SDCC FLOOR VIEWS: PAUL LEVITZ

[MattBrady]

by Matt Brady

If you didn’t know who he was, or what he looked like (and face it, not many people at the San Diego Comic-Con do), it would be easy to pass right by Paul Levitz in the DC Comics booth. Dressed casually, Levitz easily blends in to his element – he’s a glasses-wearing middle-aged fan among a sea of glasses-wearing middle aged fans. Thing is, this glasses-wearing middle aged fan usually is one of the first to show up at the booth, and often one of the last to leave. Such is the territory with being the President and Publisher of DC Comics.

Levitz wears his fan hat so well at San Diego because it’s become something of a second home for him. He’ll more than likely blanch when he reads this, but with his (low end) estimate of attending Comic-Con for thirty years, he’s spent somewhere between three to four months of his life at the con.

With the DC booth humming in the background, we spoke with Levitz in the booth’s meeting room to get his views on the convention, its growth, and DC’s role in the show.

Newsarama: Starting with the broadest view, what’s your impression of this year’s convention, both from the fan and President/Publisher standpoint? I’m guessing that the fan in your doesn’t get much time to walk around…

Paul Levitz: Yeah – the fan in me is still confused at the idea that there could possibly be this many people on the entire planet that want to be at a comic convention. The first convention I went to in New York, we hit a record of 3,000 people, and we couldn’t imagine how there could possibly be anybody more than that who would ever want to go to a comic convention. So I guess I’ve been confused ever since.

As a fan, you’re right – I do get relatively little time to enjoy myself. There’s so much here, that I think even a fan who’s here with no day job to deal with couldn’t pack it all in.

NRAMA: Speaking of the head of DC Comics – what’s the importance of this specific convention, and how has that changed as it’s gotten bigger in the last five or so years?

PL: In the most general sense, it’s a barometer. To me personally, the most important moment is always opening. The doors go open, the tide comes in, and you can palpably feel whether or not you’re doing the right things. In the years when we’re doing our job right, the tide flows right into our booth and you can watch which imprints, artists, writers, editors it flows to. When it’s working, we’re full to capacity in five minutes flat. If we’re not doing the right things, the booth is like Moses – the tide parts and flows around us, with only a trickle making it in, but the rest is off somewhere else. Follow them, and you get a pretty good idea of who’s doing their job better than you are.

That to me is the priceless moment of the convention every year.

NRAMA: And this year?

PL: We’ve got a pretty full booth, and some pretty good energy in there. And when we have that, like I said, it’s a matter of watching people interact, see who they congregate around at signings, what they look at. And for me, it’s largely the same – I’m here to talk to fans, to talk to creators who I don’t get to see that often during the year, and retailers. I have such a varied schedule during the convention – I touch pretty much every side of our business, and that’s what I’m asking – “How are we doing? Are we doing right by you?” If a retailer tells me that we’re doing well by him and getting him the right stuff, then that’s terrific. I’ve had conversations this convention on things as diverse as ways to maybe reshape the Archives program in a world where there’s so much great archive material available, to conversations about stories and art and what the next step should be for all of those things within the different imprints, hooking people up with different editors for different kinds of projects, and then a thousand more business-y conversations with everybody from distributors to retailers to the printers – all just trying to figure out what’s next.

NRAMA: In terms of the business side of things, is San Diego a place where seeds are planted, or where you’re looking to harvest the final deals, and sign things?

PL: They brought down about six contracts for me to knock off on Saturday, including the one for the Heroes deal, which we announced – we were literally dotting i’s and crossing t’s literally past the last minute of the announcement. We had a verbal/handshake deal, but it’s nice to get a signed piece of paper. On occasion, we’ve done some ceremonial signings of contracts on panels when the timing has worked out that way over the years.

More often, I think, we see a combination of two things. The most important is that even in this age of instant technology, human relationships are extraordinarily important, and human relationships work better face to face. You need to touch each other periodically, and remember that you’re comfortable working together, you’re working for the same things, to pick up the nuance in the relationship, and to be able to roll up your sleeves and try to solve a problem together. That’s much easier to do when you’re in a room together.

