ONE AMONG FIVE

Here’s my favorite personal anecdote about the late, great comics editor Julius Schwartz. Once I was at the DC offices when I heard familiar voices coming from Julie’s office and wandered inside. There was ye editor himself, along with John Byrne, Frank Miller and DC staffer Robyn McBryde. With a big smile, Julie declared (and I can’t recall the exact wording) “Here we are: the five most important people in comics!”

And this was not entirely true. As you shall see, even Alan Moore refuses to challenge a Schwartz pronouncement, but I must summon up the courage to do so (much as I enjoy the fantasy of the five of us as absolute monarchs ruling benevolently over the entire artform; now there’s an Elseworlds premise for you). I am certainly not one of the most important figures in comics: I am and have been a peripheral figure, as befits my role as a historian, standing on the sidelines, observing creative people at work (yes, the parallel to Uatu the Watcher has occurred to me). Robyn, who subsequently vanished from the ken of comicdom into a career in women’s health clubs, certainly wasn’t that important either. (However, she is a beautiful blonde woman, a motif that will recur in this week’s column, and which surely accounts for why Julie included her.) John and Frank had a much greater claim to the title, as the men who had revamped Superman and Batman, respectively, for a new generation of readers. But are they definitely among the top five?

On the other hand, Julius Schwartz himself unquestionably was. In fact, I would suggest, seriously, another set of five: the five people without whom today’s American comics industry would not exist. Though some aficionados of alternative comics may not like to admit it, superhero comics dominate the market, keep the direct sales shops open, and thereby allow comic books in other genres to survive and even flourish. So these five people are the ones who are most responsible for the continuing existence of the superhero genre. Obviously, the first two are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, the character that started it all. There are also Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the two principal fathers of the Marvel revolution, which opened the genre’s potential for greater literary sophistication and older audiences. And there was Julius Schwartz, who, among his considerable number of other achievements, rescued the superhero genre from near-extinction in the 1950s by pioneering the great revival period now known as the Silver Age.

THE BACKSTORY

How much can the world change in the course of one person’s life? Julius Schwartz was born in 1915, during World War I, before nanotechnology and genetic engineering, before DVDs and the Internet, before personal computers or television or transatlantic air travel, even before motion pictures with synchronized sound; all of this would have seemed the stuff of science fiction at the time that this major figure in early science fiction was born. Byrne and Miller may have reconceived Superman and Batman for a new generation in the 1980s, but when Schwartz was growing up there was no Superman or Batman. (Considering how established these characters have since become in the public consciousness, this may seem almost like saying there had been no stories about Robin Hood or King Arthur!). In fact, the American newspaper comic strip was still a young artform, having begun in 1894, only twenty-one years before Schwartz’s birth, and the first successful newsstand comic book would not appear until his adulthood, in 1934. Despite the high profile successes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the 19th century, science fiction was still a small, obscure, struggling genre in the 1920s. Did anyone imagine that a half-century later it would become one of the dominant genres of popular culture, the stuff of blockbuster movies? The first magazine entirely devoted to science fiction was Amazing Stories, which debuted in 1926: Julius Schwartz was eleven, and he was one of the magazine’s devoted fans.

Then there is another question: how much can one person change the world within his lifetime? As a teenager Julius Schwartz co-created the first nationally distributed science fiction fanzine, The Time Traveler, and thereby effectively co-created organized science fiction fandom; he was also one of the organizers of the first World Science Fiction Convention, in 1939. Schwartz became the very first literary agent to specialize in science fiction. Both as a fan and as agent he established connections with science fiction and fantasy authors of a generation older than his own: in their eulogies for him Alan Moore and Harlan Ellison seem especially impressed that one of his clients was H. P. Lovecraft. Schwartz also represented brand new talents, including two who became titans of the genre: Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury. Play a game of Six Degrees of Separation concerning Julius Schwartz in his agenting days, and you will begin to see his connections spread wide through popular culture. One of his clients he championed was Robert Bloch, who would later write the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock based Psycho; another was Leigh Brackett, who would go on to write films for Howard Hawks and at the end of her career, co-write The Empire Strikes Back.

So all of this would be more than enough for Schwartz to make his mark in the history of American popular culture, but this was only Act I of his career (and in a culture in which there are supposedly no second acts). With the decline of the science fiction magazine market during World War II, Schwartz landed a job as an editor at what is now DC Comics. He knew nothing about comic books, and yet would become one of the major creative forces in the field.

During the rest of the “Golden Age” of the 1940s Schwartz edited series like the Justice Society of America in All-Star and the original Green Lantern. But by 1951 superheroes had virtually all vanished from publication, save for the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.. Comics moved into other genres, and Schwartz edited the anthology titles Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space, two of the only successful, long-running science fiction comics ever. Within these titles ran several continuing series, most notably Adam Strange, an Earthman who led a secret life as champion of a distant planet.

Had superhero comics merely been a transient fad, or were they a genuine new genre, that would endure and flourish as long as it could be reinvented for each new generation of readers? That was what Julius Schwartz did when he relaunched The Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956. The artwork was handsomer and more dynamic than the relative crudity of so much Golden Age art. In the new Flash, as well as his superhero series that followed, Schwartz drew on elements from the science fiction genre: the writing thereby gained new vitality, imagination, and sophistication. The stories seemed more contemporary, reflecting the young generation’s own growing interest in science, and they were even intellectually challenging: Schwartz’s comics were clearly not for kids incapable of reading “real books,” but for smart ones.

