David Vern Reed

David Vern Reed ( 1924 - 1989 ), actually David Levine (pseudonyms David Vern, Alexander Blade, Craig Ellis, Clyde Woodruff and Peter Horn) was an American comic book author .

Life and work

Reed was born David Levine in 1924. After attending college, participating in the Second World War and doing smaller writing jobs, Levine began working as a comic artist in the 1950s on the mediation of his friend Julius Schwartz , who was an editor at DC Comics . Under the stage name David Vern Reed, and more rarely under a number of other pseudonyms, he wrote numerous issues of the series Batman , Detective Comics , World's Finest Comics and Superman in the 1950s and again in the 1970s . It was characteristic of Reed's comic stories that he usually gave them either a dedicated science fiction touch or an unmistakably absurd or self-parodistic note (for example, in one of his Batman stories he organized an "Underworld Olympics" in which criminals from all continents against each other competed). Reed's enduring contributions to Batman stuff include villain Deadshot ( Batman # 59) and Batman's flying vehicle, the Bat-Plane.

Aside from his work as a comic book author, Reed has written for various magazines - such as Cosmopolitan , Good Housekeeping , Collier's , Argosy and Mademoiselle - and for pulp magazines - such as Amazing Stories , Fantastic Adventures and Astoundign Science Fiction .

In addition, he published some novels such as Murder in Space. A Complete Science-Fiction Novel .

Works

Novels :

• The Thing that Made Love , p. l. 1944.
• The Whispering Gorilla. A Novel , Manchester 1950.
• Murder in Space. A Complete Science-Fiction Novel , New York 1954. (With Ed Emshwiller )