Writing With Wordshttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/HOME_Slider_Wash-Sq-Park.jpg960300Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/bd72b5de458b9425c4c5111b4abc1fa1?s=96&d=mm&r=g
So I did a new trick that’s being published in June 2022: writing prose fiction. It’s kind of funny that I never turned my hand to that in decades of writing, but I started off with non-fiction then drifted to comics, and unlike many of my peers in Frank McCourt’s English classes, I never had the driving urge to be a prose fiction writer. I love the form. Laziness maybe? I dunno. I have come to the conclusion in the last couple of years that my system is that of an assignment guy: when an editor comes to me with “Can you write….” I leap up like the firehouse pooch hearing the alarm bell, but left to my own devices, my initiative is far weaker.
So this started with my pal Barry Lyga (a Legion fan, former Diamond staffer, and accomplished novelist and graphic novelist) told me he was putting together an anthology of short stories themed around young people with extraordinary powers and invited me to participate, it hit all my buttons. In tune with the ridiculous luck that has been so much of my professional life, I had sold my first short story before I wrote it.
GENERATION WONDER turned out to be a fun volume, with a wide range of writers including many more experienced at the prose format than I am, and lavishly illustrated by my old collaborator Colleen Doran, who continues to blossom with new styles and approaches to her art. My story, “Bumped!”, is the last in the volume and I tried to offer a distinct possible future in which my protagonist lived. I’m a great admirer of writers who can welcome you to a fantasy quickly, and particularly Roger Zelazny’s great skill at that (I use his short story “The Furies” in writing classes as an example).
To offer you the briefest of temptations to check out GENERATION WONDER, then, here are the opening paragraphs of my story:
Back in the beginning of the 16th Century, when a genius named Erasmus wrote, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” he wasn’t just being wise and witty, turned out he was prescient. Not quite literally, and it took six centuries to get there, but close enough. If his contemporary Nostradamus had been that clear, we’d have had quite a guide to the future.
No such luck.
Turned out that the commonest side effect of the pollution war of 2132 was a dramatic downturn in most people’s vision as their optic nerves progressively atrophied in response to one of the nasty chemicals let loose in the atmosphere. It wasn’t quite living in the kingdom of the blind, but it wasn’t just the bastard who designed those pollution bombs who was shortsighted.
GENERATION WONDER, Barry Lyga editor, is published by Amulet Books, available June 14 at bookstores and the wiser comic shops. Let me know if you enjoy it!
A recent Facebook post looked at a published JLA cover by Neal Adams and an unpublished but surviving earlier version by Gil Kane, noting that the changes from one to the other were comparatively minor. The poster (David Seidman, a good soul) wondered why.
I have no inside information on that particular incident, but it made me think it was worth talking about the broader subject of Carmine and covers. In the era of newsstand sales being the dominant model for comics in America (let’s say roughly 1935-1984?), the conventional wisdom was that the cover was by far the most important element in an issue’s success. Different theories were built around this (e.g., change the logo’s color and the dominant background every issue so potential customers would notice subliminal it was a new release, or put a talking gorilla prominently in place). Certainly the principal character mattered, and Steve Ditko’s innovation of the Marvel ‘corner box’ was a way of making sure that even in racks that hid the bottom two-thirds of an issue, the character was still up there as bait. But if it was a very popular character, they might be on multiple covers at the same time (remember when there were over 20 Richie Rich titles?), so the specific cover still mattered, maybe as much or more than the starring persona. That was, of course, the logic Carmine was brought up in, and in part, his ticket to the top.
Carmine was pretty much inarguably DC’s star artist in the mid-60s when he was promoted to supervise or design most of the company’s covers. DC’s best sellers were still far outselling pretty much everything on the newsstand. It’s likely that the issue of LOIS LANE with Superman yanking off his Clark Kent glasses and insulting Lois as stupid for not seeing past them outsold the FANTASTIC FOUR that began the Galactus trilogy when they went on sale the same day, much as we’d all agree the esthetic worth of the two stacks in the reverse order. But the Marvel titles were gaining in sales efficiency–the percentage of copies printed and shipped out that actually sold. That was a critical factor in profitability, and the best measure of immediate response to the appeal of the comic. Given the belief in the covers’ importance, deciding to have a single visual hand on DC’s covers and placing that responsibility in Carmine was a weighty decision.
