Paul Levitz

I’ve probably done dozens of interviews and convention panels over the years, maybe a hundred?  Some questions come up over and over, and at this point trigger almost prerecorded answers.  Some, of course, deal with confidential information that I don’t feel can be spoken about.  Others that I think someone might be curious about never come up.  Here’s one I think is interesting to have on the record: 

What was it like designing the royalty system back in 1980, when no comics publisher had one?

There were some fascinating debates.  The relative contribution of writers and artists was one: page rates (the only form of compensation at the time) were heavily weighted towards the artists, but it was considered fair because the time spent drawing a page (unless you were Sergio Aragones) was so much greater than the time spent writing a page.  Only MAD Magazine had a structure that paid writers as much per page as artists, and the demands on writers were very different there (fewer pages per assignment, more pitches required to sell a story, and the taut scripting that line after line of humor required).

Amusingly, perhaps, we tended to argue against our own specialties.  There were four of us in the process: Jenette Kahn presiding (who had never freelanced in comics), Joe Orlando (predominantly a penciller in his comics work), Dick Giordano (far more active as an inker than a penciller), and me (a writer).  Perhaps it’s that we value skills we don’t possess over own, which we take more for granted?  In any case, in carving the pie, Joe was the strongest advocate for writers, Dick for pencillers over inkers, and me for artists on the basis of the time it took them to produce their work.  

The overall size of the pie was constrained by the budget lines I had figured out how to raid to finance the change in the short run (we all believed—and were proved gloriously correct over the next few years—that the improved work the royalties would stimulate would more than pay for the investment).  Did we want to spread it thinly over many titles, or make it an incentive for our best-selling titles?  The latter seemed wiser to us all.  While it would take a few years for projects to get into the system that reflected talent’s response to the incentives, it’s easy to draw a straight line from the institution of royalties to the kind of phenomenal effort inherent in BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, for example.

There are generally three ways participation schemes can be calculated in media: based on the nominal retail price (the standard in book publishing in those years), based on dollars actually received (analogous to the ‘gross’ deals in film), or based on the net profits of the project (a version of which had been the very positively viewed approach used in underground comix, which talent then viewed as ideal simply because it was the only scheme where comics creatives had an upside in success, and some folks had made significant money over time).  Basing on retail had several virtues: the parallel to book publishing (perceived as a far more decent field than comics), a fairly transparent calculation that should stand up on any audits, and relatively easy to attach to our then-simple accounting systems.  It also, to my mind, had the great advantage that it was less manipulable than the other two types of calculation.  This doesn’t mean that gross or net deals aren’t honest—in recent decades both of these structures have become commonplace in comics, and in most cases seem to be used in ways that are equitable and with an honest spirit.  But they’re intrinsically more opaque, and when controlled by those of less decent intent, harder to deal with.

The last of the factors was playing with the math and finding a definition of the pool that might accomplish all this.  The total royalty pool percentage ended up at 5%, a number picked for its use in the children’s book business at the time (and remember that comics were definitely still considered children’s reading at the time), and the threshold set at 100,000 copies.  That was both a number that was achievable by our best sellers (though few titles hit it), and if you calculated the amount typically paid out in page rates times the low cover prices times that mark, the page rate ‘earned out’ as if it were an advance.

Ideally, from a competitive standpoint this would also be a much more expensive plan for Marvel to implement, given how many more copies their books were typically selling in 1980.  We had hoped it might give us a lead in hunting talent for some time as a result, but to the credit of Jim Shooter and Mike Hobson’s efforts, Marvel was convinced of the absolute necessity of following along and implemented an almost identical plan within a month or so.

So much of this changed over the ensuing years as the comic shop market replaced the newsstand as the principal point of sales for comics, as the number of competing publishers exploded, and the variety of deals for comics talent expanded offering many opportunities (some good, some illusory).  But the basic principle that aligning the financial success of the company with financial success for the talent proved right and enduring, and I’m proud of the work we did at the time, and the spirit in which we approached it.

