Who is John Broome?

So, I keep bringing up their names when talking about the comics, who are some of the men responsible for creating the Elongated Man comics?

Irving Broome was born on May 4, 1913 to a Jewish family and grew up enjoying science fiction. In the 1940s, he had already begun a writing career of his own. His first published work was a two-page "Pals and Pastimes" spread in Funny Pages #7, published in 1936.

This began his writing for comics career. Eventually, he was working for Fawcett, writing text pages for their comics, using a variety of pseudonyms. It was at Fawcett that he met Julius Schwartz, who would move to All-American Publications and managed to get Broome over as well. All-American would eventually be merged into National Publications, which was soon nicknamed DC Comics, and later officially took that name.

Broome worked on many stories for the original incarnations of the Flash and the Green Lantern. He kept up a varied output, and created many minor characters for DC. When DC decided to revive superhero brands in the mid to late 1950s, Broome was the one to write the first stories featuring Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, the new Flash and Green Lantern, these new versions varying wildly from the original versions, becoming the iconic incarnations of these heroes.

After establishing new heroes and characters in the early 60s, Broome and artist Carmine Infantino would revamp none other than Batman, giving him a new look, removing many of the sillier additions to Batman lore, and focusing the stories in Detective Comics on mysteries. Their first issue of Detective Comics with the new Batman was #327, which also saw the Elongated Man appear as a solo backup feature. Broome would continue at DC until 1970.

By the time of his retirement, Broome was sending his scripts to DC from his new home in Paris, France. He and his wife Peggy later moved to Japan to teach English. Broome died in 1999, vacationing in Thailand while swimming in his hotel's pool with his wife.

Thanks to John Broome for offering his talent to DC Comics as they revived themselves in the Silver Age. He helped create Ralph Dibny, and many of the properties he helped establish we still love and enjoy today.

Even though sometimes his plot devices were downright weird. But hey, that's part of what I love about these comics.