For a long stretch the responsibility for the DC Library went to a woman named Gerda Gattel. Gerda was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust years in Germany, and worked at Timely (the Marvel predecessor) in the 1950s, possibly as a letterer, but was caught up in one of their periodic shutdown/layoffs. She came over […]
The death this week of Marty Pasko pulled my mind back to the late 1970s, and the years of our regular poker games. For about five years I sat in a Friday night game, most often hosted in Greenwich Village at the apartment that Marty and I shared for a while and I kept afterwards. […]
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER Comics Veteran Paul Levitz on ‘Brooklyn Blood’ and His Eisner Hall of Fame Nomination by Graeme McMillan “I like to feel that I played a part in making comics a better field for creative people,” says the writer, editor and executive. Paul Levitz is having quite the year. The veteran comic book […]
I’ve been very lucky in my life to have received some lovely recognition for my work, none more so than being inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. The HOF is a collection of some of the great pioneers and master crafts people of comics and cartooning, and it’s an honor to be among […]
I was privileged to have my good friend and long time colleague Karen Berger at the Columbia class I co-teach with Jeremy Dauber. Happy to share with you a transcript of that conversation. PL: Karen comes into the story (of comics) at the beginning of the 1980s at your age, basically, fresh out of college. […]
I always was fond of the mail. Goes back at least to when the subscription copies of ACTION COMICS would arrive (from the $1 sub I talked my mom into letting me order from ACTION #300 when my babysitter brought it for me). I gave up the subscriptions after my dog arrived in my life; […]
I stumbled across a piece by Tom Brevoort about some of the first comics he read as a kid, in which Tom took joy at a JSA reprint in SUPER-TEAM FAMILY, and figured it might have appeared to plug the then-recent relaunch of ALL-STAR COMICS. Not illogical, but an example of a frequent type of […]
Thinking about how I learned my trade, I realized that one of the ways I was incredibly lucky was the timing of the years of my apprenticeship at DC. The company was very small, and those of us just starting out got lots of opportunities to learn from an awesome group of talented people. Kind […]
Over the winter break, Newarama‘s Vaneta Rogers published a 4-part interview looking back over the early days of my career: Part 1 From Fanzines To LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES & Beyond Part 2 Looking Back At LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, DC Implosion, More Part 3 Deep Inside The Comics Business Of 1980s & 1990s Part 4 Milestones as DC COMICS’ President, […]
Around this time of year I get especially nostalgic about one of my old friends and my first professional mentor, Joe Orlando. Next week will be 44 years since he called me into his office as I walking the DC halls, digging up material for The Comic Reader, and offered me the assignment of compiling […]