Part one ♦ part two ♦ part three

NATHAN WILSON: During the 1980s there are a lot of different things going on for DC. And, one of the things I liked about that chapter is that there is simply so much going on…

PAUL LEVITZ: It was an amazing time in the history of the company.

WILSON: Exactly. Not just with characters, but with marketing, with characters, from a television medium, and everything. You mention there were all these ideas to modernize the character of Superman but there were limitations on what could be done. Can you tell me more about what these limits were and why they would occur?

LEVITZ: It’s always a combination of things when you’re managing a character, a property, however you want to define it, that has that level of commercial success in so many different media. You want to make it fresh and relevant to the time that it’s in, but you also want to preserve what you perceive to be the essence of the character so that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I can’t say that DC has always made the right decisions over the years or that any other company has either, but DC at least has, through some combination of good luck and good judgment, managed to persevere with it and that’s always been part of the process.

WILSON: OK, but in looking back at the John Byrne title then, what are his greatest contributions in your opinion to modernizing the character, to making Superman, as you say, “relevant to the time?”

LEVITZ: I haven’t looked back to reread that story in a bunch of years, so I’m not sure I can answer it as a reader. He clearly succeeded in getting a bunch of people to try it fresh who had given up on Superman. He raised the sales of the comics many times over. It may be the combination of the visual look that was distinctive to John’s work to the story bits he played around with. But he invited in a new group to play.

WILSON: During this period again, you also discuss weekly comics and the often lackluster attempts at this format. Why is the format so hit-and-miss, and what do you believe points to the success then of books such as 52, Wednesday Comics or, maybe even, Brightest Day?

LEVITZ: The fundamental problem of a weekly comic book is that it’s too much material for particularly one artist to create. You might be able to have a writer who can create a comic book every week, though not many of us work at that pace and I’m not sure how long that would be sustainable. [Laughs.] But in theory it’s workable. Part of what readers appreciate in comics is that they generally favor in recent decades stories that are around 25 pages long. That’s the most common, happy length for a comic book and no artist can produce that every week. Readers do like a consistency in things. The best successes in comics over the years have been by talent who have stayed on a project for a sustained period of time. To find the right writer and right artist who are in tune with where the marketplace is at the given moment and have the writer work at an absolute top limit of known writing speed and have the artist work at three or four times the fastest of what a current artist works defies all laws of physics. The successes that were finally achieved were when some central editorial team put together a team that just worked. Whether that was the Superman comics when they were being written and created in a pseudo-weekly fashion or 52 when they developed a team approach that was a good synthesis and successful. But it’s not a common model for building comics today, so it’s been very challenging to have that happen. It’s worked a few times in recent years. I think that Dan DiDio personally deserves a lot of credit for building those models, I think a lot of that comes from his experience in the television industry where he brought over some of the working models from there. But it’s like asking why aren’t there people who can run a one-minute mile?

WILSON: Even with four people writing 52 and having read the author notes in the collected trades, those seem to be intensive writing experiments and sessions going back and forth.

LEVITZ: And you are working at a velocity that simply isn’t the norm in this business. In the same fashion that there are sound economic reasons why television shows don’t generally do 52 new episodes a year. It would also be really hard to produce 52 new episodes of an hour-long drama. You probably couldn’t do it. The sheer physicality wouldn’t be possible. You might be able to do it with a half-hour situation comedy, but it would be a very impressive thing.

WILSON: This is also the period where Vertigo gets its start and you spend time in the book discussing the various authors and editors who initiated the project. You focus on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and its ability to cross gender in audiences. Vertigo seems to have a very solid handle on this and I’m curious if it’s just a combination of the writers involved at Vertigo because you see a lot of back and forth between writers who write for Vertigo and those who write for DC or Marvel. What do you think explains why Vertigo has the ability to do this while DC proper or one of the other big publishers doesn’t have this power to cross genders?

LEVITZ: Which ability?

WILSON: The ability to cross genders because if you talk with female readers, there appears to be a greater attention paid to Vertigo titles than those published in the mainstream DC realm.

