Posts By :

Paul Levitz

Arthur & accounting
Arthur & accounting 150 150 Paul Levitz

Correcting a transcription error in the newest edition of the JOURNAL OF COMICS & CULTURE reminded me to say a few words about the very nice man who headed DC’s accounting department for at least most of the Silver and Bronze ages of comics. (DC’s financial side was headed by very few people in its history: Jack Leibowitz went from being Harry Donenfeld’s accountant to the head of the company, Bernie Kashdan succeeded him until he became more of a business negotiator and contracts manager, then Arthur Gutowitz (whose name was unfortunately mangled in transcription) took over until I began modernizing the business side of the company in the early 1980s and was able to bring Pat Caldon in to take over.

Arthur was a soft-spoken gentleman, very comfortable with the long-standing members of the company. He kept the processes of accounting running smoothly with a small team, satisfying the corporate supervisors from Warner Publishing and above. I suspect he found the years working with Carmine Infantino as the leader of the company challenging–they were difficult years for the comics industry, our parent company had little knowledge of (or respect for) comics, and the business side of the company wasn’t Carmine’s strong suit. He had a much closer relationship with Sol Harrison during Sol’s presidency, and, I think, was initially wary of my youthful energy and desire for change. He began to respect me more after an incident I won’t relate here, involving some inventory payment irregularities I unearthed by one of the old school, much beloved and respected folks. It wasn’t dishonesty per se, but it wasn’t kosher, either.

When he was shifted to report to me as Sol retired and Jenette became President, it was a little awkward, given the age discrepancy (I was literally the age of his daughter). He was nervous about the pace of change: if we switch to using computers for accounting, what do we do if they break? He was, perhaps, frustrated by the tools I wanted: why do we have to know the profit or loss from individual titles? And he was plainly scared by my goals: why are you budgeting for a profit from the publishing business; if you do that they’ll expect you to do it every year? (Yes, and with one unsurprising exception, we did and steadily increased it, for the thirty years I was responsible for that bottom line.)

I suspect I wasn’t gentle and supportive enough with Arthur during the few years he worked for me; I was in my 20s, and in a rush to make things better. He deserves credit for building and managing the team that made DC a reliable paycheck for talent, a team that continued to be part of his successor’s crew for many years. Sorry about the misspelling, Arthur, and thanks for being patient so long ago.

A Time Machine moment
A Time Machine moment 150 150 Paul Levitz

Driving recently through the wilds of Connecticut saw the sign for Bridgeport, and flashed on 40 Logan Street, an address that in a certain era was a daily part of the life of most comic professionals. Was that what subconsciously led to Wolverine’s name? Who knows, but he was a colorful character…and that was the address of Chemical Color, where virtually every comic book was color separated for many years (not sure if Charlton did their own seps as part of their very vertically integrated operation).

The women who opaqued films to create the screens that were photographed to create the plates were anonymous to the industry, much less to fandom. Seeing the discussion of whether ‘flatters’ who assist in the current color process should be credited along with the colorists who engage them as assistants brings them to mind. Their work was, in a way, analogous to the flatters: covering designated areas with a dark red opaque while reading and interpreting the color guides sent up by the publishing companies. It was a s sort of paint by numbers task, with the main rule being stay inside the lines.

It also brings to mind how linked the comics publishers were in the early 1970s when I arrived. In the morning, Eddie would make the rounds–I apologize for having long forgotten his name, but I can still recall his face and grazed voice clearly. He’d drive down from Bridgeport with the latest proofs: color transparencies for the covers and sometimes first pages, black and white for the interiors; dropping them off in turn at DC, Marvel, Archie and Harvey (not necessarily in that order). Sometimes he’d bring an extra goody–pages from Curt Swan, or another artist who lived fairly near the plant and wanted to save themself a trip to the city. Of course, it had to be an artist who was confident that the editors wouldn’t ask for corrections or adjustments to be made. In the afternoon, Eddie would return, and pick up artwork for issues or covers to be shot, and their color guides. And sometimes, a package back for Curt with a script and a check.

In my time, we had four people still on the staff at DC who had done color seps in the Golden Age of comics: Sol Harrison, who would go on to head production and then become President of the company before retiring; Jack Adler, a true master of color and its technology, who would color DC’s covers for a generation and then follow Sol as the head of production; Midge Bregman, who most of the staff knew as Sol’s assistant or later mine or finally as our office manager or newsstand sales manger, with her separator days a secret identity; and Lois Barker, quietly working in the files that stored the film negatives, either opaquing them for foreign publishers to drop in other language to the speech balloons, or removing the opaque when we wanted to print them in America. Lois might have been the first person of color to work on the DC staff.

