Dorothy Woolfolk

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Dorothy A. Woolfolk née Dorothy Roubicek (October 11, 1913 - November 27, 2000, Norfolk, Virginia, United States), was a pioneering woman in the American comic book industry. The first female editor at DC Comics, one of the two largest companies in the field, she helped create the fictional metal kryptonite in the Superman mythos.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life and career

Woolfolk, the wife of novelist William Woolfolk, began her career during the Golden Age of comic books, serving from 1942-44 as an editor at All-American Publications, one of the three companies that would merge to form the present-day DC. She spent the next two years at Timely Comics, the 1940s predecessor to Marvel Comics, and in 1948 was an editor at EC Comics.

[edit] DC Comics editor

After raising children Donald and Donna, the latter of whom would become an author, Woolfolk briefly returned to comics in the 1970s, editing Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, Young Romance, and other DC superhero and romance titles from 1971-72.

She also occasionally scripted comics, including an unknown number of Wonder Woman stories in the 1940s — making Woolfolk, along with Ruth Atkinson, among comic books' first female writers. Woolfolk also wrote for the science fiction magazine Orbit during the 1950s, and in the 1970s and early 1980s was the author of young-adult novels for Scholastic Press, including a series about teen detective Donna Rockford. Woolfolk's daughter, Donna Woolfolk Cross, is also an author; her work includes the historical novel Pope Joan (Ballantine|, 1996).

Woolfolk told the Florida newspaper Today, sometime during August 1993, that she had found Superman's invulnerability dull, and that DC's flagship hero might be more interesting with an Achilles' heel such as adverse reactions to a fragment of his home planet.

She was nominated every year from 2001-2004 for induction into the Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame.[citation needed] She was living in Newport News, Virginia, near Norfolk, at the time of her death.

[edit] See also

[edit] Books

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[edit] Quotes

Alan Kupperberg (see under References, below): "Dorothy Woolfolk really was something ... Tallulah Bankhead, the Auntie Mame of comics. I thought her books looked good and she got them out on time. People like Liz Safian got breaks through Dorothy. Not to mention Sal Amendola, Howard Chaykin, Mary Skrenes, and Alan Weiss".

[edit] References

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