Tex Blaisdell was a long time comics pro, both skilled and well liked, but by the early 1970s, not in top form.  He’d done work on many newspaper comic strips, most recently a stint on Little Orphan Annie after its creator, Harold Gray’s death.  For some of that time he’d collaborated with Joe Orlando on Annie, and they’d grown friendly.  When his time on Annie ended, he shifted to mostly inking for DC, spending considerable time working in the office’s open bullpen area.  But that was a tough way to make a living, compared to the more lucrative newspaper strip field.

DC was going through a phase where the ‘mystery’ titles (scary stories far softer than the classic E.C. material) were the most successful,  and in a generally difficult market for comics on newsstands, were launching more titles in that genre and rebranding others to try to get the benefit of that magic (WEIRD WESTERN, WEIRD WAR, WEIRD WORLDS, WEIRD MYSTERY and even for a moment, WEIRD ADVENTURE COMICS).  Editor Murray Boltinoff’s titles were often the best-sellers, but in his 60s, he wasn’t anxious to take on additional assignments, so Joe ended up carrying a larger load.  To help Tex out, Joe and publisher Carmine Infantino decided to give him a shot at editing a couple, with the assumption that Joe would keep an eye on his work (and that as Joe’s assistant, I’d take care of the administrative side).  WEIRD MYSTERY would shift to Tex, and he’d launch a new anthology, TALES OF GHOST CASTLE.

Proximity giving me the advantage, I got the assignment to write the first issue of GHOST CASTLE, from intros through the three stories…everything but a Sergio Aragones page.  Scheduling on the art side would ultimately make that not quite work out, and one of my stories would run elsewhere with a David Michelinie/Marty Pasko tale filling the third slot.  For the host, I came up with the conceit of a librarian in the ghost castle, Joe sketched him out as a tall, gangly fellow, modelled after Tex hunched over his drawing board, and we tagged him Lucien. 

In the waxing and waning that DC often experienced in the ‘70s, GHOST CASTLE was gone after three issues, and Tex’s editorial career ended within a year.  Lucien vanished from the minds of all but the most trivial-minded for over a decade.  The mystery tide went out as well, as the newsstand channel of distribution faded in the ‘80s, and by the end of that decade most of those titles at DC or any other comics publisher were gone.

When Neil Gaiman began SANDMAN, he wanted to connect it to the larger DC universe of characters.  He didn’t have a reputation yet, the Vertigo brand hadn’t been born, and, well, new titles needed all the help they could get.  On the other hand, the company wasn’t willing to put its star characters on just any title spreading them thin.  DC had done that in the ‘60s (Batman guest-starring in JERRY LEWIS, for example), and it hadn’t been an effective long term strategy.  So Neil scooped up the hosts from the defunct mystery line, snuck in a hard-to-recognize JUSTICE LEAGUE villain, and of course connected the tale to the previous SANDMAN series going back to the dawn of DC.   Cain, Abel and Goldie showed up much as they had been, but Lucien got a significant promotion: from the librarian of a ghost castle to the librarian of the entire realm of the Dreaming.  I was delighted to see the old guy get a new lease on life.

And delighted again, now three decades later, to see him…er, now her…come to life with Vivienne Acheampong’s masterful performance as Morpheus’ most loyal servant.  And in a lavishly beautiful production whose budget for a single hour of programming probably exceeds the total that had been spent on DC’s one movie, two live action tv series and multiple live action serials that had been filmed by the time I wrote those brief words introducing the character.  What a strange journey it’s been…

I don’t think anyone likely to be reading this website isn’t going to check out the new SANDMAN series when it drops on Netflix this Friday, and based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think anyone will be disappointed.  I’ve known and enjoyed working with all three of the key creative folks: Neil through all the years of SANDMAN and his other DC work, David Goyer both from his comics and our conversations during BATMAN BEGINS and other adaptations, and Allan Heinberg from his time on the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES cartoon series.  And I’ve admired much of what they’ve done in all the media they work in.

