Biography

I have never, to the best of my recollection, longed for the good old days of my childhood or youth. They weren't that good, and neither were the years of the Golden Age of Comic Books. That period - the late '30s and early '40s - may seem gloriously simple and primitive to people today, but it wasn't. The world was just as complicated and irrational and frightening then as it is today, or more so - which is why we writers and artists at Fawcett created a world of the imagination in which our comic characters lived and did things that we ourselves could not do.

Today, children are given comic books that give them nightmares. I feel sorry for them. [in the mid-1980s]

What young boy has not wished that he could be big and strong enough to beat up bullies, rescue fair maidens, and bring crooks and malefactors to justice? Billy Batson could.

Today the world is not more frightening and horrible than it used to be. It has always been frightening and horrible. There have always been earthquakes and floods and disasters and terrible plagues and wars. We artists and writers and editors at Fawcett, for a few brief years, managed to give our readers glimpses of a better world, the world of the imagination. Then we were swept away and forgotten like so many old, worn-out relics.

The good old days never existed. They were imaginary, just as Captain Marvel and Billy Batson and Mr. Morris and Sivana and Beautia were. They were an illusion, a dream.