There are so many questions I wish I had thought to ask these people. Sol and Jack told a few tales, but only a tiny fragment of the experiences of their lives. The other folks I mentioned just did was needed, day after day, and rarely reminisced or revealed. If only my Time Machine worked, I’d tell myself to be more curious…

In the news
In the news 150 150 Paul Levitz

Today the announcement was made that Boom Studios! has agreed to a sale to Penguin Random House, a deal I played a small part in as a member of Boom!’s board of directors for the last decade. It’s my hope that this will prove to be a good outcome for most of Boom!’s stakeholders: creative talent, staff, retailers, readers and shareholders. Like any change, it won’t be perfect for everyone, but sometimes there are unintended and unforeseen good outcomes (when I bought WildStorm for DC, we laid off their special projects team as an unhappy part of the transition–but Ted Adams pulled many of them together to form IDW and bring many interesting projects out). My thanks to Ross Richie and Scott Lenet for inviting me onto the Boom! board, and for letting me exercise some of my comics muscles for all these years.

Insights
Insights 960 300 Paul Levitz

I realized some years ago that my preference for group comics as a young reader had different causes than my pleasure in writing them in my adult years. As writer, it was the ability to have different personalities interact that made them fun…and especially two qualities that the Justice Society and the Legion of Super-heroes shared: they were both in their own little corners of the DC Universe, so I didn’t have to check in with other writers or editors all the time. (Well, occasionally, during the massive cross-over crisis stunts that became more common. But not often.). In addition, both of those series allowed me to affect the lives of the heroes in ways that simply wasn’t available to the writer of JUSTICE LEAGUE.

As a reader, perhaps the different personalities were a factor, though the JUSTICE LEAGUE issues I grew up on kinda failed that test. Gardner Fox plotted amusing sf tales for kids, but it’s generous to assign different personalities to the Leaguers as he wrote them. And my beloved LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES fared a bit better if you look very carefully in Jerry Siegel and Ed Hamilton’s tales, but a lot of the heroes were very similiar in their outlook on life. My view of Saturn Girl or Brainiac Five definitely started from those early tales.

But the next level of my insight into my own psyche as a reader and collector came much later, probably first when I got a chance to write an AVENGERS mini a couple of years ago. I recalled being attracted to a cover of the title where a horde of heroes were depicted. Why hadn’t I gotten into FANTASTIC FOUR when my friend Alan adored the series (and it was genuinely done far better than any of the titles I loved, by my more discerning adult evaluation)? Or sticking within DC, why had I ignored so many of the team titles like DOOM PATROL, CHALLENGERS, SEA DEVILS or RIP HUNTER? (No, it wasn’t the fact that the latter two of those titles were among the most poorly written in the line…I only wish I had that discernment at that age.). Of the ‘second tier’ teams, only METAL MEN caught my interest for a while, though it lost me as Bob Kanigher began to run out of variations on his theme, while TEEN TITANS and BRAVE & BOLD kept me interested.

It was the costumes.

I liked the comics that featured heroes in different costumes working together. Maybe it was the pretty colors attracting me. Or maybe with my poor vision and the hurried artwork of the era (artists producing multiple pages per day weren’t likely to carefully vary facial features and body forms) the varied costumes made it easy for me to figure out who was who. Thinking back, my interest in the X-MEN only happened after they gave up the common blue and yellow uniforms.

Whether my attitude was typical of the 1960s readers or not, it is interesting that the group titles with varied suits charted higher in sales than the single uniform teams, by and large. It was certainly true at DC, though the fact that ADVENTURE COMICS with the Legion then outsold most of the line (and all of Marvels) is more fairly attributed to the power of the Super-symbol on covers, since that level of success was true for the whole Superman family. (Embarassing that JIMMY OLSEN outsold SPIDER-MAN? Sure, but Jack Larson made us care about Jimmy, and Spidey had no such salesman in those years.)

But my latest insight into my reading came this past week, when Joe Illidge guested in one of my courses. Speaking of his own reading habits, he attributed his love of the group books to the fact that he was an only child, and the packs of heroes were found family–the brothers (and occasional sister) he didn’t have. An alarm bell of recognition rang in my head…I’m an only child, too. Maybe that was it?

