Seekers of Tomorrow (15 page)

Added to his editorial experience of working on the planet, the time traveler, and science fiction digest, Weisinger also had background as editor of New York Uni-versity's daily newspaper and the nyu medley, the institu-tion's magazine. Editing as a career now interested him. He was also steadily making sales to professional magazines including
The Prenatal Plagiarism
(wonder stories, Janu-ary, 1935), about a present-day author ruined by pre-publication of his novel before his birth; and
Pigments Is Pigments
(wonder stories, March, 1935), built around the use of a drug that can turn a white man's skin black over-night.

But Weisinger was not primarily interested in becoming a fiction writer, though he qualified for the American Fiction Guild, where eligibility required the sale of 100,000 words of fiction, and became its secretary. One evening, at a meeting, he heard that one of the editors of Standard Magazines had quit. Editorial director at Standard was a former literary agent named Leo Margulies, who guided the destiny of between forty and fifty pulp magazines. Weisinger had previ-ously entered a contest sponsored by popular detective, one of Margulies' brood, which paid five cents a word for each word
short of
1,000 in which a good whodunit could be written. He made a favorable impression on Margulies by compressing a salesworthy plot into 500 words for a story called
Rope Enough.
When he approached Margulies at a meeting and asked for the job, he got it, at $15 a week. At the age of twenty, Mort Weisinger was on his way.

Now fate played a hand. Hugo Gernsback's wonder sto-ries, which had survived six years of the worst depression in the nation's history, could no longer pay its way. Standard Magazines purchased it early in 1936.

Weisinger was the logical man to edit the publication, except that Standard Magazines had a policy that every story had to be approved by
three
editors. A limited pool of harried and overworked men were cumulatively editing over forty magazines and none of them knew anything of science fiction except Weisinger. They tended to OK anything he wanted without even giving it a reading. Thus Weisinger "beat the system" and became editor of the magazine in fact as well as theory. Because of tough competition in adult science fiction from astounding stories, Margulies and pub-lisher Ned Pines decided to aim for the teenage market. They changed the title to thrilling wonder stories (Standard Magazines were trademarked as the "Thrilling" group), and established a policy of action covers, preferably with a mon-ster involved. So frequent and varied were the monsters on thrilling wonder stories covers, and so bulging their eyes, that the term Bug Eyed Monster (BEM) originated and was fostered in that publication. Despite the raucousness of the covers and the juvenile slant, Weisinger, through his knowledge of the field, managed to retain the magazine's readers by securing authors of considerable appeal. From the pages of science fiction digest he reprinted two A. Merritt stories that had never previously appeared in a professional magazine. He secured original stories from Otis Adelbert Kline, who had achieved a sub-stantial following for his imitations of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Posthumously, works of Stanley G. Weinbaum were run, and John W. Campbell became a regular contributor.

Until then, editing a science-fiction magazine had consisted of reading the manuscripts that were submitted and picking the best. Weisinger switched to feeding authors ideas and ordering a story of predetermined length built around an agreed-upon theme. Serials were out of the question for the bi-monthly thrilling wonder stories, so authors were en-couraged to write series using proven popular characters. Henry Kuttner, who had hitherto written only weird stories, was induced to try science fiction and was given the idea for a group of stories on the theme of a Hollywood on the Moon; Eando Binder enthralled readers with the adventures of Anton York, an immortal man, at the same time that he was building a reputation for the nom de plume of Gordon A. Giles for a sequence of interplanetary adventures, the "via" stories; John W. Campbell used a light touch in popu-larizing Penton and Blake, who cavorted around the solar system because they were wanted by the authorities on Earth; a wild animal hunter for earth zoos, Gerry Carlyle, provided an excellent base for an interplanetary series by Arthur K. Barnes; and Ray Cummings revived "Tubby," a paunchy character he had popularized fifteen years earlier, who dreams wild scientific adventures.

Weisinger found that discovering a good cover situation in a story was not always possible; so his policy was to give a provocative idea to an artist and then have the author write a story around the artwork. This was to become a common practice.

Anticipating teachers' reservations about their students reading anything as garish as thrilling wonder stories, Mort Weisinger bluffed the educators into a state of open-mouthed bafflement by featuring, on the same cover as
Dream Dust of Mars
by Manly Wade Wellman, an article by Sir James Jeans on
Giant
and Dwarf Stars
(February, 1938). Along with
Hollywood on the Moon
by Henry Kuttner, young readers were initiated into the mysteries of
Eclipses of the Sun
by no less an authority than Sir Arthur Eddington (April, 1938).