Dan [DiDio] had a writer’s meeting going in to San Diego, and we met with the Sony Online guys to show off what they’re doing with the Massively Multiplayer Online Game to the writers to bring some of them in for involvement. Despite them even being in the same room, there was an enormous language gap because the language of that kind of gaming, and the language of comic book writing, and story writing in general, isn’t identical. It was a point where I got in there, and worked up a sample of what I thought the Sony folks were asking our writers to do. There were some tweaks needed after that, but being there, with them, it concretized it in a way that, of you were going back and forth by e-mail or even video conference, we would’ve taken weeks, and probably never had had the issue as cleanly resolved. I think that’s the great advantage of being in the same place.

One of the enormous powers of this industry to get where we’re going, to hold off and survive in the tough times we’ve been through, and build into the triumphs that are ahead is the amount that the people here are working towards the same goals. There is this subtle consensus that exists in the world of fandom of the boundaries of good and bad and of what we would all like to see happen in the world. Not agreement about the details, certainly, or equal interest in all the opportunities, but it’s that same thing as the fan consensus that you’re able to, say, watch a trailer, and you come away confident – based on your view of it – that people who share your love of certain kinds of fiction, are going to love that trailer too. You’re not as confident, generally, when you see a movie out of genre, out of our “world” that you can predict whether or not it will be great for someone who you know only a little bit about. Within the “tribe” there’s a great predictive ability.

A lot of that consensus is forged in places like this, because you have an opportunity to talk to each other, you can argue out the subtleties of things. You have the time, face to face, to say, “The flamethrower bit in the Iron Man footage was a cool scene,” and you see the look on somebody else’s face as their eyes light up as you describe it. As you have those conversations and share those sensibilities and discussions, we as a community get stronger and it’s easier to reach to the next thing.

When I sit in a room with 4,000 there to watch Superman Doomsday, and I see the excitement they have about it, my opinion of the work changes. If it can raise that kind of passion in those people, then something that I may have had a concern about that doesn’t both them…I learn that I’ve got the meter set wrong. If I hear them wince about something that I love, I learn than that meter’s set wrong, but in the other way. That’s important to feel, and it’s important to me, to keep myself in touch with the community that I’m a apart of and that I have an opportunity to help affect the work I do.

NRAMA: Speaking of the “tribe” as you put it – as someone who’s come to San Diego for what…thirty years now?

PL: Oh, over thirty something. I think the first one I came to might have been in ’74, when I was working at Phil Seuling’s tables….

NRAMA: So you’ve seen the face of San Diego change from a comics-centric one to to current multi-media version. Do you think it’s still doing as much for comics as it was in its early days in terms of outreach and almost “evangelical” work, or are we reaching a point where the core message of Comic-Con is somewhat…confused at best?

PL: San Diego Comic-Con was always about multiple media. It was enormously involved with the animation community in the early years – this was the place where you got to meet Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and June Foray. You got to see animation art – for most of us – for the first time, and really go behind the curtain of it all. It always had a dimension of film and television people as well, partially because of the California locale.

The scale has changed. The amount of money/marketing/business has changed. But I think the people who are coming here still share the fundamentally the same sensibility.

I think what’s neat about what’s going on, not just with this convention, but the change that’s happening with comics is that as the medium is broadening, the good stuff’s still winning. You see Allison Bechtel get the accolades for Fun Home, which is something very different than what could or would have been done a while ago. American Born Chinese as well – that really speaks to eh flavor of comics that really didn’t have a lot of precedent in America five years or seven years back – it’s not derived from the underground or the mainstream, and it’s not a clean son of Spiegelman memoir either. There’s a rich fantasy element woven into it.

So the things that are winning are really beautifully executed creative works with voices. It’s nuts – companies come down here and throw half a million dollars of marketing at a movie that’s coming, and if the movie sucks it really doesn’t make any difference at all. If you come down here and throw a ton of money at something that’s going to be a great movie by the terms of this community, you get an early boost. Maybe that affects how you will ultimately succeed with the film, but it hasn’t turned into a marketplace for toothpaste. It’s turned into a marketplace for creativity across a broader number of media – the kind of creativity we love. Yeah, there are some barkers standing up hollering, but to some extent, we’ve always had those. At one point they were selling a new line of comics they were launching because they were able to talk someone into putting a couple million dollars into it, or their own piece of work that they believed in in excess of the reality of what the work was. Now, it’s more often some marketing outfit thinking they can sell us something that we may or may not care about.