On The Spot
On The Spot 150 150 Paul Levitz

So it’s early 1973, I’m 16, a high school senior, and lucky enough to have landed the assignment to do DC’s house pages–the equivalent of the Marvel Bullpen pages. They alternate between Direct Currents, the listing of what’s coming in the following week, and Behind The Scenes, a general sort of hype page. I’ve only done one of the latter, when I’m told that for the next one my lead should be about this exciting new title DC is about to launch, something I’m told they expect to be a breakthrough hit. The last couple of launches have been SWORD OF SORCERY and the massive commercial creative and creative success, SWAMP THING, so this should be cool.

It’s confidential enough that I’m sat down at a desk in the production department, camped between the women who do cover and text page paste-ups (if you’re too young to know the term, think desktop publishing with zero tech and lots of rubber cement involved). The boards are brought out gingerly, not having been dumped in the usual production flat files where more mundane things like Joe Kubert’s TARZAN or Kirby’s KAMANDI are stored. This is the comic that’s going to give DC momentum against the burgeoning success of Marvel, coming out against their newer hits like Roy Thomas & Barry Smith’s CONAN or the just-starting TOMB OF DRACULA run by Marv Wolfman & Gene Colan.

I look down.

It’s PREZ #1, by Joe Simon & Jerry Grandinetti. Two solid and talented professionals who have literally been doing successful comics since well before I was born. But in about a page or three I know this certainly isn’t going to be one of them. It’s a tale of a teenager becoming the President of the United States, channelling a bit of the then-recent film WILD IN THE STREETS. But tonally? If Marvel’s capturing the style of the moment, this one is sliding backwards like an awkward Time Machine.

I manage to write a column, and devote more space to the upcoming SANDMAN collaboration between Joe and Jack Kirby…a one shot that would indeed be a hit, if not a project with enough creative bandwidth to sustain a series afterwards for more than a few issues. No memory of what I said to the folks who had waxed enthusiastically about PREZ, but despite the fact that I’ve never been famous for my diplomacy, I must have hidden my confusion. I’d go on to have a long friendship with Joe, and to edit Jerry on some delightful war stories, but I don’t think I ever told either of them about this day.

I could have been wrong. It happened often enough in the decades that followed, and I can’t claim a fraction of the creative success that Joe achieved in a career that included co-creating Captain America and whole romance comics genre. It would have been an interestingly different comic world if I had been, right?

Recalling A Failure
Recalling A Failure 150 150 Paul Levitz

There are quite a number of projects from early in my writing career that I regard as failures: either assignments that I took on and dropped midway for one reason or another (lost KARATE KID when Carmine felt–probably justifiably–that I wasn’t ready to write series yet; abandoned TEEN TITANS faster than Kid Flash could have when LEGION became available), or where I just blew it.

Probably the best of my failures was WONDER WOMAN. Jenette Kahn asked me to take on the series because she felt I wrote female characters well. I hadn’t loved the character growing up. Bob Kanigher’s long run in the 1960s had felt like the weakest of DC super hero titles, and while I had enjoyed Denny O’Neil’s Diana as Diana Rigg issues, that wasn’t really Wonder Woman anyway. I was rooming with Marty Pasko when he wrote his tales, so probably prejudiced in their favor, but all in, not a member of the pantheon I was aching to script.

Thinking through the possibilities, I focused on an elect in her mythos that I did find fascinating: she was the only one of the great heroes who had given up immortality to take on her heroic role. Surely that would be a key that could unlock good stories!

Except I challenge you to find the least homeopathic drop of that idea in the three and a half issues I wrote before running in despair. No fault of editor Ross Andru, an immensely affable man if not the most script-focused of editors I’ve worked with, or of Jose Delbo, who was in the midst of a long run on the character that never failed to be solid and professional, delivering on the potential of whatever (often weak) scripts he was given by me and others.

So all the more I celebrate the wonderful work that George Perez did a few years later, breathing new life into the Amazon Princess and her mythology, and to the many great stories by others that built upon that sensibility.

Sometimes, as Shakespeare said, the fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves. That particular one was one I can’t explain, even to myself, and it’s part of why I gave a sigh of relief this month at the generally warm welcome for my AVENGERS arc. I really wouldn’t have wanted to fail on that one.