By mid-1938 thrilling wonder stories' sales were en-couraging enough to warrant either more frequent (monthly) publication or a companion magazine. The publishers decided on a companion to be titled startling stories, a title Weisinger had created in his short story
Thompson's Time Traveling Theory
(fantasy magazine, January, 1937).

Remembering the popularity of the complete novels in the old amazing stories quarterly, Weisinger instituted the same policy for the new magazine, leading off its first, Janu-ary, 1939, issue with
The Black
Flame,
a previously unpub-lished work by Stanley G. Weinbaum. The new magazine was an instant success, frequently outselling thrilling wonder stories.

When Weisinger took his editorial post with Standard, he sold his interest in the Solar Sales Service to Julius Schwartz, who was still editing fantasy magazine. Busi-ness forced Conrad H. Ruppert to cease gratuitous printing of the publication, and after a switch to another printer for a few issues, the magazine quit publication with the January, 1937, number. The science-fiction fan world collapsed into dwindling juvenile pockets of interest with the removal of this central focus.

But Weisinger played a major role in reviving science-fiction fandom in late 1938 when he made appearances at local and regional meetings, and most particularly when he decided to review science-fiction fan magazines, giving prices and addresses, as a regular column in startling stories. He also gave major support to The First World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York in 1939, by con-tributing publicity, money, auction material, and program talent, and by bringing Leo Margulies and a dozen big-name authors to the affair with him. It paid off when time and the new yorker gave major write-ups to the event. It was at this convention that Margulies went into a huddle with Weisin-ger in back of the hall and conceived captain future, a quarterly based on the adventures of that heroic character. Weisinger also developed new writers by conducting an Amateur Story Contest. His most notable find was Alfred Bester, who was to become internationally known for his
The Demolished Man.
Bester's first story,
The Broken Axiom,
a tale of the possibility of two objects simultaneously occupying the same space, appeared in the April, 1939, thrilling wonder stories. Another accomplishment was convincing the sons of Edgar Rice Burroughs, John and Hulbert, to write
The Man Without a World
(June, 1939) one of the earlier tales of the thousand-year spaceship and the first of a number of stories they did for him. He was also responsible for introducing Alex Schomburg, master of the air brush, to science-fiction illustrating. From 1939 to 1941, while Weisinger was performing a yeoman editorial job for Standard, comic books had mushroomed into a publishing phenomenon. From the first of the "modern" comic books, funnies on parade, published in 1933 by M. C. Gaines of Dell, until 1939, growth in this field had been of only modest proportions. Most comic magazines were reprints of nationally syndicated strips until the appear-ance of detective comics, dated January, 1937, by the National Company, which had entered the comic magazine business in 1934. Historians tend to lose perspective of
why
original comic features came into existence in the comic magazines. It was not out of any desire to be creative but because most of the obtainable worthwhile syndicated daily and Sunday strips were contracted for. As the field broadened, it became increasingly difficult to obtain suitable reprints.

But the comic field found a life-giving new formula with the introduction of the character of Superman in action comics, June, 1938, resulting in a sellout of that magazine, and in the appearance of superman quarterly magazine in May, 1939. Original scripts based on heroic figures, prefer-ably with a dash of superscience and fantasy, became the rage, and nothing could hold the lid on. The two men responsible for the creation of the Superman strip, Jerome Siegel, the writer, and Joseph Shuster, the artist, were old science-fiction fans and long-time friends of Mort Weisinger. Jerome Siegel produced in October, 1932, a crudely mimeographed magazine called simply science fic-tion. To obtain readers he exchanged advertisements with the time traveler. This magazine contained stories under various pen names by the editor, plus some cast-offs con-tributed by kindly authors. From its second issue on, it featured some professional quality cartooned illustrations by Joseph Shuster. Siegel, writing under the name of Bernard J. Kenton, had placed a story with amazing stories,
Miracles on Antares.
It was held for five years and then returned as no longer suitable. In informing his readers of this fact, Siegel wrote that Kenton

"was at present working upon a scientific fiction cartoon strip with an artist of great renown." The artist was Joseph Shuster, the year was 1933, and the strip was superman. In the same undated fifth and last issue of science fiction, Mort Weisinger had a Winchellian news column under the pen name of Ian Rectez, which was a partial anagram of his name.

