Morgan Edge was a highly important supporting character in the 1970s comics. He becomes Clark's employer and has many interactions with the whole cast. He's essentially Perry White--but with more power.
I like that Pasko was able to make one of the central cast a Jewish character--there weren't that many back then. And the story with his mom, where we find out he's Morris Edelstein, was one of my favourite yarns. It's riffing on elements of THE JAZZ SINGER, the same used for Krusty the Klown later on THE SIMPSONS.
I was unsettled by the Morgan Edge I saw in 1971 because I didn't feel right about Clark working for a morally corrupt businessman. This is one of those things that bugged me about Peter Parker, because J. Jonah Jameson seemed like such a loathsome person that it reflected badly on Parker if he was willing to work for the publisher with an Adolf Hitler moustache. But I came around to thinking of Spider-Man as an anti-hero and morally ambiguous, so he would do bad things because he's not completely heroic. Someone like Superman, I just couldn't see him working for Kirby's Morgan Edge--not for long.
The reason Morgan Edge became a lesser or non-existent character after Crisis isn't because he was only a minor character in the 1970s. The people who decide these things, decided he would be a minor character, a footnote--and that almost everything involving Galaxy Broadcasting was to be erased. They chose to favour a few things from the 1970s as important and worthy of keeping in continuity--mainly stuff from Kirby--and they chose to view the work of all these other creators as not worth salvaging. But holistically everything from the 1970s was of a piece.
It's one of those contrivances that bugs me, like how certain characters and facts about Smallville are kept, but Superboy the character that generated all that content in the first place is expunged.