Thus arose many of the greatest DC Comics of the Silver Age of 1950 through 1970, all revivals and revamps: The Flash (starring police scientist Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, in adventures that mixed spectacular stunts and witty comedy), Green Lantern (test pilot Hal Jordan, now a member of an intergalactic police force), the size-changing Atom (who took one DC hero’s name but was actually more like a reworking of the size-changing Doll Man), Hawkman (a blend of science fiction with the trappings of ancient civilizations, and pioneering the idea of a superhero and superheroine as equals), Justice League of America (DC’s greatest heroes united, in an updated analogue to the Justice Society), and later, ranging outside science fiction, The Spectre (an avenging ghost whose exploits now took on an epic, cosmic scale). On these books Schwartz worked closely with a cadre of great collaborators, most importantly writers John Broome and Gardner Fox, and artists Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson and Mike Sekowsky. Alex Ross has argued that in this period these superhero concepts reached their finest form, not surpassed by either previous or later incarnations of the characters. And he’s right.

So this would be enough to make Schwartz’s mark in the history of comics. Yet there’s still more to come. By the early 1960s Batman had strayed so far from his roots, battling aliens and dealing with the likes of Bat-Mite and Bat-Hound, that his books were on the verge of cancellation. Schwartz was assigned to take over Batman and Detective, and, though reluctant to take the assignment, he and collaborators like Broome, Fox and Infantino, made them the equals of his other titles. The artwork went from dated cartooniness to a sleeker, more realistic look; instead of science fiction, Schwartz and his writers drew on their love of mysteries to recast Batman as the “World’s Greatest Detective” (As a backup series for Detective, Schwartz spun off a character from The Flash, the Elongated Man, in mystery stories that fused the stretching stunts and humor of Plastic Man with the romantic comedy and repartee of The Thin Man.) Not only did Schwartz save Batman from cancellation, but his Bat-books attracted the attention of television producer William Dozier. True, Dozier ignored the seriousness and intelligence of Schwartz’s Batman stories, but it was the television show of the mid-1960s that made Batman a seemingly permanent fixture in American popular culture.

So Schwartz’s work had inadvertently set into motion another set of dominoes, with unexpected but important results. Here’s an even more important example: it has long been known that in 1961 Stan Lee was assigned to create a superhero team book to compete with Schwartz’s Justice League. The result was The Fantastic Four, the pioneering work of “The Marvel Age of Comics,” which led to The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men and all the rest. (And speaking of the X-Men, the first comics hero to be identified as a mutant was Schwartz’s Captain Comet.)

For the benefit of newer readers, I should point out that before the Internet took over the world, readers commented on comics via snail mail sent to that now nearly-extinct phenomenon, the comic book letter column. Julie Schwartz’s letter columns were the best in the business: whereas other editors then and since would choose to print inoffensive puff pieces, Schwartz sought and published letters with wit, style and intelligence, that demonstrated genuine, if still budding, critical faculties. Doubtless remembering how important lettercols in science fiction magazines were to him as a fan, Schwartz treated his comics lettercols as a means of thought-provoking entertainment, just like the stories themselves. So many letter columns in other books ran non-answers by anonymous staffers; Schwartz, in contrast, always made clear he treated his readers’ opinions with respect. By printing names and addresses of his letter writers, he fostered communication among readers in a time before comics shops or conventions. Thus, just as he had pioneered organized science fiction fandom, Julie Schwartz was a prime mover behind organized comics fandom as well. Moreover, in encouraging his more creative correspondents, Schwartz set a number of them on the path to becoming comics professionals themselves. Quite a number of comics pros made their first appearances in print in 1960s Schwartz lettercols; he thereby helped inspire and create the next generation of comics creators.

All right, so surely that is enough for one man’s remarkable career. The success of the Batman TV show swelled the sales of comics, but when the TV show fad ended, sales plummeted. For various reasons, Broome and Fox left DC, and the Silver Age was coming to an end, as a new generation of comics creators began entering the business. Surely this is the end.

But no. In some of Schwartz’s mid-1960s comics there are awkward attempts to imitate Marvel, like nicknames in the credits. But Schwartz ultimately responded to the Marvel revolution by moving in new, original directions, mentoring members of the new generation of pros, and taking advantage of the new opportunities to push the artistic envelope. Hence, Schwartz presided over Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ landmark Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories, which dealt in political and social themes in a manner unprecedented in the genre, as well as delving deeply into characterization.

Having revamped and saved Batman once, Schwartz now did it a second time, through his work with O’Neil, Adams, and such other talents as Frank Robbins, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers. The result was “the Batman” as we know him today in comics, animation, and film: the driven avenger from his earliest stories, presented in contemporary terms.

With the retirement of his longtime colleague Mort Weisinger, Schwartz took over as editor of the principal Superman titles, which, despite their brilliance in the early 1960s, had run out of creative steam and no longer satisfied an older readership raised on Marvel’s innovations.

Again, Schwartz modernized the look and upgraded the writing of the books, and if his Superman books did not represent the cutting edge of superhero genre, they were still imaginative, intelligent and entertaining enough to hold their own for over a decade.

In none of the pieces I’ve read or heard about Julie Schwartz since his death has there been mention of his 1970s revival of the original Captain Marvel. Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t commercially successful; then again, none of DC’s subsequent efforts to revive the character have worked for long. But I don’t care if Schwartz’s version was ultimately a sales disappointment: it was the only DC version that captured the whimsy and enchantment of the Captain’s Golden Age stories, and if a modern readership can’t appreciate that, that’s their tough luck.

So finally, with the DC Universe having come to the point of Crisis (on Infinite Earths, that is), in the mid-1980s, Julie Schwartz’s editorship on the main Superman books was coming to an end; John Byrne (one of the aforementioned Five) would be “rebooting” the series, starting its continuity over from scratch. Julie’s retirement as a DC editor was only a few years off. And yes, the last few years of Schwartz’s Superman had been disappointing. But then, for his farewell to the series, Julie again reached out to a new generation of talent and enlisted Alan Moore to write his final issues of Action and Superman.