It was a few years later when I began spending time at DC and with Carmine, and another few before I was present when he designed covers, so I’m not sure when he evolved his practices. But by the early ’70s, he had a very fixed ritual: an editor would bring the completed artwork for an issue in to Carmine’s office, he’d thumb through the boards (maybe reading a bit, maybe not) looking for the critical visuals or elements. There might be some back and forth with the editor, and then Carmine would pick up his chosen tools: a ballpoint pen and a piece of bond typing paper.
Two idiosyncrasies here: typing paper is not in the same proportion as a comic book, so any sketch done on it is likely to require some adjustment to fit those proportions. And after decades of using an artist’s pencil (and on occasion, pen or brush), Carmine was chasing to use a very different tool. My personal interpretation of this is that he wanted to be an executive, and so he used the tools of an executive even though he was stepping into an artist’s role again for the moment. He had disposed of his drawing board and art files, and whether it was a matter of self-image or how he wanted to be seen, I believe that was his unconscious motive.
The sketches that emerged from this process were raw design dynamics, occasionally with some emphasis on expressions when the faces were large enough images, but principally defining the poses, ideas and negative space. Many were inspired, many were powerful. And when you’re called upon to do a dozen in a week, some based on issues that had very limited visual imagery, the duds can easily be forgiven.
Sometimes no cover emerged: when Gerry Conway brought the boards for the first version of SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS in to Carmine, the pages were flipped, the absence of a headquarters for the villains noted, and the whole issue sent back for a redo. Or other changes could be required: my first Aquaman story was sent back for another, better writer (David Michelinie) to redialogue after Carmine reviewed it in the cover conference.
Artist editors (of whom DC had several in those years) might have picked up a pencil and offered dueling ideas occasionally, or more often took Carmine’s sketches and drew over them, preserving the dynamic and adding detail and expression. I watched Joe Orlando do that many, many times, to great effect. And there were times when editors brought in a finished piece of art they’d been offered as a potential cover for approval; I watched that happen with Wrightson and Kaluta pieces, and I’m sure there others.
And there were artists who were regularly in the office who were invited into those meetings, most often the principal cover artists of a period; Neal Adams, Nick Cardy, others. (Joe Kubert was, of course, both editor and cover artist on his titles; I never got to watch him and Carmine work up a cover but it must have been a joy to see.). And when the artist returned with the cover, it was brought into Carmine for inspection and approval.
I don’t know what happened with that JLA cover, but I can imagine Carmine looking at Gil’s version, wagging his cigar in disappointment, and asking Neal to come in from his workspace a few offices away to fix it. Neal might have even volunteered to do a new version. And I’d lay a side bet that editor Julie Schwartz would have been silently shaking his head, unconvinced that it made a damn bit of difference. And, of course, no one knows whether it did.
“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 creator and executive served as DC Comics president between 2002 and 2009, capping off a 35-year stint with the company. He has has been nominated for a place on the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, but he’s hardly resting on his laurels; this week also sees the release of Brooklyn Blood, a collected edition of his horror crime serial from anthology series Dark Horse Presents.Heat Vision talked to Levitz about the origin of the new project, and also where he sees the comic book industry from his particular vantage point.
I want to start with Brooklyn Blood. You’re a writer who’s worked in multiple genres through your career, and one who’s demonstrated a consistent desire to push yourself — your Doctor Fate run just a few years ago is evidence of that, in terms of cultural influence as much as anything. But even with all of that, Brooklyn Blood feels like a departure. Where did you come up with, “Oh, Lovecraftian horror noir, that’s a good idea”?
