For the second time this month, the comics landscape has been rocked, with today’s announcement that DC president and publisher Paul Levitz would be stepping down after seven years in the driver’s seat of the company. But Levitz’s story started far before 2002 — this is a guy who’s been a heavy-hitter in comics for much of his adult life. And what better way to commemorate his career than to Dial H — for History!

Paul Levitz was one of the first in the industry to get his start through the winding roads of fandom. Levitz, along with writer Paul Kupperberg, assumed editorship of the fan-zine The Comic Reader. While 3,500 readers wasn’t huge back in the early 1970s, it was enough to gain some necessary connections to the business — which soon paid off in a big way, as he became a freelancer for DC at the end of 1972. Of course, it wasn’t the most glamorous job in the world — he was working the letters page for Joe Orlando — but he worked his way up the ladder, even creating DC’s own in-house fan-zine, Amazing World of DC Comics. By his 20th birthday, Levitz had become the editor of Adventure Comics, the home of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Yet Levitz didn’t only toil as a young behind-the-scenes enthusiast — he soon became a writer in his own right. He “graduated” to super-hero stories after giving a check to Bill Finger for two scripts, when the Batman co-creator only wrote one. The only problem? Finger died before he could write the script he owed, leaving Levitz holding the bag. He would parlay that cred to eventually create the Earth-2 Huntress, take over the Justice Society in All-Star Comics, as well as the Legion of Super-Heroes. It was Levitz’s run on the Legion that was probably his most famous work, including the Great Darkness Saga, when the Legion was pitted against Darkseid, who had the powers of Mordru, the Time Trapper, and the enslaved population of Daxam at his command.

Of course, Levitz’s position within the company allowed him to bring some enormous names into the industry through the mid-1980s, in conjunction with Jenette Kahn and Dick Giordano. People such as Alan Moore, John Byrne, Marv Wolfman, George Perez, all made their big DC splashes in part because of Levitz, creating revitalizations of the medium such as Watchmen and the post-Crisis Superman. Indeed, Levitz also decided upon Dan DiDio as the creative ringmaster behind DC’s main lineup, resulting in linewide crossovers ranging from Infinite Crisis to this year’s Blackest Night.

But what about Levitz’s legacy on the industry, past that? I remember briefly meeting Levitz in the summer of 2008, and asking him what his proudest moment in the industry was: he told me that it was helping work out with then-publisher Jenette Kahn what would become the standards of compensation for creators — this includes royalties for freelancers, reprint payments, art returns (which artists generally sell for additional funding), as well as having creator credits on the covers of books. It was an act of good faith that has kept names like Len Wein happy, as seen in this interview:

As I said, the difference between the two companies; DC and Marvel, is I see money off of all of my characters at DC in any incarnation. If they do paperback books, if they do movies… I also created Lucius Fox, the character Morgan Freeman plays in the current run of Batman films, and I do absurdly well off of him being in those films, financially. Because Paul Levitz made sure I signed creator equity contracts whenever I create a character. Even on something potentially so unimportant…as I said to Paul when I argued with him about signing a Lucius contract, “It’s a middle-aged guy in a suit.” He said, “Sign a contract. You never know.” He was right.

Levitz’s touch has extended past the mainstream DCU, as well — Levitz also acted as a mentor for then-assistant editor Karen Berger, who would go on to help start the British Invasion of comics, with writers from the U.K. such as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Peter Milligan being recruited for mature titles such as Sandman, Doom Patrol, and Hellblazer. Berger’s biggest hit, however, was the creation of Vertigo, sort of the art-house division of DC Comics. It’s a gamble that Levitz has been particularly positive about, in terms of what it adds to comics as a whole: “I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built in Vertigo,” Levitz told Newsarama in 2007. “It’s a larger comics publisher than probably anybody but DC and Marvel, if it were measured on its own…maybe Dark Horse, dependent on the year.”

Now the interesting news of today is the fact that Levitz will be working as a contributing editor as well as a writer. He last stepped into the writer’s seat was concluding the JSA series, before Geoff Johns relaunched the book post-Infinite Crisis. What will he do next? According to a statement today by Dan DiDio, he’s returning home to Adventure Comics, following Geoff Johns’ departure after Issue #6. What say you, Rama readers? Sound off!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Dial H for History, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.