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Thursday, December 31, 2015 

Paul Levitz may know some history, but not common sense

At the end of this column on Arcamax, talking about history items and such, they bring up a new book about Will Eisner that's written by Paul Levitz, and says:
This book doesn't have the Kidd touch, but it has something better: It was written by Paul Levitz, the president and publisher of DC Comics for much of my adult life. Levitz knows his bones, especially when it comes to comics history [...]
He may know a thing or two about history, but he sure doesn't know much about modern marketing, recalling that he was a prominent executive by the 1990s, and did nothing on his part to ensure DC and other such publishers would have wider recognizability and availability, instead allowing comicdom at the time to exclude themselves largely to the specialty stores, and it took a while until they made a return, and by then prices were rocketing much higher, and pamphlets selling much lower. Nor did he do anything on his part to respect the works of past writers, recalling all the Green Lantern botch jobs of the times. Worse, he even stood by silently as Dan DiDio and his own clique manufactured Identity Crisis, and collaborated with the Kuwaiti propagandist who concocted "The 99", and that only made clear Levitz lost his moral compass.

On which note, as if it couldn't get any more tasteless, I discovered that Brad Meltzer wrote the introduction to Levitz's biography of Eisner. Needless to say, all that does is lower my respect for Levitz even more, and confirms where he stands on the notorious 2004 miniseries. Hence, Levitz is another of many writers whose work I now find myself forced to separate from the writer and take with a grain of salt.

As I've said at least once before, there was a time when Levitz had talent, as with the Legion of Super-Heroes. But he's long done his darndest to make it difficult to appreciate that, and it's very sad.

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  • From Jerusalem, Israel
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