Brooklyn Blood really started as a more straightforward police procedural, a genre I’ve loved forever. But stories take you where they will… Doctor Fate started with thinking about the original character’s connection to Egypt, and before I knew it, Anubis was ready to drown the world in a second great flood. Once I focused on Brooklyn as a setting — taking advantage of my old hometown now being cool — the geographic coincidence of three very different mass deaths in a single-mile stretch led me to look for the common cause, and it turned out to be Lovecraftian.
How did you hook up with Tim Hamilton? His work brings so much to the story.
My pal Christine Norrie, an Eisner-nominated artist herself, recommended Tim, and his work on [the graphic novel adaptation of] Fahrenheit 451 clinched it. Brooklyn Blood required someone comfortable with smooth shifts from gritty reality to horror that’s either in detective O’Connor’s imagination or reality, and Tim did that straddle magnificently. He’s also a Brooklyn resident, so getting the ambiance and the settings worked out especially well.
How was the experience of writing short chapters for an anthology? Books like Dark Horse Presentsremain an oddity in the American industry, sadly, but you were writing shorts for classic anthologies Ghosts and House of Mystery way back when. How did you find returning to this kind of writing after years of thinking of story in terms of 20- to 22-page chunks?
Anthologies can be great, and I loved reading things like Dune when it was originally a serial in Analog. There’s a certain power to building stories within constraints, self-imposed or otherwise, and having to structure this one in eight-page chapters kept it moving at a pretty rapid pace. That said, I think mysteries are more fun to read in a single volume, and I think Brooklyn Blood comes together better that way.
Since stepping down as president and publisher of DC in 2009, you’ve done an impressive variety of work, both for DC and elsewhere, with non-fiction books for Taschen and Abrams. You’ve made a point of staying active in the field, not settling down or settling at all. Was this pent-up energy from being an executive for so long and wanting to explore different creative avenues?
There’s so many ways to have fun as a creative person with how comics are exploding as a cultural form, and I’m enjoying as many as I can. I do a lot of teaching, board work on not-for-profits and Boom! Studios [Levitz signed on to the publisher’s board of directors in 2014], consulting projects, and when I sit down to the keyboard, I like to either revisit my old friends or stretch myself. We worked hard to expand the possibilities for comics; why not take advantage of it?
Along those lines: The comic industry is a very different place today from when you started out — thanks to changes that you were involved with at DC — and there are many more possibilities for different types of creators and stories to be found by readers these days. As a scholar, fan and creator, where is your head at when it comes to the state of comics right now?
I think the creative medium of comics is in a second golden age, with more types of stories being created than we’ve ever had in America. The comics industry I came into was a small niche in American publishing — maybe 3 percent? — compared to the sales comics forms have elsewhere, often 14–35 percent of overall trade publishing, and I think we close this gap by diversifying the genres we publish. Children’s comics and memoirs are experiencing great growth; who knows what’s next? Comics can tell any kind of story.
You’re nominated for the Hall of Fame this year. Is that a moment that makes you pause and look back at your career to date? And if so, what do you see?
I’m incredibly honored to be nominated — on the same list as Thomas Nast — and proud of what I’ve accomplished in each stage of my career: As a comic fan doing [early fanzine] The Comic Reader, as an editor, writer and executive. I like to feel that I played a part in making comics a better field for creative people, and that’s why we’ve been able to start the graphic novel explosion and see comics’ stories move into other media so successfully. Besides, as a college dropout who’s getting to teach at schools like Columbia University, I’m getting a bit of the last laugh. Does it get better than that?
Somewhere between a cop thriller and an occult monster story lives the hall-of-famer’s latest, his first set outside DC Comics in four decades, firmly set in his native borough.
Brooklyn was a place residents worked to escape in Paul Levitz’s day, which was decades before an influx of wealthy whites transformed it into something barely recognizable to its natives.