LEVITZ: I’m not sure that young women are as interested in reading about superheroes. The fundamental dynamic of the superhero story has historically been more appealing to boys than to girls. There are any number of very successful superhero comics over the years that have had a better gender balance than others, but the genre as a whole has been a more male genre. Vertigo doesn’t generally work in that genre and that’s a starting point. You’ve had a number of really talented female editors working within the Vertigo mix and help screen the material and shape the material, starting with Karen herself obviously. I would posit that she is a very positive force in that process. Vertigo has probably averaged around 50-percent female editorial staff for most of its existence while DCU has probably never been more than five or 10 percent, and I don’t know the Marvel staff members well enough to comment. That’s probably a piece of it also.

WILSON: Has there ever been a concern within DCU then, and obviously they’re not going to abandon the superhero genre, but since it’s been let go during the 1950s, was it ever a thought to incorporate more of the diversity expressed through Vertigo into the DCU itself to make superheroes more approachable to…

LEVITZ: I don’t think they’re equally approachable. I think the whole myth of superheroes is that they simply aren’t appealing to women as they are to men. I’d like to think I had a pretty good track record on that myself as a writer, as the Legion historically had a pretty good number of female readers, Chris Claremont on his years on the X-Men had a tremendous number of female readers, and there may be any number of other superhero titles that had a fair balance. But overall it would surprise me at any point if you started to have a title that was both a traditional superhero and a majority female audience.

WILSON: What about then for female superheroes, the limited number of course, but those like Supergirl, Wonder Woman, etc. I mean even from your own book, Wonder Woman has a great appeal to women, you have the Steinem story of Ms. Magazine, the Lynda Carter show in the 1970s for younger women…

LEVITZ: I don’t think the love for the character necessarily means that they love the comic expression of them. Or maybe they do and with the right writer at the right moment, that can happen and have a larger audience. Certainly any version of that has been tried by the company at some point or another in time. You’ve got the whole period around 1972 when Dorothy Woolfolk comes back into the company and she’s editing both the romance comics and the girl superheroes. She’s given Wonder Woman, Lois Lane, and Supergirl on the theory that we can sell more of those to girls with a woman driving the bus. It’s not clear that it particularly worked, and the company abandoned the experiment fairly quickly.

WILSON: In this connection then between comics and the larger culture, you talk about the Death of Superman event and you call it an idea not explored since “comics place in the culture changed.” What change are you referring to here?

LEVITZ: The fact that comic books begin to be a part of the public discussion in a different fashion. When Jerry Siegel wrote a death-of-Superman story in the early 1960s there was no newspaper or magazine that would consider doing a story on the content of a comic book story. It wasn’t a meaningful news item anywhere. By the time the ’90s story took place, you had any number of newspapers and magazines and television that were commenting from time to time on the medium of comic books as they would on things in other media.

WILSON: What do you see as the catalyst for this change in media attention?

LEVITZ: It’s a combination of things. You had an entire generation of people who had grown up reading comics that were written to a more intelligent audience either the stuff Stan dealt with and led the charge on at Marvel or the stuff Julius had led the charge on at DC. The kids who grew up reading that material, many of them had become journalists by that time and were wondering around newspaper or magazine offices saying, “Can I write an article on comics?” An awful lot of the early journalism done about comics was done by people who were passionate about comics and were convincing their editors to let them do it. I think that was probably the leading edge of the change.

Part one ♦ part two ♦ part three

NATHAN WILSON: In organizing your book, how did you decide what would go in the main body text versus the chronology because there are some really nice little gems in that chronology that deserve further exploration such as Jimmy Olsen in the Beatles’ film Help! or the recurring role President Kennedy had in the Superman books?

PAUL LEVITZ: Some of it again is just the limitations of physical space. The time lines were done last and part of what we did was keep this tickler list of everything that deserves at least a nod. We didn’t either end up having room in the main prose or in the main sections of illustrations, great, let’s squeeze it into the time lines. To some extent, when you’re shaping the time lines, when you have a physical structure like that, you get to the “There’s not enough vitally important stuff in 1964 at DC; what are three other anecdotes you can put in that would make somebody smile?”