Maybe a decade or so ago, I convinced Neil to do an evening for Columbia University, where I was ingratiating myself into teaching.  He was, as he always is, both generous and gracious about it, and did a splendid performance to the crowd at New York’s Symphony Space, including both a reading, discussion and q&a.  I don’t recall what prompted the moment, but I was up there with him, and perhaps we were talking about my then-recent book, 75 YEARS OF DC COMICS: THE ART OF MODERN MYTHMAKING.  I mentioned that I really don’t think the super heroes are truly mythology, notwithstanding the title that Taschen had attached to the book.  Mythology exists to explain the forces beyond our understanding, often the forces that terrified us (weather, seasons and other natural forces particularly for the pre-scientific societies, for example).  The super heroes are more like modern folk tales, a theory I’ve come to embrace even more as continuity has been discarded in favor of multiple versions, much like the way folk tales grow and shift in the telling, especially from one country to another.

SANDMAN, on the other hand, is built on a true, modern mythology.  Think about the Endless.  They represent forces that continue to mystify and terrify us, especially people in the core ages that fell in love with the series.  What twenty-something hasn’t wondered about their Destiny, been tortured by Desire for a new love, had a moment of Despair fearing for the Destruction of civilization, or tasted a bit of Delirium as they experimented in an age-appropriate way?  How can you not Dream of your future and all its possibilities, pleasant and terrifying at that age?  And it’s also the time of life when you’re likely to be confronted by Death taking a loved one or even a friend, even if you’ve avoided understanding mortality to that time.

Neil’s response, in his magical British tones, was simply, “I was just thinking of words that began with D.”

Pardon me, if I Disagree.

For the ancient history buffs, the Phantom Stranger launched as a title of his own in 1952, at a time when it was pretty rare for DC to debut a character in their own pages.  The original thought was to do a riff on Mark Twain’s the Mysterious Stranger, and if you look closely at that first issue you can see the lettering was originally done for the longer word and then corrected.  It was part of a mystery moment for DC: Sensation Comics had become Sensation Mystery, Star Spangled Comics demoted Robin from the cover feature in favor of Doctor 13, The Ghost Breaker, and House of Mystery (named after a popular radio program) had debuted.

I’ve seen those first stories (there were three in the issue, plus a very short anthology type tale) credited to Manley Wade Wellman, a prolific pulp writer who did a bit of comics work, and John Broome, one of editor Julie Schwartz’s favorites.  In any case, the art was provided by Carmine Infantino, maturing into his modern style as one of the industry’s leading talents, with inks by Sy Barry.   It set up the premise of a Stranger who would enter people’s stories, have an effect on the resolution, and then vanish.  And his comic followed that pattern, vanishing after 6 issues, barely enough time for sales reports on the first couple of issues.  While it had its charms, it was pretty tepid stuff compared to the E.C. horror titles of the period, and newsstands were very crowded.

The Stranger came back in 1968 in an issue of Showcase cobbled together with a new framework by Mike Friedrich and Bill Draut surrounding reprints of the Stranger and Dr. 13.  Without waiting for sales, he was launched into his own series three months later, keeping the same format.  The early issues bounced between the reprint format and some original tales, with editor Joe Orlando using some young writers like Friedrich, Gerry Conway and Len Wein, and stalwart Bob Kanigher, then making the transition from editor to staff writer after health challenges.  The art side varied even more, with longtime DC contributor Mike Sekowsky taking a turn, and the about to be star Neal Adams dropping in.  But by issue #14 magic happened.

