Re: Mod hat
OK, so DC was a much more powerful entity than its competitors when it came to the code. I confess, I did not know that. Still, I think the influence of various editors had quite a lot to do with the general 'house styles', as it were, because if you look at them analytically, you can see the fingerprints of these guys all over them. Mort Weisinger, for instance - the man ruled over the Super-titles with an iron fist; you can see his influence on them a mile away. He was a misogynist creep who, it was later discovered, actually really hated the Superman character, and the stories written under his editorship are filled to bursting with condescending and unpleasant attitudes about women and situations where Supes loses his powers, gets humiliated, or is otherwise diminished or degraded somehow. Then there was another guy (I THINK it was Robert Kanigher, but I won't swear to that) who was very fond of the cover-first method - that is, he had the cover artists come up with an interesting image with a good 'hook' to it - for example, the one where Green Lantern is selling power rings on the street - then he'd hand out the covers to the writers working under him and say 'there - build a story around that!' And so on - if you look at the output of DC through most of the Silver Age, you can generally say 'oh - this was written under such-and-such'. I therefore continue to assert that the editors had more to do with the Silver Age style of writing than the Code did - the Code limited what they could do, of course, but the editors shaped what they DID do.