In a sense, I'm happy for Paul Levitz. He can probably have a happier, more creative life when he's not in the position to occasionally have to play Bad Cop or deal with a thousand deal points and corporate concerns. He may also be able to move back towards a long-neglected love of writing, as well. But for the comic book business, it's a potential negative if what fills the void doesn't care as passionately as he always has about print media. It will be especially unfortunate if his successors-in-interest fail to build upon (or even more foolishly, reverse) the principles and momentum he helped establish with regard to how the company treats talent.
Let me get some Full Disclosure stuff out of the way here: I've known Paul for over 35 years. Back when he barely had one foot in the comic book business — and was scoffing at the notion of ever getting in with both — I helped him put out fanzines in his basement in Brooklyn. That's how far back we go. As he climbed the slipperiest of ladders at DC, we had our occasional differences but that was another time, another place…another industry, almost. We still have our intermittent disagreements but he is a superb practitioner of the belief that you can settle differences, even in the business arena, without mud-wrestling. You can even be mature enough to recognize that you and/or your company have erred and you can go back and do whatever is humanly possible to right past wrongs.
When I got into comics around 1970, the business was on shaky ground, both morally and financially. Sales were bad and not one single person was predicting a recovery. In a not-unrelated manner, there was also an ugly tendency to treat writers and artists (and to a lesser but palpable extent, staff personnel) as indentured servants who had to at all cost remain indentured. That was possible back when the core of the talent pool was still folks who'd grown up in or around the Depression and who still lived in constant terror of even short-term unemployment. That, and the fact that most of them knew no other way to make a living made it feasible to treat freelancers like cattle and to still have freelancers.
Today, if you handled artists that way, there'd be nobody around to draw Batman. That's because the new generation that bled into comics around then simply and wisely wouldn't put up with it. Some of us would endure a lot to turn our hobbies into our careers and to get to play with our childhood favorites…but we hadn't grown up in the thirties. More to the point, we'd seen what The System, as it was then configured, did to writers and artists whose work we loved, and were well aware of the Dead End in which so many of them were trapped. One reason I never made comics my entire life was that I saw how my friend/employer Jack Kirby was treated. I looked at his track record in terms of making money for publishers. It was one I could never hope to approach, let alone equal. Then I looked at how little he'd attained in terms of savings or job security and…well, the top of his profession, which was where Jack resided, didn't look all that desirable. Then.
I also heard him argue as to how the business had to change, if not for moral reasons than merely in order to survive. Almost without exception, his arguments were dismissed, in some cases as the ravings of a looney who simply did not understand the business he was in. But even those who nodded in concurrence felt helpless as he spoke of treating talent with respect and of respecting the work, and of giving writers and artists a chance to participate financially in their creations. On a more pragmatic level, he talked of artists having their original art returned and of matters like proper credits and health insurance. In '70, both DC and Marvel had recently experienced corporate takeovers and in light of them, Jack was surer than ever that better working conditions had to come…
…and come they did. Every last thing he advocated.
Kirby lived to see that day, even if most of the improvements came too late for him to profit directly from them. It was a testimony to his general classiness that he was not the kind of guy to say "I told you so." Since I am nowhere near as classy, I feel I can and should say it often on his behalf.
And the comic book industry is still here. Jack isn't but it is. It's had some rough times and there are still blemishes…but the fact that it didn't all go the way of pulp magazines in 1980 has much to do with its becoming more mature in how it has treated its creative talent, both past and present. A change in distribution methods was the biggest lifesaver but even it would not have worked if the pages were being generated under the old plantation mentality. DC and Marvel could not now interface with Time-Warner and — assuming the deal goes through — Disney if they had not evolved from hot dog joints into real businesses.
Many have taken credit for that evolution, including some who fought it until it became inevitable and a few who resisted even after that time. Among those who honestly do deserve great credit is Paul Levitz.
Just how much he deserves is not something I'm prepared to gauge in a weblog, nor can I start listing others who made the change occur, made it possible for so many to make decent livings in the field. But Paul's in for a big share. There's a reason that last year at San Diego, he became the first person in any sort of "executive" capacity to receive the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.
Even harder would be to assess how much of what he made happen was shrewd business strategy and how much was simple human decency. I suspect the answer is that at some point, Paul figured out those two values did not have to be mutually-exclusive. Even if that's all he realized, that puts him way ahead of some folks who've been in charge at companies I've observed or worked for.
I have dozens of stories of Paul being a gentleman in a position where some would fear being gentle. One anecdote I haven't the time or space to tell in detail didn't even involve DC. It involved another company where there was a dispute over ethics and policy versus immediate monetary considerations. It was finally settled with the parties involved asking, "What would Levitz do?" Because even though they were competitors — or perhaps because they were competitors — they recognized that Paul had demonstrated that pursuing the right approach from a moral standpoint will almost always lead you to the proper business decision.
We're entering a new era in how a comic book company will fit into a larger corporation and into a marketplace where interest in print media of almost any kind is plunging. A lot of the old jobs and the folks who fill them are subject to realignment. Paul had an astounding run at DC, enduring more than twice as long as anyone would ever have imagined. One of the reasons they pay corporate execs so much is that most of the jobs don't last anywhere near that length and breadth of time.
He still has a role at DC and that company will be fortunate to have him contributing for some time to come. And when he's finally done with it, whenever that is, he can look back with pride. He made the comic book business a much more decent place to live in.
