Book Review: Otto Binder
/Otto Binder:
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?
He gives a quick sketch of Binder's early life and then moves on to the book's main preoccupation, Binder's endless hustling in the comic book and pulp magazine worlds where, for a few booming decades, a fast writer of catchy prose could make a fairly decent living, provided that writer was willing to take every job, make every deadline, forego luxuries, and toil under pseudonyms. And Binder was everywhere in that four-color world: he was the chief writer for Fawcett Comics for thirteen years, writing hundreds of adventures for Captain Marvel and his steadily-increasing cast of friends, family, and foes (Binder helped to create quite a few of all three categories, including super-powered Mary Marvel, whose saucy quips still crack smiles today); he wrote on Superman in the 1950s and '60s, creating or co-creating such now-iconic concepts as Brainiac, Supergirl, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and Krypto the Super-Dog; he was the editor of Space World magazine, a doomed venture and inevitable future collector's item.Schelly is just restrained from hero worship throughout the narration of these heady backstage adventures, and whenever the setbacks of Binder's life or career force him to set out blunt facts, he nevertheless manages to invest them with something of the Binder narrative zest just the same, as when noting that even as late as 1959, Binder seemed to have no savings to speak of:
What had happened to all the money he'd earned in Captain Marvel's heyday? Binder himself wondered where it had gone. Taxes had taken much of it, of course, and he had been sending regular checks to Mother Binder all through the years. He also spent freely on his daughter (ballet lessons, music lessons, et al.) and paid for the upkeep of his son Robert, which was expensive. In a later story, Binder puts words in a character's mouth that could easily have come from his own: “Money! The magic key to the good life! But it only passes through my hands!”
The end of the tale can't possibly match the effervescent enthusiasm of its beginning, of course. Binder's later life was marked not only by tragedy – the
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.
“Otto Binder, now fifty-two, was many things,” Schelly writes, “but 'hip' was not one of them.”Through novels and writing projects and illness and yet more hustling, Schelly follows his hero to the end, noting with characteristic generosity that “holding on to his essential self in the face of everything was a significant personal triumph.” A triumph of a different sort, but no less significant, is this biography of a gaudy, reliable unsung creator of the 20th century.
