrible driver. Otto would make a right from the far left lane, which is really something in Manhattan. He would be preoccupied talking with me or telling stories.
“Whenever we attended SF conventions [like the 1966 LunaCon], he spent as much time talking to writers as he did talking with the fans. Isaac Asimov made a point of coming over and talking to Otto. They seemed to be good friends, sharing a deep nostalgia for the Golden Age of SF pulps. Arthur Clarke came over to Otto at one of the conventions, and was obviously very happy to see him. They chatted for quite a while.” It was Louis Black who got Otto Binder in touch with Calvin Beck [publisher of Castle of Frankenstein], which led to Binder’s involvement in Beck’s attempt to put on a fantasy and comics convention in early 1967.
“The theme [Otto] was most passionate about, the one that really set him off, was about how poorly comic book writers had been and were treated by the industry, by history, and by fans,” Black said. “He resented the low rates per page writers were paid compared to artists. Due to all the letters he wrote to fanzine editors, Binder was one of the most celebrated writers in fandom, and yet he still felt writers weren’t given their due compared to the amount of attention lavished on certain artists.” Black would remain friendly with Binder for the rest of Binder’s life, and was one of any number of fans who considered the warm, welcoming, utterly professional writer a mentor.
15.
TOUGH SLEDDING
When a dead-broke Otto Binder tur
ned again to the comics industry as a means of support, in the spring of 1964, he found a different environment than when he had left.
Changes had come with startling rapidity, largely a result of the new breed of comics being published by Marvel (formerly Timely Comics). Stan Lee had introduced heroes quite out of the DC or Fawcett mold. These new heroes—Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron Man—weren’t magical beings or visitors from another planet. They were more or less average people who had had heroism thrust upon them. They were imperfect heroes with problems and hang-ups. Marvel comics were both more psychologically interesting and more action-packed than those of DC.
As the decade progressed, more and more comic book publishers began emulating the Marvel style as best they could, and DC’s more restrained approach began to seem downright stodgy. Though Lee was already in his forties, he seemed to be in tune with the world of rock music, antiwar protests, and the irreverent younger generation. Stan Lee was, in a word, “hip.”
Otto Binder, now fifty-two, was many things—but “hip” was not one of them. Well into middle age, working in his home in semi-isolation from society, he was a child of the Depression whose adult years had been spent during the war and its aftermath. He was politically liberal, but he viewed the changes in the 1960s from afar.
Binder was the quintessential DC writer: geared toward younger readers, gimmick- rather than action-oriented. Captain Marvel and Superman were heroes cut from whole cloth, and at least while he was writing them, they never had any dark sides, nor even reluctance to carry their heavy burdens. Binder made no effort to make these types of characters “realistic” or “relevant”—for he felt comics served as a respite from reality.
DC editors met behind closed doors to try to figure out how to counter their waning sales in the face of Marvel’s surge. Weisinger’s main concession was more variation of panel size and a bit more action. He was backward-looking by nature. Veteran DC and Superman writer Alvin Schwartz was quoted as saying, “The fact that DC became old-fashioned and didn’t keep up with Marvel was a result of Weisinger. If he didn’t recognize it as having been done before, he wouldn’t go along with it.”168
While Binder had been away, Jerry Siegel had been given his workload, producing many memorable stories. Now that Otto returned, it seems Siegel was cut back. (Forced to find work elsewhere, Superman’s co-creator went to Archie comics, where he became sole scripter for the recasting of the old MLJ comic book heroes into the Marvel mold.) By 1964, most of the expansion of Superman’s universe was over. It was left to Binder to write stories that wouldn’t be inconsistent with what had now become a complicated backstory.
Two years hence, Otto’s fellow DC writer Arnold Drake wrote, in a memo to publisher Irwin Donenfeld, about the reason Superman sales were down. “The reason for this is that, while the nature of Superman’s character (simplicity itself—brute strength, astounding speed, near invulnerability) makes him a child’s hero, the nature of the Superman books has grown more and more complicated and convoluted. Character was piled upon character, power upon power, relationship upon relationship until it became truly impossible for the writers, the artists, and the colorers to remember one from another.”169 Despite the fact that Binder had fulfilled Weisinger’s dictums perfectly, and had written many tales with interesting subtexts, he had himself contributed to the complexity of Superman’s world, and also to the slightly claustrophobic, ingrown qualities that—compared to Marvel’s innovations—some found stultifying.
Irwin Donenfeld scoffed at Arnold Drake’s memo.
Meanwhile, Binder discovered that returning to the so-called safe harbor of DC was to be more difficult than anticipated. In an environment where the company’s dominance in the comic book field was threatened, Weisinger proved more irascible than ever.
“He can charm a guy with his talk,” Binder recalled. “Mort’s got a real slick tongue. He talked me into working exclusively for DC. He said he would guarantee me $200 a week, which wasn’t a huge amount, but I could still augment it with non-comics work. Mort didn’t care about that as long as it didn’t interfere with my production for him.