But its hold on its children can be felt in the bitterness, the contempt and the truth behind the opening lines of Levitz’s newest comic book: “I got Brooklyn in my blood. But it sure as hell isn’t this Brooklyn.”
The lines belong to Billy O’Connor, a pissed-off Marine veteran of Afghanistan turned asshole cop whose struggle with PTSD fuels the engine of Brooklyn Blood, Levitz’s first original comic in 40 years published outside DC Comics.
Levitz, an East Flatbush native raised in the shadow of Tilden High School, spent decades shaping DC Comics as a writer, editor and eventually publisher. But on Wednesday, the smaller-press Dark Horse Comics will publish a collected edition of Brooklyn Blood, Levitz’s hybrid detective thriller/horror story, a collaboration with artist Tim Hamilton.
It’s a creative stretch for Levitz, one of the first comics fans to turn professional, who’s most widely known as the driving force behind DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes, a 30th century intergalactic task force helmed by teen heroes Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, and Lightning Lad. Brooklyn Blood riffs off Ed McBain’s detective fiction, he says—“great procedurals and often structured to work around not developing too much detail about an adversary”—and felt it was important to ground such a work in a familiar place.
“O’Connor is channeling my amazement at the borough changing. Not disgust, part joy, part amazement… and some worry that the working class transformative power of Brooklyn may get lost in the shift,” Levitz tells The Daily Beast.
Brooklyn Blood, first serialized in the anthology series Dark Horse Presents, is a nervous tale driven by trauma. O’Connor’s flashbacks to his armored personnel carrier running over an insurgent roadside bomb both complicate and help him unravel the case of a serial killer stalking Park Slope. With help from a psychic, O’Connor and his Muslim partner, Nadira Hasan, get sucked ever deeper into a seemingly random spate of slayings that connect to something ancient and occult lurking within the fabric of the borough. There’s even a guest appearance by the borough of Queens.
And you thought the scariest thing in Brooklyn was at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal.
As the head of DC Comics, Paul Levitz worked with the biggest names in the comics business — Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.
But after retiring and deciding to write an original story of his own, the East Flatbush native chose to leave capes and costumes behind and write about something far more astounding: the real, bloody history of his home borough.
“I noticed three of the city’s five greatest loss-of-life disasters all took place within a mile of each other in Brooklyn. That’s kind of weird. It’s a big city. Why? That became a story hook,” said Levitz, who served as president and publisher at DC from 2002 to 2009.
“What would happen if a serial killer was committing murders in the spots where those mass deaths happened? Where would that lead?”
Where it led was the book “Brooklyn Blood,” a supernatural thriller about a grizzled 78th Precinct gumshoe trying to work out why corpses and ghosts are showing up at the site of those disasters — the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, the 1918 Malbone Street train wreck and the 1960 Park Slope plane crash
It’s part police procedural, part Lovecraftian horror story — and a history lesson on the surprising body count racked up in and around Park Slope before the neighborhood was more synonymous with the phrase “food co-op.”
The setting isn’t far from where the comics-industry legend, 61, grew up, reading books from seminal crime writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ed McBain.As a teenager, Levitz took over running a defunct comics fanzine called The Comic Reader, and his work soon caught the attention of DC — home to the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel — where he was offered work as a writer and began climbing the ranks.
But even though the first original comic book ever made rolled off the Brooklyn Eagle’s presses in 1935, Levitz notes, the entire comics industry was in Manhattan.
By age 19, he’d happily said “fuhgeddaboudit” to Brooklyn for good and moved across the East River.
“Brooklyn was not cool in those days,” Levitz, 61, said.
Of course, the borough’s cachet has seen a rebirth in recent years to rival that of Superman’s 1993 rise from the dead, as Levitz saw when he returned to visit after his daughter moved to Boerum Hill after college.
‘I noticed three of the city’s five greatest loss-of-life disasters all took place within a mile of each other in Brooklyn. That’s kind of weird. It’s a big city. Why? That became a story hook.’