Pondering 50 Years
Pondering 50 Years 150 150 Paul Levitz

This week marked 50 years since I became a comics professional, getting the modest assignment to write Joe Orlando’s letter columns at DC. Looking back over a long and complex run, I’m particularly proud of a few things:

  • My role in writing the first standard talent agreement for mainstream comics. After the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act, companies needed to have written agreements with comics talent for the first time. We chose to embody simple but honest terms in DC’s, including things either not guaranteed before (like the return of artwork to artists and reprint fees) or ambiguous (like a specific deadline time within which the assignment needed to be completed, avoiding the occasional situation where someone would come in with work authorized ages before and since reassigned to another person). It was still fairly one-sided, but a great improvement over what had been the practice before, or how some of our competitors chose to deal with the situation.
  • Similarly, my participation in getting standard royalties put in place at DC, and as a result, elsewhere in the mainstream. That was very much a team effort, but I found a way to fund it within our budgets that made it an easier sell to management. Top talent like Simon & Kirby had gotten participations back to the dawn of the Golden Age, but making it a basic part of compensation that any successful project could theoretically achieve changed comics, and modernized the mainstream publishers at a critical moment as we moved from a focus on newsstands to comic shops and a more sophisticated audience.
  • Less a single dramatic moment, but leading the team that took critical steps to create the graphic novel form in America. Working out a unique business structure to do co-editions of our earliest graphic novels like DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN, building the strength of graphic novel series like SANDMAN, and ultimately arranging distribution that made these forms more available through changes in how comic shops could order them or bookstores could develop real graphic novel sections was the work of a decade or more, but pioneering in this fulfilled a long-held goal of mine to have comics’ best material consistently available. It seems silly today in a digital, internet-connected world, but it was radical and important in its time.
  • Finally, the fact that I got to contribute some elements and stories to the mythos of comics that have endured. It’s a delight to see Helena Wayne back in action again, or see my Lucien become Lucianne, and wonderful to see “the Great Darkness Saga” still pop up on top lists of stories to read.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, from mentors to readers; it’s been a hell of a journey.

The Avengers: War Across Time
The Avengers: War Across Time 1059 1600 Paul Levitz

Some Shazam backstory
Some Shazam backstory 150 150 Paul Levitz

In the early ‘70s, Superman was still the heart of DC’s publishing program, but his power was growing weaker every year.  His decline was steeper than the general, and that point slow, ebbing of the newsstand comics business in general, and there’s no research from the time to indicate which factors were most critical.  A few years earlier, the S-symbol was powerful enough that even LOIS LANE and JIMMY OLSEN were outselling anything in the Marvel line.  It’s possible that decreasing syndication of the ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN television series starring George Reeves was the dominant factor, with the Saturday morning SUPERMAN cartoon also ending its brief run.  Or maybe it was that the last years of Mort Weisinger’s incredibly successful run as Superman’s editor had run out of steam at last, or simply couldn’t change to capture the readership’s developing tastes that were giving Marvel momentum.

Regardless of the cause, it was the critical problem for DC’s publishing profitability.  Carmine Infantino had inherited the mantle of leadership, and began to influence factors that might help.  Neal Adams began doing covers for the super-titles, allegedly over Weisinger’s resistance, bringing a more dynamic visual style to them.  Art assignments were juggled, with Ross Andru promoted from the very strong selling METAL MEN (and the less well selling WONDER WOMAN) to join the Krypton chroniclers.  Nothing was working to reverse the trend, and with Weisinger retiring, Carmine had the responsibility of making a more radical change.

Julie Schwartz was promoted to be the primary Superman editor, although the titles were scattered among several of the DC staff.  Julie had played a critical role in the revitalization of super heroes as a genre in the ‘60s, and put together a team that would be very critically acclaimed in fandom: Denny O’Neil, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.    Shifts in the mythology found Clark working in television as a more modern aspirational occupation than newspaper reporting, and his alter ego relieved of his Kryptonite weakness, which Julie viewed as a story crutch.

Unfortunately, the applause from fandom didn’t translate into sales reversing the decline.  Superman was still a star property, but could no longer carry a handful of titles to the top of the charts.

