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