Moore’s two-part story, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” was such an astonishingly brilliant utilization of the Weisinger/Schwartz Superman continuity as to make one wonder why anyone thought it needed to be rebooted in the first place. Julie Schwartz left his last important series with one of the great classics of his entire career: not with a whimper but with a bang.

MEMORIAL DAY

So, yes, it seems as if Julius Schwartz was everywhere in the history of American science fiction and comic books, but what kind of a person was he? For that I turn to the speeches made in his honor at the public memorial that DC Comics held for him on Thursday, March 18 in New York City.

Obviously, I had to go. My friend Laurie Sutton, a former DC editor, warned me: you know Julie’ll be looking down and watching, seeing who shows up. She turned out not to be the only person thinking along these lines.

But early on, it was a miserable day. After one of the coldest and snowiest winters on record in New York City, we had finally broken through to springlike temperatures, only to be plunged abruptly back into Arctic weather. It had snowed the whole day before, and this morning was dark, overcast and chilly. It was funeral weather.

There is actually something of a tradition of memorial services in the New York comics community: there were a disturbing number of them in the mid-1990s, in ominous juxtaposition with the convulsions shaking the industry, and shaking various people out of it. Not only were there memorials for Founding Fathers of the business, such as Jerry Siegel, but for people who died far too early: notably Marvel direct sales head Carol Kalish and editors Archie Goodwin and Mark Gruenwald. Those three memorials were attended by enormous numbers of comics professionals.

At the Gruenwald memorial, watching old videotapes of the stunts and hijinks staged by Mark that were a regular part of life at Marvel in the less corporate environment of the 1980s, people commented that an era had passed; Mike Carlin noted that he knew even while they were happening that those would be the “good old days.”

It was less obvious at that memorial that it would be the last great gathering of the mainstream New York City comics community. With harder times and fewer social occasions, much of it dispersed.

Unlike past memorials I attended, which were in the afternoon or evening, the Schwartz memorial was held in the morning, and in a different sort of locale: a movie theater. That accounts for the early time: there are no screenings in the morning, but we would have to be out by noon. The memorial was scheduled to begin at 9:30 AM, actually started at 9:40, and ended at 11:30, leaving a half hour for the inevitable milling about, conversing and networking, before everyone had to leave.

The site was a Clearview Cinema (showing The Fog of War, the Oscar-winning documentary about Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara) on 62nd St. and Broadway. This would be over halfway along a direct route from DC’s offices (which are in the big black building you see across from the Ed Sullivan Theatre on the Letterman show) to Lincoln Center. Paul Levitz himself, DC’s president and publisher, was in the lobby welcoming people as they arrived. On a nearby table were copies of Julie’s autobiography, Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics (2000, HarperCollins), as well as the program booklet for the memorial. On the front of the latter was a photograph of Julie, inside was Harlan Ellison’s obituary for him, and on the back was a familiar illustration from DC’s 1970s in-house fanzine, Amazing World of DC Comics: drawn by Joe Kubert, it shows tiny figures of DC’s leading super heroes looking up at a colossal bust of their editor’s face.

It had been widely reported that this was a memorial open to the public, and I wondered beforehand if there would be a crush of comics fans trying to get in, but there wasn’t. It was certainly well attended: the theatre was nearly full. But that’s “nearly,” not “entirely,” since there were plenty of empty seats. True, there had been snow the night before, and the early starting time was not good for out-of-town freelancers. Still, it seemed to me there had been more attendees at the Goodwin memorial, and unquestionably at the Gruenwald public memorial. Perhaps in part this is due to the comics pro diaspora: people at the memorial would meet and greet each other with the kind of delight and surprise that comes with not having seen each other in a very long time. Part of the reason could also be that Schwartz had been retired from editing for about a decade and a half. I saw very few people younger than Boomers at the ceremony. Yet Julie had been a prominent presence at conventions over those years. And one might hope more of the newer pros would have had more of a sense of history. Ah well. In his blog Peter David estimated the audience as being 100 to 150 strong. I think it was more; as I said, it was nearly a full house. And it was clear that for all of the people there, it was important for them to be there.

A memorial like this one is a form of theater. That is not to imply it is less than serious in intent. Theater began as a firm of ritual; a memorial is a ritual of remembrance. There are speakers and there is an audience. But the speakers are not the “stars”: there is a lead character, the deceased, and it is the story of his life that they tell. The speakers are, in a sense, performers, and the best speakers deservedly receive applause.

The art of public speaking is in a sorry state in contemporary America. Just think of the current presidential election campaign, or every other one of them over the last forty years. How often is anything memorable said? I even saw a column in the New York Times that argued that people nowadays would reject eloquent, well-written speeches as false and artificial. Even at the Cartoon Network advertisers’ presentation I attended last month, I found myself enduring lame and dismal efforts at humor, as if the speaker’s craft of capturing an audience’s interest were irrevocably lost.

Politicians and comedy executives may not be good at public speaking, but comics writers and editors are. The great comics industry memorials are themselves memorable for the eloquence and writing skill of their best speakers, and the Schwartz memorial bore this out.

At 9:40, Paul Levitz started the proceedings by informing us that in his “usual organized fashion,” Mr. Schwartz had edited today’s memorial. He had requested that selections of his favorite form of music, jazz, be played. And so they were, over the sound system, suggesting to my mind a touch of a New Orleans funeral. The tone set was quietly contemplative, though. One passage seemed particularly appropriate: Louis Armstrong singing (if I made out the words correctly): “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust/It’s too bad ol’ Gabe couldn’t have stayed on and lived with us.”