“But, it didn’t turn out to be even $200 a week. With all the re-writes I was having to do, it was averaging at $155 a week. When I told him that, he said my figures had to be wrong. He was absolutely sure he was giving me $200 a week worth of writing. Finally, I told him I couldn’t be exclusive with DC anymore.”170
Otto Binder’s first story back at DC turned out to be quite ingenious. It was “Tales of Green Kryptonite” (Superman #173, November 1964), billed as the first in a new series. This was a story of kryptonite personified, narrated by a chunk of kryptonite, telling its own “life story.” Beginning before the doom of Krypton, it tells of the cataclysm that sent it hurtling through space clouds, and hence to Earth. Landing in an African jungle, the green, glowing rock was encountered by Super-Monkey, then carried to America, and Smallville, by an African explorer. Eventually, the chunk complicates Superboy’s life, and finally is deposited in the arctic. “Well, here I am in an isolated wilderness, far from humans!” it thinks. “It is best I end up here! I’ll never menace Superboy again.” Kryptonite with a conscience—now that’s creativity!
More and more, the Superman series featured two longer stories per issue rather than the standard three, and sometimes book-length “novels.” Otto adapted with alacrity to twenty-three page stories. “Clark Kent’s Super-Brat!” in Superman #192 is an elaborate imaginary story that not only spanned the issue, but was continued into the next. With room to expand, Binder was able to really let his imagination go, and worked out a complex sequence where a powerless Clark Kent—who’s forgotten he’s Superman and is now married to Lois Lane—is stranded incommunicado in far-flung Tibet for five years. After numerous escape attempts, he finally finds his way back to Metropolis and wife Lois. In the interim, she has given birth to their child, who is now a four-year-old “superbaby.” How is a very human Clark going to deal with a super-son? And how did Clark Jr. get those super powers, they ask, with two non-super parents? It does get a little labyrinthine, but Binder skillfully leads the reader through each well-conceived twist and turn, until Clark regains his memory—but not his powers. “Clark Kent’s Super-Brat!” was the sort of story that set Superman apart, and is like nothing else in the history of comics.
Another aspect of the Superman comics of the 1960s is the sheer goofiness of many of the plots, and of much of the behavior of the cast of characters. In order to “plus” the dialogue, Binder (and the other writers) interpolated “gulp,” “gasp,” “choke,” “puff,” “chuckle,” and “sob” right into the word balloons. This was far from being natural or realistic.
A geologist, speaking aloud though alone on a mountainside, says, “A new mineral composed of glowing green, red and golden material. What a find … EEYII! I slipped … I’m falling into the ravine! HELP!” Why is he telling us this, when we can see very well for ourselves that he’s about to fall?
Consider this opening caption: “Take off your hats, folks! This is a solemn occasion! No, it isn’t a dream, a hoax, an Imaginary Tale, a robot, a double, or a parallel world. Superman has really had it this time!” Imagine a nine-year-old reading a Superman comic book for the first time. What would he or she make of this?
After returning to National in 1964, Binder turned out increasingly elaborate tales such as “Clark Kent’s Super-Brat!” in Superman #192 (January 1967). ™ & © DC Comics.
These are just two examples (both penned by Otto) of the type of stylized writing that was employed in the comics edited by Mort Weisinger. In some ways, it’s almost camp (the type of exaggerated humor that briefly made the Batman TV show a hit)—funnier than camp, really, because it’s tongue-in-cheek without being ridiculous. Surely there was a twinkle in Otto’s hazel eyes, and a smile on his lips, when he came up with this dialogue. It’s hard to know how much of this was introduced by Binder himself, but he was certainly a master of it.
Though his return to writing for DC was bumpy, Binder put the best face on things in a letter to Jerry Bails dated October 18, 1964 (reproduced in chapter 14): “With the recent upsurge in the comics field—new titles appearing daily and rumors of a massive flood of titles by next spring—I’m starting to get offers to write all over the place again. So far I’ve resisted, except for keeping up my old standbys of DC and Western/Gold Key, but … who knows? Maybe I’ll toss another 1,000 stories onto my heap (God forbid) in the next few years. Surely something in the epitaph on my tombstone ought to record this unseemly attainment … if it’s big enough to hold the number representing the total scripts I did.
“And I can already picture Saint Peter (no religious offense meant) greeting me with the glad news that I’ve been assigned to write scripts for Beyond Comics, by direct order from the Head Office. Or, conversely, old Satan himself being the one to whom I’m logically consigned for poisoning the minds of untold millions of mentally crippled kids (Jerry Bails, Dick Lupoff, et al.) and am given the eternal job of shoveling all the millions of comics with my scripts in them [into the flames], which keep returning whole from the ashes over and over. …
Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary Page 19