The people still come here for this stuff. As long as we have that, I think the fundamental virtues of the convention stay the same.

NRAMA: To wrap things up, overall, what’s the “message” that DC is looking to get out, not just at San Diego, but at these types of “tribal gatherings” in general?

PL: I think if you walk the arc of our booth, the odds of your finding something that creatively appeals to you is vastly better than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There’s a MINX in one corner, a CMX in another, there’s a Vertigo, now full blown and using wheelbarrows to bring home its awards; there’s Wildstorm doing a Heroes book and a Worlds of Warcraft book, both of which appeal to large, but yet related audiences. There are kids titles, original graphic novels, something like Cairo, which explores a different vision of everything from human relationships to magic as viewed through a more Arabic/Islamic/historical slant. There’s a Zuda thing going on in a corner and no on can quite figure out what the hell it is – in a good way. And of course, there’s the DC Universe line.

I used the argument years ago that I felt that the great success of Marvel – which is a terrific company over the long arc of its history – was that they succeeded in doing one thing really, really well – the classic superhero comic that I loved as a kid, and still love. The great success of DC is the diversity of what we offer. When you come to a San Diego, and you walk this booth, there’s a palpable feeling that says, “We have a great line of superheroes – there’s incredibly cool stuff there. But look around – look at what we have to offer, and look at what we’ve been able to do.” And it’s not just us – look at this convention – there are a massive number of really great comics, and we only scratch a corner of it. But we scratch a bigger corner of it than anybody else, and we’re still growing, and reaching and trying to do all of that, and trying to make our corner bigger and more interesting. That’s the heart of the message. This is a large player in the game, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that size gives you, that’s determined to grow through creativity, that’s determined to reach out through creative diversity and find a wider and wider range of wonderful things for our readers.

[Barnum01]

Intelligence, desire for diversity, and humbleness...all great qualities to have. One request Mr. Levitz: please "pick up the pen" and write another story arc for the Legion!

First post?

[Dav G]

Paul Levitz is a class act. Period.

But:

Originally Posted by Paul Levitz

The most important is that even in this age of instant technology, human relationships are extraordinarily important, and human relationships work better face to face. You need to touch each other periodically

Human Resources should probably keep a wary eye. Just sayin'.

It should go without saying, though: Just kidding people!

[TheMightyGeek]

Thanks for sharing, Paul!

Now, how's about that "Great Darkness Saga" DVD, hmmmmm?

[Hokeyboy]

Originally Posted by TheMightyGeek

Thanks for sharing, Paul!

Now, how's about that "Great Darkness Saga" DVD, hmmmmm?

I just wet' em, thinking about such a movie.

*sighs wistfully*

[math]

i first became aware of Paul Levitz when he was doing the Comic Reader years ago,i've met him at the last two New York comics cons,a class act doesn't go far enough to describe him..he really is the face of DC.

[ScottRowland]

There are too few interviews with Mr. Levitz. I really appreciate his broader view of the comics medium. I am amazed that he (and DC) don't get more kudos for publishing such a wide variety of comics.

And I agree that it would be good to see him writing more.

[KentL]

Originally Posted by MattBrady

by Matt Brady
Chinese Born American as well – that really speaks to eh flavor of comics that really didn’t have a lot of precedent in America five years or seven years back – it’s not

American Board Chinese. Good book.

[Amoebas]

Always good to read an interview with Paul.

And I'll take an All-Star LSH with Paul & Perez before a DVD.

[NewRisingSun]

Matt,

was this interview done on sunday at the Tin Fish across from the convention center?

I was sitting right next to you.

If so, how did you feel about the acoustic pirate band?

[MattBrady]

Originally Posted by NewRisingSun

Matt,

was this interview done on sunday at the Tin Fish across from the convention center?

I was sitting right next to you.