When these opening selections ended, the audience applauded. Paul Levitz said, “As far as I know, Julie has not arranged for anything else to happen here,” but warned us that he could not be certain of that. (So perhaps Laurie was right.)

Then Levitz spoke of the tradition of these memorials in the comics industry: “Over the years days like this have been very special experiences within our field.” As for the man being honored today, he said Julius Schwartz was “unique among the unique” and “our self-proclaimed Living Legend.” (This was one of the continuing motifs of the morning: Schwartz’s description of himself as a “Living Legend,” which, as Henry Kissinger said about another subject, “has the added advantage of being true.”)

The memorials are a tradition, and their format is traditionally laissez-faire. “We have no system; we have no organization; we have an open mike,” Levitz noted, so anyone who wished to speak could do so. He pointed out that we “have to be out of here by noon,” observing that “Julie would not approve of our missing any deadlines.” As for the length of the speeches, Levitz said he would “suggest a minute or two for every decade you’ve known Julie” – the audience chuckled – and added that he realized this would make some speeches long indeed.

The first of the speakers was Brian M. Thomsen, Schwartz’s collaborator on his autobiography, Man of Two Worlds. (The title, should you need it explained, refers both to one of Schwartz’s landmark stories, Flash of Two Worlds, in which the Golden Age and Silver Age Flashes first met, and to Schwartz’s careers in science fiction and comics.)

Thomsen was primarily standing in for the man who was supposed to have been the lead speaker, Schwartz’s longtime friend and the great writer of imaginative fiction, Harlan Ellison, who had been prevented from attending by the double whammy of health problems and last night’s snow causing the cancellation of his flight from the West Coast.

However, Ellison’s eulogy was printed in the program leaflet, and now Thomsen read it aloud. It was just right for the occasion, combining historical perspective and personal anecdotes, and touching in its conclusion. Much of the audience followed along silently in their programs as Thomsen read the piece aloud. When Thomsen moved from one page to the next, there was a loud rustling noise, as so many audience members simultaneously folded over the program, as if they were turning the page of a prayer book in church.

I would love to quote bits of the eulogy, but I’m not going to. It is well worth reading, and touching. But Ellison is understandably and rightly upset by the mindset in the Internet culture that asserts a right to illegally download copyrighted material without paying for it – such as music or Ellison’s own writing – just because it’s so easy to do so, and he takes a very hard line against copying. Rather than debate him on the subject of “fair use” of excerpted quotes in reporting on public events, I’ll simply send you all to read the eulogy where Ellison has posted it himself. (Remember: look but don’t touch!) It will also be printed in the Schwartz tribute comics that DC will be publishing this summer, so you can buy copies of it then.

But maybe I can describe (without quoting) some of the topics of his eulogy. Much of it was a chronological recounting of Schwartz’s extraordinary list of career achievements; I’ve taken my own approach to doing this sort of thing earlier in this column. As if composing an overture to the ceremony, Ellison touched on many subjects that recurred throughout the day’s speeches, like leitmotifs in a musical composition: the Living Legend nickname, Schwartz’s trademark pleasures (jazz, the Yankees, pea soup), the regularity of his habits, his proper businesslike manner of dress (in contrast to younger, more casually garbed slobs – I mean, comics pros), the contradiction between his gruff facade and his kindly inner self, and the fact that he saved American comics from going the route of the dodo. And there was another theme that other speakers also voiced: the fact that through editing (and so often co-plotting) these stories of heroism that readers discovered in their childhood, Schwartz was a positive influence on the moral sensibilities of generations. (Julie Schwartz had a stronger creative personality than most mainstream comics editors of recent times; to borrow a term from film criticism, he was clearly the auteur of his Silver Age comics.)

I will risk one quote – because Ellison was himself quoting someone else. He pointed out that in Spaceballs, Mel Brooks’ parody of Star Wars, characters great each other with “May the Schwartz Be with You.” Now I always assumed that Brooks just used “Schwartz” as a funny sound-alike for “force.” But is Ellison right? Is Brooks comically aware enough to have been doing a homage to our industry’s Schwartz?

On finishing Ellison’s piece, Thomsen then began his own reminiscences of Schwartz: in keeping with the regularity of Julie’s habits, Brian had a weekly lunch and phone call – always at 9 PM – with him. Thomsen recalled how Schwartz “loved the Yankees,” but would continually grouse, “The Yankees…they’re not a very good team” – even when they won the pennant. In part, Thomsen acknowledged, this is because Schwartz was old enough to remember the days of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. But it was also because he was “a man who expected perfection from everyone else because he expected it from himself.”

Speaking of “The Golden Age of Schwartz,” Thomsen said that Julie provided an “example of why retirement means you don’t have to stop working.” After officially retiring from editing, Schwartz continued to appear at conventions as DC’s goodwill ambassador; he also retained an office at DC and went in once a week. Thomsen said that Schwartz would insist that he “had to get into the DC offices because DC needed him.”

But, Thomsen said, “there was a time he felt he wasn’t needed anymore”: Schwartz “was getting depressed, discouraged, and needed something to do.” Thomsen credited Paul Levitz with solving the problem by arranging for Julie to write his memoir. This meant that “Julie had a focus again,” and work to do, and he had a “sense of accomplishment” when the autobiography finally came out. And when it did, Schwartz asked Thomsen, “We’re starting on the revision now, aren’t we?”

(This was not the first time that the idea of a book about Schwartz’s life had arisen. I seem to recall that Elliot Maggin was working on such a book at one time; in fact that’s what scuttled the plans of Mark Gruenwald, who idolized Julie, to write his own book about him – and Mark wanted me to help on it, but with his own busy schedule, Mark never got around to doing it. So I am pleased that Thomsen succeeded where others had not.)

