Dear MS in Publishing Community,

raskinIt gives me great pleasure to announce that Paul Levitz will serve as Visiting David Pecker Distinguished Professor for the academic year 2014-15.

Paul Levitz was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1956, and entered the comics industry in 1971 as editor/publisher of The Comic Reader, the first mass-circulation fanzine devoted to comics news.  He continued to publish TCR for three years, winning two consecutive annual Comic Art Fan Awards for Best Fanzine.   He received Comic-con International’s Inkpot Award in 2002, the prestigious Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award in 2008, the Comics Industry Appreciation Award from ComicsPro (the trade association of comic shop retailers) in 2010, and the Dick Giordano Humanitarian Award from the Hero Initiative in 2013.  Levitz also serves on the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and BOOM! Studios.

paullevitzLevitz is primarily known for his work for DC Comics, where he has written most of their classic characters including the Justice Society, Superman in both comics and the newspaper strip, and acclaimed runs on The Legion of Super-Heroes.  Readers of The Buyers’ Guide voted his Legion: The Great Darkness Saga one of the 20 best comic stories of the last century, and visitors to the site comicbookresources.com selected the same story as #11 of the Top 100 Comic Book Stories of All Time.  DC Comics issued a new hardcover edition of Legion: The Great Darkness Saga in 2010, the first of his four appearances on the New York Times’ Graphic Books BestSeller List, including his recent THE SILVER AGE OF DC COMICS (Taschen, 2013), making him the only writer to appear on that list for both fiction and non-fiction.

Cumulatively, Levitz has written over 400 stories with sales of over 25 million copies, and translations into over 20 languages.  They have been collected in over 20 graphic novel volumes.  As a DC staffer from 1973, Levitz was an assistant editor, the company’s youngest editor ever, and in a series of business capacities, became Executive Vice President & Publisher in 1989 and then served as President & Publisher from 2002-2009.  He continues as a consultant to DC parent company Warner Bros., but is now concentrating on his writing.

His recent writing projects include Taschen’s 75 YEARS OF DC COMICS: THE ART OF MODERN MYTHMAKING, published for holiday, 2010, which has won the comics industry’s Oscar, the Eisner Award, as well as the United powerofcomicsKingdom’s prestigious Eagle Award and Germany’s Peng Award.  Over 2013-2014 this mammoth volume is being revised and republished as five separate volumes, beginning with THE GOLDEN AGE OF DC COMICS.  His WILL EISNER: CHAMPION OF THE GRAPHIC NOVEL is forthcoming from Abrams ComicArts in 2015.

Levitz has joined Professors Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith as the third author on the revised edition of THE POWER OF COMICS (Continuum, 2014), the first college-level textbook on the subject.

He has spoken at M.I.T., Columbia Business School, George Washington Law School, the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and delivered keynote addresses at the Digital Kids conference, the Frankfurt Book Fair, Comic-Con International, and Wuhan University’s digital publishing conference last fall.  He has been teaching “Writing For Media” at Manhattanville College since 2010, “Comics and Graphic Novels” and “Transmedia and The Future of Publishing” for Pace University’s M.S. in Publishing program and “The American Graphic Novel” in Columbia University’s American Studies program.

Mr. Levitz will work closely with our Pace Publishing students and present two major lectures during the year. The Pace faculty welcome Mr. Levitz and look forward to working with him.

Best,

Sherman Raskin

“I’m extremely honored to be appointed to the Visiting David Pecker Distinguished Professorship, which is a true highlight to my second career in academia.  Working with the committed and energetic students and faculty at Pace’s M.S. in Publishing Program has been delightful, and it will be my pleasure to expand my involvement with them.  I couldn’t have written a piece of fiction with such a pleasant twist for someone who’s lived my life.” -Paul Levitz