The Iconic Superman Writer Who Retired Mid-Story

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and eighty-fifth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Edmond Hamilton retired in the middle of writing a Superman story.

STATUS:

True

Edmond Hamilton was already a prolific pulp fiction writer in the 1920s and 1930s before he had even heard of comic books. He was really well known for the Captain Future character (a character that, contrary to popular belief, he did not invent).

Years into his career, Hamilton was approached by an old acquantaince from his pulp fiction days, Mort Weisinger, into writing for Weisinger on the Superman feature at DC Comics, where Weisinger had recently become the editor of the Superman line of comics.

Hamilton then worked for Weisinger for the next TWENTY years, writing numerous Superman and Legion of Super-Heroes stories.

One of his most famous stories, Action Comics #300, saw Superman transported into the future where the Earth now had a red sun. It allowed Hamilton to touch on a lot of the same ideas he did in his science fiction stories.

Hamilton, though, decided he wanted to travel more and so, in 1966, when he was 62 years old, he decided to abruptly retire. It was so abrupt that it meant stopping in the middle of a story he was writing!

Action Comics #336 (sorry, it is not the story that is on the cover with Supergirl and her horse. That is the other story in that issue. I couldn't resist using it at the featured image) saw Hamilton paired with Curt Swan and George Klein about a story involving the first person paroled from the Phantom Zone and how the people of Kandor were not fans of the former criminal, Ak-Var, except for Thara, the niece of Superman lookalike Van-Zee...

Since Hamilton left midway through the story, Weisinger's assistant editor, E. Nelson Bridwell, stepped in and finished the story (Bridwell would later write stories where Van-Zee and Ak-Var took over as Nightwing and Flamebird from Superman and Jimmy Olsen and Bridwell would note in the pages of Superman Family that Ak-Var had a special place in his heart because he finished the story of Ak-Var's first appearance) and here is how Bridwell finished it out...

Hamilton would pass away in 1977, but he would still occasionally write, even doing a few science fiction novels. He at least got to travel a lot with his wife, Leigh Brackett. She was an amazing writer in her own right. She passed away a few years after her husband.

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Was there almost a Gladiator sequel, despite the whole "the star dies at the end of the movie" thing?

OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!

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