“We worked so hard to get out of Brooklyn!” he joked.
And when a pal who runs indie publisher Dark Horse Comics asked Levitz to write something, he decided to return to his roots by setting the story in Brooklyn and finally penning the kind of crime story he’s loved since childhood, although with a paranormal twist.
“I had an opportunity to play in that genre after decades doing superheroes-slash-science fiction,” Levitz said.
He was able to funnel some of his head-scratching, homecoming experiences into the main character of “Brooklyn Blood” — an Afghanistan war veteran who returns to the streets where he grew up to work as a cop, only to find them filled with hipsters drinking pumpkin-spice beers.
Suffering PTSD, Detective Bill O’Connor is haunted by the ghosts of his past — which are soon joined by the ghosts of Brooklyn’s past when a murder victim is found in Prospect Park.
That’s the approximate site of the Battle of Brooklyn — the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, where about 300 members of the Continental Army were slaughtered by the British.
The connection isn’t obvious in the story until O’Connor walks past the Fort Greene Prison Martyrs Monument — where the remains of American prisoners from the war are buried — and spooky skeletal poltergeists start coming out of the ground.
The 1960 Park Slope plane crash. (NY Post photo)
He starts seeing ghost planes crash over Park Slope — where a United Airlines jet plummeted in 1960 after colliding in midair with a TWA propeller craft (which smashed into Staten Island), killing 134 people. Then there’s a ghost train rocketing along the subway tracks beneath Malbone Street where 93 people died when a Brighton Beach Line train crashed near the Prospect Park station in 1918. O’Connor soon realizes these aren’t just his regular war flashbacks.
Levitz teamed up with Fort Greene-based illustrator Tim Hamilton to bring the story to life — so to speak.
The pair pored over history books and old articles and walked the streets to get the Brownstone Brooklyn scenery right before filling their tale with monsters and explosions and casting a noir-ish shadow over everything.
“I really do enjoy history, so I was able to go around and take pictures of most of the things I put into the novel,” said Hamilton, who has previously adapted Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”″ into a graphic novel and has done art for The New Yorker and Mad magazine.
The pair also used their own homegrown knowledge — it was Hamilton’s idea to include the Prison Martyr’s Memorial from his neighborhood, while Levitz knew what the fatal train tunnel in the Malbone Street disaster actually looked like from riding the rails as a kid.
“In my youth, I used to ride in the front of the train looking deep into the tunnel, so I’ve got a pretty good visual sense of what goes on. In the old days, you could easily see out the front of the cars, so you learned a lot more than you do now,” he said.
Which is just as well, because Hamilton, like many New Yorkers, hadn’t even heard of the wreck.
“They don’t make a big deal about it at the Transit Museum,” Levitz quipped.
The 1918 Malbone St. train wreck. (NYCTA File Photo)
“And [the city] renamed Malbone Street to Empire Boulevard pretty quickly after the disaster. Real-estate values — the guiding history of much of New York City.”
The comic culminates in an epic showdown between O’Connor and his mystic foe at the Hell Gate Bridge — which isn’t in Brooklyn, but is where the Brooklyn-made General Slocum steamboat sank when it caught fire in 1904, killing 1,021 people.
“Once it became a supernatural story, the fact that the city’s great disaster prior to 9/11 happened at a place called Hell Gate was a natural payoff,” Levitz said.
Also, the scene just looks cool — and has the right infrastructure for a ghost train, a ghost plane and a ghost sea monster all at once.
“When you’re talking about deaths that happened a hundred years ago and in many ways hadn’t been memorialized, you didn’t have a distinctive visual to play with,’’ Levitz said.
“So being able to work with something as vivid as a railroad bridge, it’s pretty cool architecture.”
With comics currently enjoying unprecedented popularity thanks to the explosion of superhero stories on the big and small screens, plus Brooklyn’s new popularity, Levitz is looking to tap into the zeitgeist of both.
“I hope ‘Brooklyn Blood’ can be a little bit of a trend-setter,” he said.