WILSON: There’s something there though, especially about Kennedy’s impact on society and culture at the time, the youth culture movement of the period. It’s striking that he’s also in Superman, to see what the message was to children and how he was portrayed.

LEVITZ: It’s very different. From a historical point of view, it’s a turning point for the culture because he’s portrayed extraordinarily differently than you can imagine a president being portrayed today in most comics.

WILSON: It seems that there is so much going on for DC during the Silver Age against the larger cultural backdrop of the 1960s and you talk about the generational differences between writers and editors. In trying to get more into the idea of context, how would you contextualize what DC did during this period, alongside this generational conflict, as you get books like Doom Patrol, which is a way-out-there type of book alongside the more status quo books DC published?

LEVITZ: You have a certain number of writers and artists who either are more in touch with youth culture than their chronological ages or who believe that they are. If you look at the 1960s, Stan Lee over at Marvel is chronologically older than his writing is. One of the reasons Marvel succeeds as much as it does at that time is that Stan’s personal style is very much in tune with that moment. If you had told the average reader how old the writer was, they wouldn’t have believed you. They thought it was a kid writing to them. I think you have a lot of books at DC in that period of the early 1960s where you had some wonderfully talented writers who weren’t in touch with kid culture and you had a handful of writers, such as Doom Patrol‘s Arnold Drake, who were very fascinated by the youth culture and were trying to write to it, but perhaps not as successfully as Stan did. Then you get a new wave of guys in who are much, much younger and they may not be as good as writers, they certainly may not be any better in any absolute sense, but they connect to youth culture more naturally because they are a part of it.

WILSON: If we think of this a conflict then between an old and new guard, was DC pretty open to this new exploration sought by younger writers?

LEVITZ: It’s not a monolith on either side.

WILSON: Well, you get this image from various comics-studies books that Marvel was about the youth because of their appeal to the quote-unquote “radical” youth movements of the period, but DC was the conservative, consensus-driven publisher. Did the majority at DC side more with the older or newer guard, or was it that there was freedom to explore both?

LEVITZ: It depends on what year you’re talking about and which DC office. You have a bunch of guys in the old guard who are trying to do more of what they perceive as hipper stuff. Whether that’s Drake on Doom Patrol or writing Bob Hope with a character called “Super Hip,” or Bob Haney on Teen Titans, those two guys would be the ones who I believe were the most consciously trying to change their vocabulary to match their perception of youth culture. You had other guys who said, “This is the way we’ve been doing it for 30 years. We’re right; don’t worry about Marvel.” Then you have changes in the editorial and writing roles, and the game changes yet again.

WILSON: In getting into this late 1960s era then, you mention briefly Betty Friedan and the creation of N.O.W., the changes in the larger society that are transpiring, but the connections to the actual books are tenuous at best. I’ve read some studies that say comics have never known how to approach women and women’s movements at the time, simply falling back on parody and failing to match what is going on in society. First, were there any women writers at DC in the 1960s?

LEVITZ: You know, I don’t know on the romance books because that stuff has been so inadequately researched. There certainly were no prominent women writers working in the place by the late 1960s when credits became more common. There was a small number of women who had certain assignments, but not on any of the major projects of that period.

WILSON: Well, on pages 402-03 of your book, you show Lois Lane’s new attitude with Superman, Supergirl and Wonder Woman turning their backs on being superheroes to embrace lives of fashion and romance, and Wonder Woman becoming a mother figure in the Justice League. Looking at them today, through a contemporary lens, are these examples of what you call the generational conflict then?

LEVITZ: If your question is how I see the characters today, we have a great advantage that we have many wonderful women writing and drawing comics, and editing comics, and that affects the whole culture. We’re in a different stage of society.

WILSON: Let me try to clarify it. Do you see these examples as reflective of what was going on in society at that time or simply parody?

LEVITZ: These were not historical documents. Whether it’s a comic, television show or motion picture, when they mirror society, depending on what the talent and the publishing house are trying to do, they’re funhouse mirrors. They can be showing us an idealization of what the people think is going on or they can show a corruption of it. It’s not intended to be journalism. It’s not intended to be: “This is what the role of a woman today is.” You turn on a television program this evening, randomly, you’ll find most of the women characters doing things related to some of how women live today, but also not. It’s fantasy.