Thomsen underlined the fact that beneath a certain ironic bravado, Schwartz was actually quite modest. “Despite calling himself a Living Legend,” Thomsen stated, “Julie didn’t really think his story was that important.” Instead of getting him to talk about himself, Thomsen found himself getting Schwartz to talk about the many talented individuals he had worked with: “Julie told his story through other people’s stories.”

Thomsen concluded by proposing a revision of the old maxim that one can judge a person by the company he keeps. Instead, “You can tell a man’s character by the people who wish to be in his company,” and Thomsen proceeded to go down a remarkable list of luminaries in the worlds of science fiction and comics who counted Julie as friends, and included “many many beautiful blonde women.” (Now actually, I was under the impression that Julie didn’t discriminate according to hair color.)

Following Thomsen’s remarks, Paul Levitz declined credit for the memoir project, and said he was merely the one who connected Julie, whom he called “an unlikely Scheherezade,” with Thomsen as his collaborator. Levitz said that the project started instead with Harlan Ellison, Comic Buyer’s Guide editor Maggie Thompson and others, who “came up with the basic idea,” and said that Julie was “a national treasure” that they must “keep polished.”

BEYOND THE SHIRT

Next up was Denny O’Neil, who worked with Schwartz on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Batman, Superman and Shazam, and who represents the gold standard for speakers at comics memorials: I still recall his eulogy for Mark Gruenwald, praising him for making his “life” into his foremost work of “art.” O’Neil was Gruenwald’s mentor at Marvel; now O’Neil would be eulogizing his own mentor in the artform.

O’Neil began by reflecting that superhero comics deal with “double identities”: the person who looked ordinary on the surface, but “underneath, ubermensch!” He continued that about three days ago, it occurred to him that Schwartz himself was a “double identity character.”

O’Neil then gave us a flashback to his first meeting with Schwartz, in 1966 or 1967. “He did not look like the god of editors”: in white shirt and tie, he “looked like he could’ve been a Midwestern businessman.” Moreover, O’Neil said, Schwartz proved to be “a man of egregiously regular habits”: making a phone call to his wife at same time at the same time each day, and so forth. O’Neil noted that the philosopher Immanuel Kant was said to be so regular in taking his afternoon walk at the same time every day that his neighbors could set their watches by it. Compared to Julie, O’Neil declared, “Kant was Courtney Love.”

In contrast, O’Neil described himself as looking like “an aging hippie” in tie-dye shirt, jeans, and long hair (“I know it’s hard to believe; I have photographs.”). Yet despite the disparities, within only months they had established “mutual trust” which eventually evolved into “friendship.”

O’Neil commended Schwartz’s style of editorship, stating that he “set boundaries for the playing field,” but allowed him a “great deal of freedom within” those boundaries. Moreover, with Schwartz “ego never entered into it.” O’Neil quoted one of Schwartz’s own proteges in science fiction, Alfred Bester, as having said, “Among professionals the job is boss,” and that was true of Schwartz.

“Along with Stan Lee he reinvented a genre,” O’Neil declared, adding that Schwartz “didn’t think it was so important”: he saw himself as just doing his job. And yet, O’Neil said, returning to his “double identity” theme, “beyond the white shirt” lay “Super-Editor.”

Calling Schwartz a “warm, cranky, lovable, extremely creative guy,” O’Neil summed up, “Working with Julie was one of the better things that happened in my life. Being able to call him friend was one of the absolute best.”

AN INTERRUPTED TOUR

Next came Michael Uslan, who started out in comics writing letters to Schwartz’s books; if his name is familiar to you it’s because you see it in the credits of the Batman movies as executive producer.

Introducing himself as “another student of the Living Legend,” Uslan revealed that he first met Schwartz forty years ago that very week on a tour of the DC offices. (Calm down, readers, I don’t believe these tours are held any longer, and certainly not for adults.)

Another of the recurring themes of the memorial was how young many of us were when we first encountered Schwartz’s work. When he was only eight, Uslan said, he thought Schwartz’s name was “Editor” because that’s how the letters in the lettercol were addressed: “Dear Editor.” With greater age, sophistication, and powers of observation, the young Uslan discovered the mystery man’s name in the indicia: “Julius Schwartz, Editor.” “I remember thinking that ‘Schwartz’ was a funny middle name,” Uslan recalled.

Their first meeting was a fan’s dream come true. At age thirteen Uslan was taking the DC office tour, and Schwartz went by and saw him carrying a copy of The Flash. Schwartz pulled Uslan out of the tour, introduced him to legendary Flash writer John Broome, and even took him into the DC Library (the treasure vault!!) and showed him a copy of Flash #1. And from then on, Schwartz answered every letter Uslan wrote. (Hey, wait a minute! He didn’t do that with my letters! Note to self: another reason I shouldn’t have grown up in the Boston area.)

When Uslan was in college, Schwartz even let him write Batman, in retrospect, a foreshadowing of Things to Come. Here Uslan introduced another of the morning’s running motifs: Julie’s nickname (known even to us readers at the time) as “B.O. Schwartz.” This was not a reference to scents but to sensibility: it stood for “Be Original,” Schwartz’s maxim for his writers.

ACHIEVING THE HEIGHTS

Our next speaker was senior among them: Irwin Hasen, whose artwork on the comic strip Dondi I saw in my childhood, but who worked with Schwartz in the “Golden Age” of the 1940s.

“Julie Schwartz was a legend of the Golden Age,” Hasen began, and “an innovator of the Silver Age, but Julie was ageless.” Here’s yet another running theme, and one that reminds me of something writer Steve Englehart said when I interviewed him some months ago for TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #3: “…some people, and Julie is certainly one of them, are sort of eternally youthful. Julie is always enthusiastic about cool stuff. … There’s no reason to get stuck in any particular era, and Julie was always of whatever era he was in.”

