With writer Otto Binder, he co-created the DC characters Supergirl and Brainiac, as well as the teenage team the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Born at Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in Manhattan, New York City, on December 15, 1921,[2] and raised in The Bronx, Plastino was interested in art since grade school.

[3] He attended the School of Industrial Art in New York City,[3] and afterward began illustrating for Youth Today magazine.

There, a sketch he had made for a model airplane he had designed[4] caught an officer's attention, leading to his being assigned to Grumman Aerospace Corporation, the National Inventors Council, and then The Pentagon.

Plastino drew the Superboy story in Adventure Comics #247 (April 1958) that introduced the Legion of Super-Heroes, a teen superhero team from the future that eventually became one of DC's most popular features;[11] with writer Otto Binder, Plastino co-created the first Legion characters, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad (as Lightning Boy) and Saturn Girl.

At the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson, it was published two months later, in Superman #170 (June 1964),[15] with Plastino adding a title page showing a ghostly figure of Kennedy looking down from the heavens at Superman flying over Washington, D.C.[16] Plastino had always believed the artwork had been donated to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, but the artwork was placed on auction by a private entity in late 2013.

[19] In 1996, Plastino was one of the many artists who contributed to the Superman: The Wedding Album one-shot wherein the title character married Lois Lane.

When Schulz and the syndicate reached a successful agreement, United Media stored these unpublished strips, the existence of which eventually became public.