WILSON: If you look across the board though in media…

LEVITZ: The faster the rate of change going on in society, the more likely you’re going to have significant distortions in fiction because you don’t have a base line. If you go back 150 years to village life, you’re the historian, you know that things remained fairly constant over a three- or four-generation period. Take an example from history, the famous Washington’s book of manners. A gentleman should do this and shouldn’t do that. He could reflect an ethos that was likely to be true throughout his entire lifetime: “I learned this as a child, my adopted step-children were taught this way, and they should teach their children this way.” You can’t pick up a 1950s Emily Post book and say that’s how we live now. And you certainly wouldn’t expect it to be how your children would live. Fiction is, of course, going to have a greater degree of distortion during a time of change like that.

WILSON: It’s interesting to see how this stuff enters the comics, but also how it’s presented because it usually is very bizarre, very distorted, or oftentimes, reflective of consensus opinions about an issue such as the E.R.A. debates and women’s liberation movements in the 1970s. You mention the romance comics and there seem to be a lot of DC romance comics in the 1960s. Who were the main audiences for these books?

LEVITZ: The company never did market research in those years that I’m aware of. My impression of it was that you were selling them to girls between the ages of 8 and 12 years old.

WILSON: It goes to back to your analogy of the factory model with “x” number of books…

LEVITZ: Yes, there was a tremendous amount of romance comics from DC and the competition in those years. Your outward evidence of success in a capitalist society is that people rarely continue doing things that don’t produce a profit ultimately and those books survived as a meaningful part of the comic-book industry for close to 30 years.

WILSON: You mention briefly the Public Service Advertisements in DC books from the 1940s through the 1960s when you discuss DC’s evolving social responsibility. Do you know who was responsible for these? Was it the writers, editorial?

LEVITZ: I think Jack Schiff wrote the majority of them in the 1960s. He was very proud of those.

WILSON: From what you know of Schiff, were those geared more toward the parents, the children, or general audiences because…

LEVITZ: I think you assume they were for the kids.

WILSON: Do you believe this gives credence then or at least fuel to those that contend that Marvel was “rebellious” during the 1960s versus the largely conservative DC?

LEVITZ: I think there’s a lot of evidence to support that from the period of 1961 to 1973 you can make a case that Marvel is more anti-establishment than DC on many levels.

Part one ♦ part two ♦ part three

Paul Levitz has a perspective on the comic’s industry that few can share or fully appreciate due in large part to his lengthy tenure as an editor, writer and executive with DC Comics. Beginning with DC in 1973 as an assistant editor after working on his own fan magazine The Comic Reader, Levitz worked his way up to becoming a writer on The Legion of Super-Heroes by the mid-to-late ’70s. This was a cherished position Levitz held throughout most of his career as he transitioned into more administrative roles in 1980. From 2002 through 2010, Levitz served as DC’s President and Publisher.

Recently, Levitz has returned to writing comics, and he is now back on the titles most readers associate with him: Adventure Comics and Legion of Super-Heroes. In addition to his monthly writing duties, Levitz has also published his first nonfiction tome, 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking, with Taschen Press in November 2010. I had the opportunity to talk with Levitz about his life with DC and how this shaped his historical examination of the company.

NATHAN WILSON: Obviously, the release of your book is tied to DC’s anniversary, but can you tell me about the origin and impetus for this project?

PAUL LEVITZ: The book was conceived as part of the 75th anniversary celebration and the DC guys went out and talked with a number of different publishers about the possibility of doing it. Ultimately, they worked it out with Taschen. At that point, I was asked if I’d be interested in writing it, but I was still doing the day job, so it wasn’t very practical. By the time I was moving away from the desk job, they still hadn’t found a writer. All of the graphic research had been largely finished, so they said “you have time for it now, don’t you?” I said, “Sure, love to do it.”

WILSON: How long then did it take you to put all of this together, when did you begin?

LEVITZ: Well, the art directors have probably been working on it for two or two-and-a-half years. My portion of it took about a year.