There was no melancholy in Hasen’s speech: instead it was a rapid-fire string of funny anecdotes about his decades-long friendship with Schwartz, delivered like an old-time stand-up comedian. A man who might be described as vertically challenged, Hasen declared, “At a low point in my life he advised me to go to Height Watchers.” A few seconds passed as the joke sank in, and then the audience burst into laughter.

STANDING ROOM ONLY

Then came Jack C. Harris, a former writer and editor at DC, who now (like some other comics veterans, including myself) has turned to teaching about the comics medium. He posted his speech at the Ellison website on March 20, and you can find it here

Harris was the first of the speakers to acclaim Schwartz’s letter columns. As “a price to pay” for what he gave us, Harris said, “Julie demanded original, thought-provoking letters, missives that posed intriguing questions and offered informative critique.”

“I never saw anyone who didn’t like Julie Schwartz,” stated Harris, who quoted comics writer Len Wein’s description of him as “everyone’s favorite uncle.” Harris imagined that Julie was now the permanent guest of honor in a comics/science fiction convention held in the hereafter.

The high point of Harris’s speech came after he recalled standing alongside Schwartz at a comics convention, looking out at the enormous crowd of pros, fans and more. Harris told him, ‘You know, this is all your fault.” and Schwartz smiled and replied, “Yeah, I know.”

So now Harris conducted an “experiment”: he asked the members of the audience if any of them were in the comics industry today because of Julie Schwartz, “either indirectly or directly,” to stand up. By Harris’s estimation, about two thirds of the hundreds who were gathered there stood. “See, Julie?” said Harris; “It’s still your fault.”

(Afterwards I spoke with Jack, and we agreed that considering that the comics industry might not even exist today if not for Schwartz, everybody should have stood up.)

IN THE SOUP

Harris was followed by Ricia Mainhart, who observed that as a science fiction literary agent, she was following a career that Julie Schwartz had created. She was another of Schwartz’s regular lunchtime companions, and the centerpiece of her speech was an amusing tale of how “catastrophe” struck when the restaurant near DC’s old offices where he had his beloved navy bean soup closed: unable to find another restaurant with the good sense to put it on their menu, she ended up learning to make it herself, with him editing her efforts all along the way.

DC editor Bob Greenberger read a message sent by longtime comics writer Len Wein. In their first meeting, Wein recalled that an angry Schwartz saw him and seized him by the shirt collar, telling him. “You’re writing The Flash. I don’t know who you are but you couldn’t do a worse job than the expletive deleted I just fired!” (Playing Schwartz’s part, Greenberger affected a comically gruff voice that didn’t really sound like him but got the requisite laughs. Perhaps Julie should have played J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movie, or maybe Bob.)

A year later, Wein found himself at the DC offices just watching Schwartz intently working at his desk, as if studying how editing is done. Schwartz looked up and (in Greenberger’s performance) barked, “What the hell do you want?” In his reminiscences Wein admitted he could not explain why he said what he did (was he demonically possessed?), but he replied that he “just thought I’d stand here for a while watching you go senile.” (!) Schwartz stared, then started laughing, so convulsively he actually fell out of his chair. “Now that was funny,” Julie told him; “Why aren’t you that funny in your scripts?” (And the audience laughs in surprise and delight.) And that is how Wein and Schwartz became friends.

Yet more comedy came from the next speaker, Mike Carlin, one of Schwartz’s successors as Superman editor. I had thought that Mike had begun his comics career at Marvel, but he informed us that thirty years ago around this time of year he was a high school intern at DC. Carlin said he didn’t meet Schwartz back then, but he saw him, at work, drinking his lunchtime soup. “Soup is a very big theme here,” Mike observed, as if engaging in literary analysis. “Julie was Soup-erman.”

The audience groaned in agony, like a massive wail of pain from the pits of hell. But Schwartz loved puns, including bad puns, and Mike was simply honoring the Schwartz tradition here.

Though they became friends later, once Mike became an editor at DC, Carlin said he understood why Schwartz never talked to him when he was an intern: he didn’t have to, “I wasn’t part of his day.” But “He actually taught me a lot. I don’t talk to interns now,” Carlin told an amused audience.

OLD TIMES ON OLYMPUS

Now Neil Gaiman stepped onto the stage, but he told us, he was there to deliver not his own speech but one sent by Alan Moore! For 1602 readers, this state of affairs causes me to imagine if there had been a memorial held by English playwrights in the early 17th century. Ben Jonson gets up to speak, and the audience stirs expectantly: it’s Jonson, the best writer here, this is going to be good, o rare Ben Jonson and all that. And instead Jonson says he’s there to read something his friend Will sent down from his retirement home in Stratford, and the audience’s collective jaw drops!

Moore’s speech was utterly extraordinary, and you can find it in the March 18 post on Gaiman’s blog (a website that people of taste should visit from time to time, anyway).

As a writer, rereading Moore’s tribute, I am astounded at how much vivid imagery, insightful characterization, sharp observation and sense of time and place (even a throwaway bit like a reference to “the migraine-yellow dot-toned hallways” of the old DC offices; it’s true!) he packed into such a short piece, while still allowing the piece to flow smoothly, whether it is read silently or aloud. Gaiman reveals in his blog that he was asked to read Moore’s message when he arrived at the memorial; hence he had no time to rehearse. Gaiman says he tried “to pace and pitch it as Alan would have done.” Neil’s reading struck me not as an imitation of Moore, but as a performance by a skilled actor of his own writings, turning the same talent to an interpretation of a fellow author’s work.