The next bet Carmine made in the replace Superman’s slipping sales sweepstakes was to get a license for Captain Marvel, the only super hero who significantly outsold Superman at points in the Golden Age.  His publisher, Fawcett, had given up the comics business in the mid-50s when the whole field was shrinking, and had settled its long litigation with DC by agreeing not to publish the character any more.  Fawcett had concentrated on its magazine business, and in the years since been sold to CBS, and was rebranded as the CBS Magazine Group.  Since the Big Red Cheese couldn’t be published without DC’s consent (and it’s not clear that there would have been any other bidders, as the super hero category shrunk after the Batman craze faded), it wasn’t a tough deal to negotiate.  DC Business Manager Bernie Kashdan did a license with the publishing terms largely on their traditional basis, and off they went.  But uniquely, DC would also control all the licensing and media rights, sharing proceeds with CBS.

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and unprovable insight, I’d argue the return of Captain Marvel suffered from three challenges: first, the name of the hero himself was unavailable as the trademark had lapsed and Marvel had wisely jumped in with their own Captain Marvel; second, editor Julie Schwartz arranged a really bad marriage for the creative team, putting Denny O’Neil (who favored serious melodrama) together with C.C. Beck, the hero’s original artist (and a determined proponent of the tongue-in-cheek humor that was the series’ trademark); and most seriously, misjudging that the audience had simply moved on from the innocence that appreciated the charm of the original, with its talking tiger and menacing worm mastermind.

Fan speculation fueled sales of the first issue (I recall buying a stack off the newsstand to ship over to Nick Landau, the British fan entrepreneur who would co-found Forbidden Planet and Titan Distributors), but wasn’t enough to sustain the series.  Beck was more and more frustrated, and a succession of talented creatives never found a great balance or tone.  Notwithstanding that, it would turn out to be an excellent arrangement for DC, with two television series launched and some attendant merchandising.

Flash forward to the next decade.  DC still hadn’t found a reliable creative direction for Shazam, but there were still lots of talented folks who wanted to try.  One barrier to establishing him successfully in comics seemed to be that original license.  It’s provisions hadn’t really imagined nesting him deeply in the DC universe of characters: it provided that the royalty rate would be pro-rated for a team-up like a BRAVE & BOLD appearance or the eventual SUPERMAN VS. SHAZAM tabloid, but had a ‘floor’ on the royalty rate that made it impractical to have him as a member of a group like the Justice League, or appearing in some massive mash-up (my memory isn’t clear on whether we were already thinking of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS yet).

By now I was managing the business side of DC, so after discussions with Jenette Kahn and Dick Giordano, off I went to solve this.  The most practical solution was to simply buy out CBS’ interest in the property: they weren’t going to ever go back into the comics business (in fact, they’d sell off their magazine division not long after), and while it was nice to get a modest royalty check every year, it seemed a do-able deal.  I negotiated with an only slightly older accountant for their magazine division, David Pecker.  David would go on to an illustrious career in magazine publishing, ending up running American Media, the publishers of NATIONAL INQUIRER, where his exploits would come to a controversial end.  He would also be a generous donor to Pace University, especially to its publishing program, where I’d coincidentally serve as the “David Pecker Distinguished Visiting Professor” for a year in the 21st century.  We worked out a buyout, and not only of Captain Marvel but of all of the remaining Fawcett comics assets, including stacks of comics that would find their way to the DC library.

The renewed efforts to make Shazam an integral part of the comics’ universe met with mixed results over the following decades, but with one film having scored a box office over $365 million, a second in production, and BLACK ADAM opening next weekend to great anticipation, I guess that deal worked out.  I don’t have access to the information (or, frankly, the analytic skill) to figure out the return on investment, but I think it’d beat any reasonable financial test.

On My Affection For The Avengers
On My Affection For The Avengers 150 150 Paul Levitz

I came to Marvel relatively late: my comics reading began with the Weisinger-edited Superman titles in the early sixties, and moved from there to the broader DC line slowly.  I read a few Marvels along the way from friends’ stacks, but my mom limited me to three new issues a week in hope of preserving my eyes from the lousy print and tiny lettering, as well as focusing me on prose books.  That kept me squarely in DC’s grasp, with only a bit of dalliance with the few and short-lived THUNDER Agents.  It wasn’t until my father took a week’s vacation for my elementary school graduation (he was the PTA president, unusually enough for a man in those years in Brooklyn’s culture) that the turning point came.  That was June of 1968.   Dad was happy to indulge me more, I think the comics vaguely reminding him of the pulps of his youth.