Len Wein got the scripting assignment (his first ongoing series) at around the moment his first legendary Swamp Thing story appeared, and was teamed with Jim Aparo, just hitting his stride a few issues into settling into it as a regular gig.  The team collaborated for a baker’s dozen of tales (a two year run in those days of mostly bi-monthly comics), and made the title one of the most interesting DC was publishing at the time.  I loved it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t love the work of the next writer on the series, as longtime professional Arnold Drake stepped in, with the art now assigned to Gerry Talaoc, of the Redondo Studio in the Philippines (with interesting interruptions by Bill Draut and Mike Grell).  Arnold had written some wonderful comics in his life (most notably the Doom Patrol, on which he was the primary creator, but also on a wide range of stories from humor comics to horror, and the proto-graphic novel, It Rhymes With Dust.   Joe gave a couple of issues to new writer David Michelinie, but he wasn’t able to continue on the series (ppssibly because of picking up assignments on Swamp Thing and the Unknown Soldier, but I can’t recreate the timeline that neatly in my head).  Arnold was continuing, and I was agitating (as Joe’s assistant editor my agitating was from a front row seat).

Then I did something I now consider wrong.  I agitated enough to take over the assignment myself.  I still think my criticisms of Arnold’s work on the series were fair ones, but taking advantage of my proximity to replace him wasn’t fair.  I wasn’t the only assistant editor of the period at DC (or Marvel) who acted that way, with varying degrees of justification or self-aggrandizement.  Arnold was justifiably unhappy about it, and we had a long period of a difficult relationship as a result, though I’m enormously glad he ultimately forgave my youthful folly (I was 17) and we became friends before he passed.

Still, Phantom Stranger became my first regular assignment.  I got to do five issues, one as a rewrite of Arnold’s last script, then four of my own before the series was cancelled.  I think I went in the right direction (bringing back Len’s wonderful character Cassandra Craft, and pulling Deadman into the series when he was without a home), but I’ll leave it to others to decide if I actually did any better than Arnold did.

I would get to return to the Stranger a few times over the years: filling in on his series when it was a back-up in Saga of the Swamp Thing in the early ‘80s, using him in a Superman team-up in DC Comics Presents, and getting to be one of the several writers speculating on his origin in a lovely issue of Secret Origins.  My version was magnificently brough to life by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, but it was hard to compete with a contribution from Alan Moore and Joe Orlando.  And now, almost five decades after I first touched the cloaked conjuror, I got to do a short story of him for DC’s Halloween anthology for this year.  It’s particularly neat because it’ll come out almost simultaneously with a Phantom Stranger Omnibus that will include all the stories I’ve discussed, allowing you to make your own judgements.

One last note on inspiration.  I particularly turned to John Brunner’s Traveler In Black for my vision of the Stranger.  Brunner’s character was a being of a singular nature, who walked a primordial and magical world, slowly helping it turn from chaos and magic to order by granting wishes of its inhabitants, though rarely in the way they expected.  It’s a lovely little book, and well worth hunting down.

One thing that worries me about the increasing trend of virtual offices is the learning process.  In some fields, very specifically comics but I’m sure others as well, much of the learning is informal and osmotic.  There’s some formal or structured training, to be sure, but equally important (more important?) is what you learn by observation.

When I came onto the DC staff in the early 1970s, the company had a very small (30-35 people?) but exceptionally talented staff augmented by another handful of freelance editorial people who came into the office on their own schedules, some daily, some weekly, some rarely.

The size of the place was such that everyone was in contact with everyone else, formally or informally, and it was natural to observe others at work.  The full-time salaried editorial team was tiny: Julie Schwartz, Murray Boltinoff, Joe Orlando, one reprint/support editor, Nelson Bridwell, and one editorial assistant, Allan Asherman.  Coming in and out idiosyncratically were Joe Kubert, Denny O’Neil, Archie Goodwin and Joe Simon.  [If you’re counting, that’s six Hall of Famers—seven if count Carmine Infantino down the hall as President—which is why I sometimes have described this period of my life as the equivalent of being batboy for the Yankee’s Murderers’ Row.]

I worked directly for Joe, and later for Gerry Conway as well when he became one of the freelance editors, and learned enormous amounts of my craft from them.  Some of it in the brief instructional ‘lectures,’ some by doing tasks like rewrite or copy editing which they would review, and much by simply observing their interactions with writers and artists.  Broadly I’d characterize what I got from Joe as principally under the heading of tools to get the best work from writers and artists.  From Gerry I got deeper tools for my own writing and reviewing the writing of others.   [And not discounting that both of them played major roles in simply protecting my young self from own errors and teenage arrogance.]