You should all go read it for yourselves. In the time-honored tradition of reporters and reviewers I will merely mention a few of the best bits. Like some other speakers, Moore drew our attention to how young most of us were when we first encountered Schwartz’s work: he was “our childhood’s god, the intergalactic cabby who wouldn’t shut up, the curator of the Space Museum” (clever references to two of Schwartz’s comics science fiction series). Moore and Gaiman drew their second biggest laugh with Moore’s reminiscences of Schwartz showing him his scrapbook filled with photos of the great writers he had known: Moore wrote that he “could not have possibly been more impressed if he’d said, ‘See that old guy in the toga, standing by Ed Hamilton? That’s Zeus.”

But the biggest laugh came unexpectedly, after Moore and Gaiman abruptly seemed to shift the tone away from amusing anecdotes. “And now we hear that Julie has been discontinued. Cancelled.” Gaiman paused significantly, and then continued, “But they said the same about Green Lantern and the Flash –” And there was a massive detonation of appreciative laughter, the loudest and most fervent of the entire morning.

Towards the end Moore noted that Schwartz had “ruined my reputation as a gentle pacifist” through his anecdote (found in his memoir and elsewhere) that Moore had (playfully, I trust) seized him by the throat to persuade him to let him write his final Superman story. Asking how he could possibly contradict Julie, Moore confessed that it was true.

Or was it? I recall filmmaker John Ford’s classic line at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to the effect that when the legend is superior to the truth, “print the legend.” Did the mock-strangulation actually take place? Well, it’s a good story. If it didn’t happen, it should have. And since the two participants claim that it did, it effectively has. (In W. S. Gilbert’s The Mikado, Ko-Ko reasons that if the Mikado sentences someone to death, that person is as good as dead, and to all intents and purposes is already dead, so why bother with the trouble of physically carrying out the execution?)

SEEING SPARKS

And now, finally and appropriately, a blonde woman steps up to speak about Julie: Karen Berger, head of DC’s Vertigo line. She began by remarking that the comics industry, “particularly DC,” has a “sense of family.” (Well, perhaps this is still true of DC.) Pursuing the metaphor, she characterized Schwartz as the “cranky but lovable uncle or grandfather.” She also observed that he kept his personal life separate from his off, and that he thus had “two families”: it would appear that his funeral, held weeks earlier, was her and other DC editors’ first real encounter with his “other” family.

Unlike so many of the other speakers, Berger was not a comics fan when she was growing up, and hence did not read Schwartz’s comics as a child. But she said her memories of when she started working at DC, nearly twenty-five years ago, and sat in a cubicle outside Schwartz’s office (I remember that cubicle: it’s where she sat the day I first met her), were something “pure” which she likened to “childhood memories.” She recalled seeing his leading artists “coming and going,” and also his conferences with writers, where they “sat nervously as Julie plotted with them.” She said “You could see the spark in his eye” as he worked with them, and that he would “get them to take bigger chances, to be more original.”

So there, intentionally or not, was another reference to Schwartz’s “Be Original” nickname. This also made me realize that Karen was learning how to be an editor by observing Schwartz from her privileged vantage point: so, inadvertently, Julie Schwartz also had a major influence on the Vertigo line as well.

Referring to Schwartz as the “ubereditor,” Berger reiterated one of the day’s leitmotifs: “Comics today really wouldn’t exist as it does if not for him.”

Next, DC veteran Anthony Tollin recalled attending “PulpCon” with Schwartz, where he saw Schwartz’s “fan” side emerge: the pulp magazines of the ’20s and ’30s were what he loved growing up. Tollin pointed out that the “important thing” about Schwartz as an editor was that “he remembered what it was like to be a fan,” and “identified with fans,” and knew what sort of things they would want to see.

Tollin was followed by Nick Barucci, of Dynamic Forces, dealer of comics-related collectibles, who, alluding to the hereafter, said that Schwartz was “now truly a man of two worlds, looking down” upon us.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE

Then came Maggie Thompson, editor of the Comic Buyer’s Guide and one of the leading figures of comics’ “first fandom.” Conveying Harlan Ellison’s apologies for his inability to be there, she proceeded to illuminate the origins of Schwartz’s Man of Two Worlds autobiography. It was, she said, a “conspiracy” devised by Ellison, who was concerned about Schwartz’s health, as a means “to keep him focused.” Ellison got in touch with Maggie, who then told Paul Levitz.

Maggie Thompson sounded a now familiar but essential theme about Schwartz once more and extended it: “The comic book industry would not be here without him,” and, further, science fiction would be different without him. And here she came to a major point indeed: “The world outside will never comprehend how important he was to us.”

That’s certainly true about the present day; one might hope for more enlightenment in years to come, if comics continues to gain respect as an artform. For example, The New York Times‘ obituary was respectful and accurate, but did not truly convey Schwartz’s enormous influence. It’s not just the direct influence on writers and artists who worked with him, or even the indirect, unintended effects I’ve pointed to his having on Marvel and Vertigo. How many writers of science fiction, fantasy, and heroic adventure in comics, prose, television and film grew up reading books he edited, or the works of writers (like Bradbury, et al) he promoted? Just how far does Schwartz’s influence extend through popular culture? Indeed, to return to one of Ellison’s points, how many millions of people over several generations had their sense of morality and social responsibility in part shaped by Schwartz’s stories? Are there even kids who were inspired by Schwartz’s science-oriented Silver Age comics and ended up pursuing careers in science as adults? Will the World Outside or any of us ever really know?

