Otto Binder

Otto Binder and his older brother Earl Andrew Binder wrote together as Eando Binder, a name made from their initials, E and O. The family settled in Chicago in 1922. The brothers sold their first story, “The First Martian,” to Amazing Stories in 1930, and it appeared there in October 1932. Otto kept the byline after Earl stopped writing. Sources put that break at different points: the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says about 1934, and Bill Schelly’s biography, as cited on Wikipedia, dates it to January 1936.

Six Eando Binder stories ran in Weird Tales between April 1935 and June–July 1939, all under Farnsworth Wright. ISFDB credits four to both brothers. The other two, “The Elixir of Death” (March 1937) and “From the Beginning” (June 1938), it credits to Otto alone. Their brother Jack Binder drew the interior art for “Shadows of Blood” and “The Crystal Curse,” along with illustrations for other writers’ stories in 1935. The title page of “Shadows of Blood” bills it as “a grim story of torture in the cruel days of the Roman Emperor Caligula.” Dorothy McIlwraith reprinted it in the January 1954 issue.

Late in 1935 Otto went to New York to run the office of Otis Adelbert Kline’s literary agency, where the stories he marketed included Robert E. Howard’s. The agency closed about a year and a half later. In Amazing Stories for January 1939 he began the Adam Link series with “I, Robot,” told by the robot himself. Isaac Asimov later took the title for his own first book in acknowledgment of Binder’s story.

From 1941 to 1953 Binder wrote Captain Marvel and other Marvel Family stories for Fawcett; Jack did much of the early drawing for Captain Marvel. He began writing for DC in 1948, worked on the Superman titles, and co-created Supergirl in Action Comics no. 252 (May 1959). His last Superman story ran in 1969. He died in Chestertown, New York, in October 1974.