“I’m hoping people in Brooklyn hear about the story and are curious enough to take a look. I promise no ghosts come with it.”
Levitz and Hamilton are doing a signing at Crown Heights’ Anyone Comics on July 27.
That, too, is the site of an important Brooklyn event.
“I was bar mitzvahed a couple of blocks from there!” Levitz said.
The joys of awards – part twohttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Just_Books.jpg1200375Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/bd72b5de458b9425c4c5111b4abc1fa1?s=96&d=mm&r=g
A few weeks ago I received perhaps the most unlikely award of my career: an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Pace University while speaking at graduation. Never having finished my undergraduate education, this was a delight, checking an unexpected box on my life list. But the icing on the cake has been a couple of emails that followed. One was from a former grad student (I teach in the M.S. in Publishing program as well as undergraduate courses), saying that my speech about the power of stories had finally helped her family understand her career choice, and another came from the parent of a graduate, telling me about the importance of my writing to her recently deceased brother through a very difficult lifetime.
Most of the awards offer strength to me in proportion to how they were achieved: the ones that were voted on by my peers or by groups that I worked with closely are great sources of pride. But there’s a true warmth in the one on one feedback that my work has permitted: the people who have come up to me at comic conventions talking about the pleasure my stores gave them, or responses like these. There’s a real joy in being part of a community, whether it’s comics or a school.
To all involved in these, thank you…and to all of you who allowed me to do the work that qualified, thank you as well.
The Joys of Mailhttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Stan-note.jpeg24682226Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/bd72b5de458b9425c4c5111b4abc1fa1?s=96&d=mm&r=g
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; Chee-Chee despised the mailman, and as a point of honor would grab the mail as it came in through the slot in the front door, and toss it around. Comics with bite marks are even less mint than the mailing fold down the middle caused.
The years when I published fanzines confirmed my pavlovian reaction to the mail. Every day some new orders for The Comic Reader might arrive, or perhaps a new article or column I could publish (no email attachments to open in those days, or PayPal credits). As the circulation grew towards its final tally of 3,500, the daily take grew commensurately.
Then there was the mail that came into DC for the letters pages I was responsible for putting together and answering. All in, I did over a thousand text pages for the company, from Phantom Stranger #25 onward. I think it’s the largest number of texts anyone’s contributed to comics, but since the vast majority of such work is uncredited, that’s a biased and unsupported claim. Love to hear from anyone with a contrary claimant, however.
Those letters ranged from the youngest kids’ scrawls for the mystery comics, to long and complex analysis from serious fans of the Legion of Super-Heroes. There was a physics expert pointing out my errors in depicting a black hole, and lengthy, thoughtful literary discussions from a Tulane grad student who would become a professor there and a lifelong friend. Oh yeah, and there was the letter from Harlan Ellison to Swamp Thing that he was so pissed I printed. Sorry again, Harlan.
And when I got to the publisher’s desk at DC, some of the best mail were the thank you notes from creators whose work I had rejoiced in, either in appreciation of a payment the company made, or of something I’d thought to send. I’m smiling, recalling warm words from early Superman and Starman artist Jack Burnley for a reprint payment, and a beautifully drawn self-portrait of Jack Davis, for something MAD-related, of course.
But my absolute favorite fan letter is this one:
I didn’t really know Stan at that point in my career. Perhaps we’d shake hands once or twice, but there was no reason for me to believe he knew I existed (I have trouble remembering people I’ve casually met, and even in those pre-cameo days, Stan was a celebrity who’d encountered countless folks). And he’d taken the time to read the obit I’d written for former DC executive Sol Harrison, liked it, and gone to the trouble of sending me this note.
Stan Lee liked a “bullpen” page I wrote. ‘Nuff said.
Next time, let me tell you about a letter from Alan Moore…
Random Causality?https://paullevitz.com/wp-content/themes/movedo/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/bd72b5de458b9425c4c5111b4abc1fa1?s=96&d=mm&r=g
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 error made by fans, academics and even those of us with insider experience: assuming logical causality.
