Mort Weisinger
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Mortimer Weisinger (1915-1978) was an American magazine and comic book editor.
He is most famous as the editor of the Superman line of comic books for DC Comics during the Silver age of comic books. He also co-created such long-running features as Aquaman and Green Arrow, as well as Johnny Quick, served as story editor for The Adventures of Superman television series, and compiled the often-revised paperback 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get Free.
His tenure on the Superman comics was marked by the introduction of a variety of new supporting concepts and characters, including Supergirl, Krypto, the Phantom Zone, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and a variety of types of kryptonite, among others. A few of the recurring plot threads in Weisinger's stories included plots about Lois Lane trying to prove Superman was Clark Kent, and "imaginary stories" that featured events deviating wildly from the comics' status quo. It has been said that many of Weisinger's ideas came from talking to children in his neighborhood, asking them what they'd like to see, and then using those ideas, uncredited. In fact, although he was initially not aware of his true age, Weisinger even had the writing services of a teenage Jim Shooter whose work from that time included a celebrated run on "The Legion of Super-Heroes" series in Adventure Comics. Weisinger was noted by some for having a micromanaging attitude and a heavy-handed, overbearing treatment of his writers and artists.
Weisinger encouraged a static picture book style of illustration in his stories, and was known for reusing previously published stories as new story ideas; a noted example of this is a 1950s story featuring Superman encountering an alien being he thought might've been his long lost brother being reused in the early 1960s to publish the Superboy story introducing Mon-El.
During Weisinger's reign, the Superman comics maintained a reasonably tight internal continuity, but related little to the rest of the DC Universe. Weisinger retired from his editorial reign over the Superman comics in 1970, and was succeeded by Julius Schwartz.
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