WILSON: What kind of research was involved for you in reconstructing DC’s history into a viable narrative?

LEVITZ: Part of it was to build the chronology. The first question in a project like this, always, is you can’t do everything, so what are you going to do? I had three-quarters of a word for each issue DC had published, never mind every animated program and movie and everything else, so obviously I wasn’t going to be able to cover subject matter comprehensively in depth. I started out with the idea that the art can tell the art side of the story, so let’s concentrate on the context and the process. I went back and dug through my own files, through previously published things and found stuff like a great article Lloyd Jacquet had done maybe 50 years ago looking back at the beginning of DC that had been reprinted in an old issue of Comic Book Marketplace. Discovered that the first issue by DC was printed at the old Brooklyn Eagle, I had forgotten that, so let’s put that in. From there it was a process of deciding chronologically what are the key things you have to talk about to have the context make sense.

WILSON: In looking back at the book not just as a history of DC, but also as a history of the comic-publishing industry, how do you see your book alongside others by such authors as Les Daniels and Jim Steranko? What distinguishes your book from other histories in terms of scope, outlook and contribution in your opinion?

LEVITZ: Looking at the prose separately from the rest of the book for a moment, I think part of what it brought to bear was the perspective of someone who was an insider for half of those years and knew most of the people from the beginning. There’s only three or four of the pivotal people in DC’s history who weren’t still around when I came into the game. I at least had an ability, hopefully, to have my work reflect the personalities of the individuals and the connections between them in a way that would be very hard for Les to do, and Les is a brilliant historian of the material. I certainly leaned on his books for certain things, particular a lot of the work he did in the Wonder Woman book was useful to me. But, he didn’t have 50 or 100 conversations with Shelly Mayer over the years. He didn’t know Julie Schwartz for 30 years of his life as a friend. Hopefully, all of those experiences color it in a way that makes it more interesting or more useful or just different.

WILSON: I think that does come through in parts and gives a more personal aspect and experience to the book.

LEVITZ: Thank you. I was trying. Again, I had very limited space, so how do you contextualize the contributions of someone like Julie, who did so much. Even for a moment or two, talking about his relationship with his wife, how he managed his life, how he managed his office. Hopefully those help conjure a certain amount of the picture. The longer version when I do a longer book. [Laughter.]

WILSON: Is that something you would actually want to do after this 700-page work?

LEVITZ: There’s a lot of stories to tell, so who knows how that will work itself out over life.

WILSON: Was it difficult for you writing something nonfiction when the majority of your experience has been in the fiction realm of comics?

LEVITZ: One of the things I argue in teaching writing, which I’m doing now in this new stage in my life, is that fundamentally the skill sets (whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or marketing communications) are really just reflections of each other. I try to explain to the class the five questions of journalism, the who, what, where, when and how/why are just as relevant in writing fiction as they are in writing nonfiction. If you can answer those about your character, you can build a viable character. If you’re writing a marketing puff piece for your corporation and you’re trying to build an identity for the management team or whatever the case may be, or the culture of the corporation, you’re answering those same sets of questions in many ways. It definitely was a different way to work, a different set of research materials, of reference materials, different speech limits, it’s the longest piece of prose I’ve ever written by far, so I was using a somewhat different set of muscles, but they’re related muscles I think.

WILSON: Since the book is through Taschen, who do they see as the primary market and audience for the book? Will it be geared toward the Direct Market or more toward the chain bookstore outlets? Comic-book fans will obviously be a big part of any audience, but who is the most successful audience in your opinion?

LEVITZ: The people who have come up to me who have ordered it in advance include an awful lot of scholars in the field and people who are interested in related parts of the field. I was at Ohio State University for their tri-annual comics and cartoon-art festival which is very heavily weighted to the newspaper-strip world. Any number of people who you or I might not naturally number as comic-book people, but people who are interested in comics as they are related to the whole field of cartooning, talked with me about their excitement about the book. I was just over at LUCCA in Italy, at the festival there, and they had copies already since the book was printed in Italy. I was signing a bunch of them for people It was fascinating to see how many people there were people who were interested in making the investment.