UNDER LOC AND KEY

Then came another message from an absent mourner, a surprising voice from the past. In the 1960s there was a small, prolific cadre of writers who regularly turned up in Julie Schwartz’s letter columns, the fan critics with the most incisive and stylishly written LOCs (Letters of Comment). The foremost of these writers, the dean of LOC correspondents, was the erudite and aristocratically named Guy H. Lillian III. I’ve never met him, and he was not there, but he had sent in a LOC, by e-mail, in keeping this new century, and it was read aloud at the memorial: a poem from a novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick,. including the lines, “I must be gone/There is a grave.”

Following this was another longtime fan, Ken Gale, who for eleven years has run a radio show about comics. Gale reinforced what Brian Thomsen had earlier remarked about Schwartz’s underlying modesty about his achievements. Gale said that it was impossible to get Schwartz to set a date to talk about himself on the radio, but he would eagerly go on to talk about people he had worked with.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In his closing speech, Paul Levitz invoked the work of science fiction pioneer E. E. “Doc” Smith, whose Lensmen series was a major influence on Schwartz’s Silver Age Green Lantern. In that series, Levitz said, was a character like Schwartz, who was described as “one of the good aliens,” trying to make sure the humans got the help they needed, without taking credit.

His voice breaking twice in these closing comments, Levitz focused on Julius Schwartz as mentor. “Thank you, Julie,” he began, saying that he “began teaching me when I was six,” reading his first Schwartz-edited comic, The Atom #6. Though Paul “didn’t know your name,” he was “learning about heroism. . .modesty. . .courage,” through morals “soft-spoken in the back of stories,” not realizing he was being taught. Years later, when he was a DC staffer, Levitz “watched” as Schwartz “taught organizational skills,” “gravitas,” and more, “by example,” acting as the “model of what an editor should be.”

The very last speaker of the morning was Julie’s adult granddaughter, Andrea Hopkins, who told us it was “so overwhelmingly beautiful” to see how many people loved her grandfather. If we didn’t know about her and the rest of Julie’s family, it seems that they hadn’t known much about us until now, either. As she said, “he was very private.”

TAKING A STAND

The audience applauded Ms. Hopkins, the jazz recordings resumed, and the memorial had come to an end. It was 11:30, and for another half hour there was much communal milling about, both within the dark theater auditorium and in a well-lit room outside. People who hadn’t seen each other in a long time were talking, and perhaps the attendees did not really want the gathering to end so abruptly.

This was far from the last tribute to Julius Schwartz. There will surely be panels in his honor at comics conventions in the coming months. Moreover, in July and August, DC will publish eight tribute comics. Each one will have a cover, recreated by a present day artist, based on a Silver Age cover from a book that Schwartz edited. The cover images would often be devised first and then he and his writers constructed stories around those images. So, too, each of these tribute books will contain two eleven-page stories by leading comics writers and artists, based on Schwartz’s original cover imagery. The original cover will also be reprinted inside each book. (But shouldn’t each issue also contain a reprint of Schwartz’s original story, too, so that readers who don’t have collections of forty-year-old comics can witness the work of the master and see what all the fuss is about? Well, I can help remedy this: I have a future column in the works that critiques a number of classic Schwartz-edited stories. And probably I will review the tribute books later this year, as well.)

When it finally came time to leave the Clearview Cinema, we emerged into a greatly changed day: the clouds had appropriately lifted, it was brightly, beautifully sunny, the snow had all melted, and it was reasonably warm, as if spring had finally succeeded the long winter.

I was part of a group that decamped to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and ended up sitting across from, and meeting for the first time, Irene Vartanoff, another of the leading lights of the Silver Age Schwartz lettercols. As a fan, I greatly admired Irene’s work as I did Lillian’s and others, and was thrilled when Julie began printing my letters regularly, too, elevating me into this honorable circle: this was my first published work. Now, at the restaurant, I found myself contemplating the unexpected twists and turns that life takes: it is at once strange and very appropriate that I should finally meet Irene, finally put a face and voice to the name, at the memorial for the man we both wrote letters to decades ago. This is one of those incidents that seems to be evidence against the idea that life is merely a random series of accidents; is it being plotted?.

Irene made the point that Julie was our editor, too: that we knew we had to meet his high standards, to do our best work writing these reviews of his books, in order that he would print them in his letter columns. She’s right, and those letters were not just my first published work, but my first works of comics criticism. I went on to do more such work, in those oxymoronic entities, professional fanzines, which led in large part to my many years of work chronicling continuity for the Big Two, Marvel and DC, a satisfying way to make a living until recent years.

But the silver lining is that now I have returned to my Real Work: as a critic and historian of American comics and cartoon art, in this column, in my (unsigned) reviews for Publishers Weekly, in the course on comics as literature that I’ll be teaching at New York University this fall, and my work in books and documentaries (and I hope I do more of both). The “Comics in Context” column, my Abrams Marvel Universe book, and all of the rest of it are direct descendents of the letters I used to write to Julius Schwartz’s letters pages. As far as I’m concerned, among his many other contributions to comics and science fiction, he is also one of the fathers of comics criticism. This column exists because of Julius Schwartz. I write about comics as an artform because of him. When that moment came in Jack C. Harris’s speech, I stood up.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Comments: 1 Comment

One Response to “Comics in Context #32: The Living Legend” Rick B. Says: September 3rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm Thank you for this inspiring and enlightening remembrance. I had a basic grasp of Mr. Schwartz’s importance to our field, but very little knowledge of his contributions to science fiction and fandom. It’s encouraging to read about someone who kept both his professionalism and his passion alive for so long; and also good to see that the comics community has an appreciation of its artform’s history, and honors those who played such a critical part in it. Similarly, I was encouraged to read just today of Brad Meltzer, Joe Quesada, Brian Michael Bendis and others joining to found the Siegel & Shuster Society, to preserve Jerry Siegel’s home in Cleveland for its historical importance. (Maybe a topic for your column sometime?) Rick B. Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