Tagged: comics

Pulp Time Machines: Flash creator Gardner Fox’s comics collection

A Flash comic from Feb. 1941 in the Gardner Fox papers at University of Oregon.
A Flash comic from Feb. 1941 in the Gardner Fox papers at University of Oregon.

The past meets the present in our Friday File series, where we delve through artifacts housed at the UO Libraries and let them talk.

 

He created the Flash, molded Batman, and wrote the first Justice League comic, but Gardner Fox didn’t care about being famous. That’s why his name isn’t in many of the more than 600 comics in Special Collections and University Archives.

“He believed in comics,” said Jennifer DeRoss, a University of Oregon Master’s student in English who has studied Fox. “He supported the genre of comics itself. Fame wasn’t important to him.”

Fox could have been famous; entering the field at its infancy in the Golden Age, Fox began writing even before Action Comics #1 and Superman’s debut. His contributions to the fledgling cultural phenomenon put him in a category with Bob Kane, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby.

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Celebrating National Comic Book Day

Ghost Rider, no. 10, 1952
Ghost Rider, no. 10, 1952

Happy National Comic Book Day!! We are pleased to celebrate this day and highlight some amazing comics from the Gardner Fox collection. A prolific author of comic books, as well as other genres, Gardner “Gar” Francis Fox (1911-1986) was one of the most influential comic book script writers in the business. A part of this branch of Americana since its inception, Fox wrote before the advent of Superman and Batman and continued to script comics until his death.

 

In the early years of comic books, he created the first Flash comic, wrote for Justice Society of America, did several issues of Detective Batman, Dr. Fate, Spectre and Starman, all for National Comics. He later created Magazine Enterprises’ Ghost Rider, one of the most widely read series of the period when heroes began to fade out. For Columbia Comics, he wrote some Big Shot Comics. Later, when revivals were popular, he wrote Adam Strange, Justice Society of America, Justice League and other super hero stories.

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