But I also learned from the other people on the hallway.  Julie Schwartz’s organizational tools and disciplines made the editorial process smooth, ensuring regular work for valued contributors and punctual production of isssues barring accommodation to the rarest of talents or situations.   It wasn’t the specific tools [the equivalents of spreadsheets in modern terms] that I adopted as much as the attitudes and priorities.  

And I learned what not to do, as well.  Murray Boltinoff was an accomplished editor [his titles in any genre tended to sell better than other DC editors’ similar ones], and a decent man weighed down in those years by family challenges and his own frustrations with his career.  But watching him deal with writers and artists was both a time tunnel into DC’s past when editorial emotional abuse of talent was commonplace, and an object lesson in behaviors I never wanted to model.

There were other observational lessons: watching how some editors treated their assistants less generously than Joe and Gerry had been with me [and there’s no possibility that I would have had my long career at DC if they hadn’t gone above and beyond customary practice to carry me through a valley during those years, for which I’ll always be grateful]; watching how different editors interacted with production or the freelance craftspeople doing lettering and coloring; and learning about the processes of comics from the extraordinarily experienced and skilled Sol Harrison and Jack Adler.  Other small assignments from Carmine, Sol or VP-Business Manager Bernie Kashdan taught me things about copyright, scheduling, and dealing with Controller Arthur Gutowitz on inventory gave me insight into…well…the tricks editors used to game the system.  Denny began years of writing advice.  And freelancers coming in and out of the office taught lessons as well; Len Wein hovering over me proofing SWAMP THING together, for example.  I’m not confident that I’d have had the chance to learn any of those things in a virtual structure; much less watch artists working in the bullpen finishing up or correcting assignments, or gabbing with writers of my generation or predecessors back to legends like Alfie Bester.

Every moment has its own opportunities and challenges, and I’m sure the virtues of the emerging virtual systems will create their own.  But I feel very lucky in how I got to learn, and I hope it works out as well for this generation’s beginners.

It’s July 4^th weekend, a time when many fans of my generation remember the amazing time we had at the New York Comicons of the 1970s.  Everyone’s memories of great events is biased by the point they occurred in the individual’s life, so it’s pretty much useless to argue about when the “best” Comicons were.  But objectively, the conventions of those years had a few things going for them: our gatherings had grown large enough to have budgets that permitted flying in legendary guests (and so many of the legends were still with us), but were still small enough that the guests were totally approachable; original art was being returned to artists and so was available for sale (but inexpensive enough that you probably could have had every piece in the hall for the auction price of Frank and Lynn’s iconic DARK KNIGHT RETURNS cover); likewise the wealth of early issues being offered (unslabbed) by a roomful of dealers (okay, I didn’t think the $150 it would have taken to get a copy of ACTION #1 was wise—who says I’m a good businessman?); and publishers were beginning to support the shows without trying to turn them into ‘activations’ the size of a Vegas trade convention.

But most of all, I remember Phil Seuling on the 4^th.  He was as loud and explosive as a fireworks, inviting the world to his party and furious when anything threatened to make it less than memorable.  His vision of a comic convention lives on, now almost four decades after his premature passing: even within the largest shows events mimic what he dreamed up or polished. 

I knew Phil from when I was 11 or 12, and my Dad rented him space for a used bookstore venture he briefly tried in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.  One of my fondest childhood memories is of a summer day when I walked across the borough with friends, 10 miles of hitting used bookstores and places that randomly racked new paperbacks, ending at Phil’s.  Later on, I worked on the convention program books, helped him mail out ‘progress reports’ (think of an analog equivalent to Kickstarter communications with backers but being hand-coallated in a 90 degree living room with my Mom unwilling to open windows on a summer day), helped at his dealer’s tables at my first San Diego Con, got to know Bill and Annie Gaines racing through the woods of Canada with Phil driving like a maniac (a very skilled maniac, but still), worked briefly for him at the dawn of the direct sales system and had a challenging couple of years dealing with him as I took responsibility for the business side of DC in the years when his distribution company was facing increasing competition.  Oh, and I wrote his eulogy for DC’s Meanwhile page, probably the first time a fan was so ‘honored.’