It’s possible Nelson Bridwell (who edited that reprint issue) was motivated by the ALL-STAR relaunch; he was a great fan of the Golden Age and curious enough about doings in other editorial offices (as opposed to some others at DC at that time) that he’d have been aware of it. But it’s equally likely he chose the story for a JLA 100-Page issue a year before that got cut to ordinary periodical size, or just thought the first super-team belonged in his first reprint collection of that name. I have no memory of the events, but I’d lean to the former theory…but with no more certainty than Tom, even though I was working a few feet away from Nelson at the time.
My favorite illustration of the randomness of the day was my own experience on STALKER. The series was launched when Carmine Infantino asked a couple of editors for sword & sorcery titles, presumably motivated by CONAN’s success for Marvel. As Joe Orlando’s assistant editor, I used my inside track to pitch an idea as a sword & sorcery fan, and he got Steve Ditko and Wally Wood to illustrate it. An astounding bit of luck for a 17-year old new writer.
Carmine, however, wasn’t impressed by the material as it crossed his desk in cover design sessions, and cancelled the title as of the third issue. When Carmine’s secretary, Shelley Abramson, typed up the December 1975 production schedule though, she accidentally included STALKER #4. In those dinosaur days, correcting it would have meant retyping the entire page, and Carmine decided to simply let us have a fourth issue. Random enough for you?
Ball boy on Murderers’ Rowhttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/DC-LOGO_SuperStars.png300300Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/bd72b5de458b9425c4c5111b4abc1fa1?s=96&d=mm&r=g
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 of the equivalent of getting to be the ballboy on the Yankee’s legendary Murderers’ Row, back when it was led by Ruth and Gehrig. But the Yankees had only 6 super-stars in that line-up, and DC was fielding a full nine: during the three years I was an assistant editor, this 30 person company had offices for Bill Gaines, Carmine Infantino, Julie Schwartz, Joe Orlando, Joe Kubert, Joe Simon, Archie Goodwin and Denny O’Neil …just listing the Eisner Hall of Famers. Oh, and there was Jack Kirby, writing , drawing, editing and sending in his wisdom from California.
Denny O’Neil
That meant I had a chance to observe the different approaches and strengths of a diverse group of masters of our form. Evesdrop from the hall, and overhear Julie Schwartz’s straight-forward plotting tips (“If you can change the hero’s name and the story still works, it means the story’s no good.”), lean across the desk from my boss, Joe Orlando, and watch him turn a pencil into a camera, showing how an uncomfortable hand move was bad storytelling, or be lucky enough to sit in on a cover conference, and watch two or three of these guys duel , shaping ideas. Some times you’d turn in a piece of your own work, and get an instant lesson (“Tightening your copy” by Denny O’Neil has served me for decades). And, of course, watching the work in progress on all their books, you got a good idea of how the craft should be performed.
Just celebrating the Eisner HOF winners gives short-shrift to a handful of other top talents. Gerry Conway was in his peak years as a comics editor and writer, and took particular care to pass along what he’d learned at Marvel to his not-much-younger juniors. Nelson Bridwell understood the multiverse in a way that no one living since ever has. And the production processes that are so important to good comics were explained by two of the men who had invented many of them, Sol Harrison and Jack Adler.
Alex Toth
Besides the staffers, there were almost twenty other Hall of Famers freelancing for DC at the time. I got to learn by watching their work, seeing some of them translate my scripts in to finished comic art (17 and getting to create a title for Steve Ditko & Wally Wood to draw!), editing scripts by a couple of the most prolific writers of DC’s first fifty years, being saved from horrendous error by at least one (thanks, Len, for making sure I never used a non-repro blue marker to proof Bernie’s art) and making lifelong friends of more than a few. Oh, and after you’ve opened an acrid note from Alex Toth sending back a script he refuses to draw, you’ll never wince at anyone else’s invective.