For five years Siegel and Shuster tried to peddle the Superman strip, meeting rejections at every turn. Among the editors who turned it back was M. C. Gaines. He left Dell to work for National in 1938, and when action comics was projected thought it might prove suitable. Siegel and Shuster had been doing a variety of well-received originals for de-tective comics, and adventure comics, and they were avail-able and cooperative. Superman was given a chance and literally created the comic book industry as an important publishing business.

By 1941 the various Superman comic books were selling so well that the editorial director of National Comics, Whitney Ellsworth, decided they could use another editor. Since the entire success of superman was based on a background of science fiction, Ellsworth felt Weisinger was ideally qualified. Negotiations were conducted through Leo Margulies, who wisely counseled Weisinger that comic magazines had a greater future than pulps. But almost simultaneously, Mort Weisinger received a letter from Ziff-Davis offering him the editorship of a new slick paper magazine they were planning to issue, popular photography. Weisinger was on the horns of a dilemma. The Ziff-Davis offer carried with it full editor-ship, a challenge, and prestige, but the field was unknown to him. Superman, which required a strong facility at plotting and a comprehensive background in science fiction, was right down his alley. In March, 1941, he decided to stay with superman.

Then World War II abruptly terminated his stint at National Comics. Happily, his old friend Julius Schwartz, turned down by the army because of poor vision, was taken on as interim editor. In the armed forces, it was
Sergeant
Mort Weisinger who was assigned to Special Services, working at New Haven as associate editor of Yale's lively paper called the beaver. It was on the train to New York, where he wrote the script for an Army radio show, that he met a tall, attractive registered nurse, Thelma Rudnick. He proposed on the train, and they were married on September 27, 1943. They have two children, a boy and a girl.

Following his discharge shortly before the end of the war Weisinger took a whirl at nonfiction. His talent for the offbeat and his skill at finding the unusual angle made him a winner from the start. He sold four major articles in one week, including one to coronet, a prestige market. All the research experience and familiarity with interviewing tech-niques gained on the time traveler and the science fic-tion digest paid off as Weisinger grew to become one of the nation's leading article writers, appearing in reader's digest, collier's, saturday evening post, ladies home journal, esquire, cosmopolitan, this week, holiday, redbook, and most of the rest of the galaxy of great American magazines. Eventually a paperback he wrote,
1001

Valuable Things You Can Get Free,
would go into endless editions and be used as the basis of a weekly feature in this week. Weisinger had settled down to a career of free-lancing when superman comics called up and asked when he was coming back to work. Reluctant to part with his newfound prosperity, he finally succumbed to the lure of an all-expense sojourn for himself and family to work on the plotting of a Superman movie in Hollywood as a prelude to his resuming editorial work.

The story has often been told of the FBI's unsuccessful attempt to stop John W. Campbell from printing atomic energy stories in astounding science-fiction. The story has also been told of the successful mothballing of a Philip Wylie atomic energy story,
Paradise Crater,
sent to blue book during the war. To those stories may be added two about superman strips with atomic energy plots which the government stopped Mort Weisinger from printing in 1945. So he was off to a lively start. The prosperity of superman had encouraged imitators, the most popular of which was captain marvel, published by Fawcett with continuities written by Eando Binder. National Comics, before World War II, sued Fawcett to "cease and desist" from using that type of character. (Their counsel was the distinguished attorney Louis Nizer.) For nearly a decade the case dragged through the courts. As the years rolled past, many of the superman imitators disappeared, unable to sus-tain novelty and originality in their story lines. Finally Fawcett settled out of court. It was suggested that Fawcett felt the vogue had passed and there was little money to be made from captain marvel and that superman had won a pyrrhic victory. National's answer to that was Mort Weisinger. Rallying his vast background of science-fiction plotting, he began to re-shape the history of superman to make it possible for new, more fascinating adventures to occur. There was precedent. Originally, superman covered ground by tremendous leaps. When the first movie was made, it became obvious that this would make him appear like a kangaroo on the screen, so he was given the power of flight. A new generation of readers was indoctrinated with a background that lent itself to greater thrills.