Phil was full of enthusiasm and energy, bouncing through life, a big kid who was content not to completely grow up.  He loved comics, he loved creativity, and he loved the next idea, sometimes before he’d been able to make the last one work.  He quietly supported projects by others, buying up improbable and likely unsalable quantities of early zines (or a garage full of the AMAZING WORLD OF METROPOLIS tabloid).  He experimented, putting together everything from classic reprints to coloring books.  And when he focused on something, he almost always made it better.

If you saw him with Jonni Levas, in their good years, you might hear a booming voice singing of their love.   If you saw him with Gwen and Heather, you saw a father who was always ready to be a playmate.   And while I was too young to get any kind of read on his marriage to Carole before it ended, just seeing the pics that circulate of them in costume before the word cosplay was invented tells me they had their good times too.

I made so many friends at those early shows, and had so many moments that I cherish.  But when I think of the 4^th, the first person I think of is the guy who threw the best parties of my life.  And if you have a great time at a comicon this summer, stop for a second and think of him too.  He’d like that.

I’ve been teaching on an undergrad and graduate level at a number of colleges for the last dozen years or so, usually 3-4 classes per term.  I don’t teach required courses, or relatively conventional classes because I’m not the best person for them; traditional pedagogy isn’t something I ever studied, and my goal is to bring my unusual life experience to the students. 

This upcoming term I’ll only be at Pace University, but with a nice diverse workload: undergrad creative writing program Writing Comics & Graphic Novels, graduate M.S. in Publishing program the practice of Comics & Graphic Novels, and my first-ever course in their business school, New Ventures In Arts & Entertainment Management. 

I’ve always used guest speakers in my classes, and had some wonderful ones (Chris Claremont, Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, Laura Lee Gullidge and Miss Lasko-Gross were among the ones we’ve had at Columbia; Vivek Tiwary and Fabian Nicieza are reoccurring ones at Pace).  But what I learned from the plague years of teaching via Zoom, besides that I really prefer being in a physical classroom, is the ease of bringing in speakers from distant places when the school offers the right technology.  And Pace usually does.

So last year for Alternative Literature & Media at Pace  I was able to bring in a great range of folks: Cheryl & Wade Hudson, who founded Just Us Books (an early children’s book line featuring people of color), Lee Marrs (co-founder of WIMMEN’S COMIX, one of the few underground comix cartoonists to also contribute to DC, a computer animation pioneer), Isabel Yap (fan fictioneer turned sf writer(, and topping it off, Alison Bechdel (if I have to tell you who she is, not sure why you’re on this website).  Needless to say, I learned things from each of them that I didn’t know.  I was even able to get one of my former Columbia students who had done a wonderful paper on Fun Home to join in.

Speaking of learning, I seem to learn three categories of knowledge while I teach: first, ideas that I focus on as I try to codify what I already know to share with students; second, new slang (well, relatively new—I’m an old guy, after all) from my writing students; and third, the occasionally obvious thing that I overlooked or never considered.  An example of the third was this past term, in a discussion of the external and internal media forms and how comics treads that line in an interesting way, the point was raised that song in musical theatre is often used as an internal form to reveal emotion and thought.  Obvious, right?  I just never focused on that, despite having enjoyed musical theatre since Fiddler as an adolescent. 

Learning from students and the process, getting to share my experiences and others, and enjoying the vitality and energy of the young…overall, a very rewarding experience.  And I’ll admit to a certain satisfaction from being a college dropout, whose odd life has enabled him to have entre to this profession.  My colleagues used to occasionally point out that I was pedantic, and now I’m making constructive use of it.