Charles Biro

Charles Biro (1911–1972) spent sixteen years at Lev Gleason Publications as writer, artist and editorial director and is usually described as the most ambitious editorial mind in 1940s comics. He pushed for continuity, consequence and adult subject matter over pure escapism, and coined the term Illustories for what he was making.

A common misconception is worth correcting: Biro did not create Daredevil. Jack Binder created the character in 1940 and Jack Cole revamped him an issue later. Biro then took over and made him famous – changing the costume from pale yellow and dark blue to the iconic dark red and blue, dropping the character’s muteness and rewriting the origin.

His Daredevil Battles Hitler appeared in July 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. With Crime Does Not Pay he effectively invented the crime comic as a mass genre – and that same genre was a direct cause of the Comics Code that later ended his career in comics. He was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2002 and spent his final decade as a graphic artist at NBC.