Joe Orlando
It wasn’t as storied an office environment as E.C. Comics or the heady first decade of Marvel, and the creative quality of DC’s output from 1973-1975 doesn’t match what the company would achieve a decade later, but as a safe place to learn, it was pretty amazing. I only wish I’d thought to ask more questions and write down some of the lessons I was offered (there was a long lecture from Joe Orlando one day tracing the evolution of comic art and illustration placing names like Noel Sickles properly in the ‘family tree’ as he saw it that I wish I could recreate).
And, of course, I was much too young to realize what a unique experience I was having. Or would have a minute later when Jenette arrived and the bullet took an entirely new spin… Sigh…
If you read the lengthy series, you will essentially have experienced a day of my university lectures. Don’t fall asleep, there will be a test: find the place where a one word transcription error credited me with working on a series I never did a complete issue script for.
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 his letters pages, launching my freelance career. And it’ll be 18 years since he passed away, his heart giving out as he walked down the platform at Grand Central, heading home to join his family for Christmas. In between was over a quarter century of learning, collaboration, debate, and so much laughter. We swapped books, ideas and occasionally even skills: Joe knew far more about comics than I did, but there were some things I could help him with too.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know Joe was one of the great E.C. science fiction artists, one of the first artists on Daredevil, and the editor who spearheaded the revival of the mystery genre at DC. But he was an incredibly diverse creative spirit, working on everything from National Lampoon’s “First Lay” comics to Sesame Street books to a Henry Kissinger cover for Newsweek. And more, he was en enthusiastic and effective teacher, developing the talents of a generation of young artists and writers. If you enjoyed comics in the 1970s and 1980s, you benefited from his teaching and cheerleading, as so many of the generation of us coming up in those years were encouraged and developed at his hands.
But what I miss most is the twinkle in Joe’s eye, the elfin laugh as he planned his next moment of mischief, and his warmth. No situation was too grim for Joe to lighten up: when his old friend Bill Gaines passed away, Joe recalled a piece he’d illustrated for Mad, a deathbed scene with the man who was about to die reaching up and giving his friend “The Last Tag” with his last breath. It hung on our bulletin board for a long time afterwards.
If you haven’t finished your holiday giving, consider a donation to the Joe Orlando Scholarship Fund at the School of Visual Arts, where he taught for many years. Or to the funds at that school named after his mentor, the wondrous Wally Wood, or our colleague, Archie Goodwin. Even a small check to these funds is a nice way to remember these legendary creative people who gave us all so many great tales, and each taught so many other creators who to improve their craft. Their address is Visual Arts Foundation, 220 E 23rd, suite 609, NY, NY 10010, and it’s tax-deductible.
Digging in the storage unit today, I ran across an odd artifact: the letterhead of the Narrative Art Alliance Inc. Never heard of it, huh?
The NAA was probably the second not-for-profit incorporated related to the American comics industry, after ACBA, which went defunct in 1977, around the time the NAA was founded. The founders were mostly young people in the field, concerned with a number of issues, including the way comic conventions could be altered to make them more beneficial to the creative talent. We were full of good intentions, but sadly didn’t make them—or the NAA—a concrete reality that lasted. Most of the folks made lasting differences in the comics community, though, one way or another, and stayed friends for many years.
Based on the yellowing sheet of letterhead, our initial board included Steve Gerber as Chairman, Carla Conway, Scott Edelman, Carl Gafford, Stu Hellinger, David Kraft, Doug Murray, Marty Pasko, Jim Salicrup, David Simons, Mary Skrenes, Roger Slifer, Ed Summer, Duffy Vohland and me. I also recall Irene Vartanoff serving as our treasurer, as she watched the tiny treasury fade away over the next few years.
It makes me all the more grateful for the hard work the founders of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the Hero Alliance did to make those organizations into enduring institutions, and to hope that the several smaller not-for-profits in comics grow and prosper.
