Gardner Fox

Probably one of the greatest comic book writers of all time, Gardner Fox was born 1911 in Brooklyn. He started out as a lawyer, and practiced law from around 1935-1937. Being a proficient writer, Gardner Fox found there was more money to be made in writing fiction than in practicing law (during the latter years of the Depression), and took a job with DC Comics. By 1939, he was writing Batman stories, and came up with ideas like the Batarang (which became so popular in the TV series in the 1960s). Gardner Fox also created some of the most enduring characters in the Golden Age of comics, such as: Starman, Dr. Fate, the Flash, Johnny Thunder and his Bahdnisian Thunderbolt, the Sandman (possibly inspired by the Green Hornet), and Hawkman and Hawkgirl (possibly inspired by the winged bat-men of Flash Gordon serials) - however, as Carter Hall & Shiera, Hawkman & Hawkgirl were the first married superheroes in comics (a quarter of a century before Reed & Sue in the Fantastic Four). Not one to be tied down to any one company, Gardner Fox also wrote for Timely (the precursor of Marvel) and EC Comics. Superhero comics thrived during the 1940s, but by 1951 they were replaced by Westerns and science fiction and teen humor comics; Gardner Fox took it all in stride and wrote for these genres, he also wrote stories for pulps such as "Amazing Stories" and "Planet Stories." In the 1960s, Gardner Fox wrote the interstellar exploits of Adam Strange and his beloved Alanna in "Mystery in Space" comics. In those great years of the Silver Age, Gardner Fox revived many of the superheroes of the 1940s, to new audiences (he used a science fiction device: the earlier heroes live in a parallel universe on Earth-2). He wrote several thousand comics in his career. After 1968, he concentrated mainly on writing science fiction novels, and wrote such classics as "Escape Across the Cosmos" and "Arsenal of Miracles," as well as writing mysteries and sword-and-sorcery adventures. He wrote over 100 novels. In his small amount of free time, one of his hobbies was hunting; Gardner Fox was an excellent marksman and sometimes wrote about hunting and rifles in his novels. In his retirement years, Fox wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Lynna Cooper. He died at age 75; he had 2 children and 4 grandchildren.