If so, how did you feel about the acoustic pirate band?

nope - that wasn't the interview. And that band was horrible. I think if they were sober, they'd have still been horrible.

I want my wallet back.

MattB

[JoshAdams]

Originally Posted by MattBrady

nope - that wasn't the interview. And that band was horrible. I think if they were sober, they'd have still been horrible.

I want my wallet back.

MattB

Haha, great. SDCC is full of great stories and I'm sure some would like to hear about that.

But to the subject. Paul Levitz is one of the nicest guys I've ever had the opportunity to meet and just as in this interview, when you hear him in person you can take away the knowledge that he really cares about the industry he is in. A great face for DC.

[superate]

Originally Posted by ScottRowland

There are too few interviews with Mr. Levitz. I really appreciate his broader view of the comics medium. I am amazed that he (and DC) don't get more kudos for publishing such a wide variety of comics.

And I agree that it would be good to see him writing more.

I'm sure the juggling act he has to deal with on a daily basis is enough of a headache. Between late writers, later artists, merchandising people, tech people, lawyers, the overlords of Time Warner and god knows what else thrown in there, I'm surprised the man even has a second to breathe.
Paul Levitz follows in the Jenatte Kahn model of smart business people willing to take risks. Couldn't be happier to have him running my favorite comic book company.

[JusticeLeagr]

I saw Mr. Levitz speak at the Gays and Lesbians in Comics panel, and I thought it was awesome that the publisher of one of the big two would appear. I was genuinely amazed at his and his company's attitude about the workplace and not only gays and lesbians but Albanians!

I was also very pleased that he had nothing but the greatest respect and kind words about his predecessor, Jennette Kahn. Ms. Kahn always seemed to me to be a fantastic publisher who always seemed to know what I loved in my comics without overdoing it.

It was an honor BEYOND my wildest imagination when i got to shake his hand and basically thank him for a lifetime of entertainment and along with Ms. Kahn for being apart of my life everyday.

I even got to pose a question to the panel about secret identies and the parallels to 'coming out of the closet'. When Clark 'came out' to Chloe in Smallville made me cry because it reminded me of an incident in my own life

I'm sure, to him, I was just another kooky fan, but he took the time to listen and thank me and share his thoughts about Ms. Kahn.

THANK YOU MR. LEVITZ

DC Boy til I die,
Andrew

[hebitudinous]

At the end of the day Paul Levitz should be proud of all the lives he has touched as a result of his stewardship, both as a writer and publisher.

Unlike his predecessor, Paul has a very unusual juggling act. As longtime 'Rama readers know, the industry is going through some unusual times. Marvel sales are up 78% year-on-year, but it's been a challenge for retailers to get more newsstand readers. All of this is happening just as digital downloads have started to gain some notoriety.

'52' and 'Countdown' get the production cycles away from the lackadaisical production schedules made infamous by 'Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk' or 'Planetary' -- the rest of the media world is moving away from monthly to daily to nearly real-time updates. I'm not saying we're going to get 24x7 'Justice League' anytime soon -- but despite some really crappy video game adaptations of movies, media companies have realized that there is real value in speeding up their production schedules.

Paul needs to get his staff - editors, writers and artists - communicating more often (and I agree, face to face) with the Sony guys. One day, you'll be able to participate in a Halo-esque online video game with a thousand or so of your closest friends, and have the comic book that comes out Wednesday provide an added value/power-up/hint that helps you get even more out of the videogame experience. After all, any backstory of Halo or Worlds of Warcraft absolutely pales in comparison to the rich tapestry of the DC universe. When that happens, you're really going to be in for a treat.

[hhbx]

You know, I almost think it would be the greatest thing in the world of MMO if famous comic writers would write the story for the big updates/expansion.
For example, using COH as a example, say Morrison wrote the story for issue 8, Bendis for issue 9, and so forth.

[ORACofSEVEN]

Originally Posted by Dav G

Paul Levitz is a class act. Period.

Ditto. He found time not only to talk about his own company but admire and say nice things about the competition. DC is more than just a super-hero comic book company and the continued diversity of the comics medium and DC in general has Paul Levitz among other to thank for that.


ORAC OUT