Now that was a fascinating moment to be let loose.  The DC line was getting shaken up radically, largely by the influence of Carmine Infantino changing editorial and freelance assignments that had been frozen for much of the last decade.   Neal Adams and Jim Steranko were introducing new visual styles to the heroic titles.  And there was a real feeling of wonder, not simply because I was approaching 12 years old.  (I heard the “The golden age of [science fiction] is 12” quote as attributed to Sam Moskowitz, but no longer am certain it was his first.  Regardless of authorship, I think the principle of imprinting on popular culture around that age is very sound.)

Group books had long been my favorite: The Legion of Super-Heroes especially, but Justice League and Teen Titans as well.  In part it was the sheer quantity of characters, I think, and maybe the visual diversity?  (Notice that the THUNDER heroes all dressed differently too.). In any case, it was The Avengers #54 that caught my eye in a candy store/soda fountain store on Clarendon Road, a few blocks from home.  Fantastic Four never had, perhaps because they all wore the same uniforms (notice Challengers hadn’t made my DC fave list either), notwithstanding that my childhood friend Alan Leiblich had good enough taste to select a subscription to it as a birthday present.  But that issue of The Avengers had 8 different costumed characters on the cover!

There was no going backwards once I was unleashed.  Sorry, mom. 

The Avengers quickly became one of my favorites, not surprising as I came in on a peak period of Roy Thomas and John Buscema’s work, just as they introduced The Vision.  I went backwards too, collecting the earlier issues and discovering the unique dynamics of how heroes moved in and out of the line-up, utterly differently than any of the other group books of the period.  (I wouldn’t learn much about the Justice Society for a while, and anyway, although their heroes changed frequently, it wasn’t because of story-driven reasons, just the invisible editorial hand guessing at popularity.). My not very mint Avengers #1 cost $5 from a used bookstore off Church Avenue.

One of my first fanzine efforts with lifelong pal Paul Kupperberg was devoted to an index of The Avengers, focusing on the first 60 issues or so, clearly showing that my collecting had been effective and my passion unsated.  Thankfully, almost no one saw that Xerox copied un-masterpiece, or at least have been kind enough not to embarrass me with it since.

Anyway, I started writing comics a few years later, and not long after got the chance to try my hand at groups, starting with the revived JSA.  Being an analytic type, I went back and studied The Avengers, particularly how the line-up changed and plots moved through the series.  I charted it all out (and no, none of those charts survive), with particular focus on Roy’s long run, which seemed to me the model I wanted to emulate.  My tonal style was definitely heavily influenced by Stan, Roy and particularly Gerry Conway, whose assistant I was for a short stretch when he came to DC as an editor.

My affection for the series is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that it was my bound volume of Avengers #1-16 that I took along on my second trip to Stan’s home, promising to be a grown-up at dinner with Joan but imploring him to inscribe it for my inner child.  He, of course, graciously did, though thinking back I wonder if that’s why the rest of our meals together involved meeting at restaurants?  Hmmm…

In any case, despite having the first 30 years of Marvel neatly bound on my shelves (along with the far larger DC collection, naturally), I never worked there.  The opportunities at DC simply came my way more appropriately and delightfully, ultimately leading to the long partnership with Jenette Kahn, my tenure running the company, and a period of writing exclusively for them.  By the time I had the freedom to do anything for Marvel, I certainly wasn’t the hot writer I’d been in the ‘80s, and the characters and mythos had evolved beyond my knowledge.

So it was a particular pleasure when Mark Waid opened the door for me at a Marvel writers’ summit, reminding their powers-that-be of my love of The Avengers, and motivating Tom Brevoort to and give me the opportunity to do The Avengers:War Across Time.  It wasn’t originally planned for The Avengers’ 60th, but in so many ways is appropriate to kick that off, as stylistically it’s a love letter to those early issues.  (It gave me the reason to do a Douglas Wolk-style re-reading of the first few years of the whole Marvel line, in order of publication, to try to get the dialogue and details right.). The icing on the cake was the chance to work with Alan Davis, whose beautiful art and sense of whimsy I’ve loved since DR & Quinch.

I’m not sure if War Across Time will lead to anything further at Marvel, but at the least it feels like a beautiful bookend to the No-Prize I have sealed in Lucite, earned by a letter expressing my childhood joy in Jack Kirby’s Inhumans in AMAZING ADVENTURES (again, a bunch of characters with very diverse looks…I never thought about that before today).  And if I get a chance to follow it up, so much the better.  Time, as Kang might say, will tell.

© 2022 Paul Levitz. All rights reserved.

Enter your
text here