Dorothy Woolfolk

• Born 1913-10-01 · Died 2000-11-27

Dorothy Woolfolk was one of the first women in the American comic-book industry. As an editor at DC during the 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books, she is credited with helping to create the fictional metal Kryptonite in the Superman mythos. Woolfolk served from 1942 to 1944 as an editor at All-American Publications, one of the three companies that would merge to form the present-day DC, before Julius Schwartz took over, then spent the next two years at Timely Comics, the 1940s predecessor to Marvel Comics, and in 1948 was an editor at EC Comics. She also occasionally scripted comics, reportedly including an unknown number of Wonder Woman stories in the 1940s — making Woolfolk the first female writer of that series, and, with Ruth Atkinson and Ruth Roche, among comic books' first female writers. Woolfolk said in 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. This gave rise to the famous fictional metal kryptonite. After raising two children, Woolfolk briefly returned to comics in the 1970s, editing DC superhero and romance titles from 1971 to 1974. Woolfolk also wrote for the science fiction magazine Orbit during the 1950s, and in the 1970s and early 1980s was the author of the 10-book Scholastic Press young-adult novel series about teen detective Donna Rockford.