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Julius Schwartz as Silver Age Architect

Some descriptions of the Silver Age of Comics often overlook the role that DC Comics played in modifying the superhero comics medium. However, once one starts looking past the most obvious names (like Lee, Kirby, and Ditko), some changes beyond the shared-universe/continuity model and comics-as-soap-opera become important defining traits.

While fawning over the star-spanning races Jack Kirby (and, presumably, Stan Lee) created over at Atlas / Marvel, we tend to forget that the bug-eyed alien had become such a frequent visitor in DC stories that editors saw little inappropriate about inflicting chromatically-mismatched extraterrestrials on even characters like Batman, whose core concept clashed with flying saucers, antennae, and crania that look like exposed brains. DC planted both feet firmly in science fiction concepts even as Atlas sought a direction it would find by becoming Marvel, and Julius Schwartz had much to do with this development. As such, Schwartz, already in middle age at the onset of the Silver Age, played a principal role as an Architect of the Silver Age.

Fandom in the Pre-Comics Age

Julius Schwartz, born in the Bronx in 1915, would live an early life in geographical proximity to the New York centers of the publishing industry, whose physical nearness may have helped shape his future inclinations as a literary agent and editor.

Schwartz, before entering the comics business, had already developed a taste for science fiction. During his youth, the original science fiction market first dawned with the first science fiction pulp magazines. Schwartz made his first connection to fellow science fiction fan and Bronx resident Mort Weisinger from a recruiting letter in a science fiction magazine.

Schwartz and Weisinger became engrossed with both the content of science fiction magazines and with the details usually unavailable to the reader in the street, such as biographical information about the authors of this (then) limited backwater genre, and they created a fan magazine on the subject, which exposed them to other science fiction fans, including Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

As with many comics fans today, Schwartz wanted to work in the business, and the information and connections they made doing a fanzine and amateur science fiction magazine ultimately led to work for Schwartz as an agent.

Schwartz founded the Solar Sales Service in 1934, a literary agency specializing in science fiction material, a function he performed until 1944.

The Bester Connection

Schwartz, as a literary agent, represented writers such as Alfred Bester, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury at early points in their careers.

Pulp literature and its descendants, including comics and fantasy and science fiction books and magazines, however, did not (and do not) always offer enough work for those who create them. At some point, science fiction author Alfred Bester, one of Schwartz' clients, realized this, and sought some extra work in comics. Through Schwartz' earlier connection to Weisinger, he managed to introduce Bester to Golden Age talents such as Bill Finger (co-creator of Batman and the original Green Lantern).

Schwartz, at this point - the early forties - had not yet taken an interest in comics. However, Bester, after taking an assignment as a writer of Green Lantern stories, recommended that Schwartz experiment with writing comics; and, as he tells the story, became a comics writer after a successful interview with Sheldon Meyer mere hours after reading his first comics on the subway to the interview for the position.

In 1944, then, Schwartz took his first position with DC Comics, within editorial roles that he would hold for a startling 45 years, a period including some of the Golden Age and a year or two after Crisis on Infinite Earths.

From there, further networking would draw him into a circle of talent including figures like Gardner Fox.

Schwartz as Editor

Schwartz claims to have written perhaps three complete comics scripts in his career (plus a number of short fill-in pieces, perhaps of the character of the "Flash Facts" feature on science fact), but this belies another role he mentions in the context of his more well-known functions as an editor: he co-plotted many pieces in the Golden and Silver Ages of comics, including early Flash and Hawkman pieces.

Schwartz stood as editor of the entire Superman line of books for a sixteen-year stretch, something almost incomprehensible in this age of downsizing, turnover, editorial shakeup, and terminations that follow tiny changes in the stock market.

Anecdotes he tells suggest he possessed an essential property of an editor worth his salt: He knew how to inspire the imaginations of his writers. For instance, he regularly played a game of wits with Gardner Fox where he would contrive a ridiculous or impossible trap to place Batman in, then adjourn for lunch, waiting for Fox to provide an answer about how Batman might escape. In these contests, he tended to get both the answer he sought and a lunch he didn't have to pay for.

Schwartz also made decisions that reflected the changes in the industry. As superheroes lost their ability to sell comics, Schwartz presided over the transition of All-American Comics (home of the Golden Age Green Lantern) to All-American Western; of All-Star Comics to a western title as well; of Sensation to a mystery title; and of Star-Spangled Comics to a war title.

He stood in a perfect place to witness the double-action blow to the industry - first, the dying-off of first-generation comics concepts (such as most of the Golden Age superheroes), and second, the impact of public and political scrutiny of the comics industry entire that subjected it to a hostile regulation that, while making the product noticeably less lurid, also managed to drive out talent, publishers, and readers, forcing a second implosion of the market.

At this point, Schwartz stood on one of the fulcra of comics history. He played the role of doctor to an ailing patient. To help get comics back on their feet, Schwartz turned back to his early roots in science fiction and gave DC Comics a conceptual transfusion that would help maintain that company's health through a bad time for the market.

Science Fiction Maven for DC

With DC's growing awareness that Strange Adventures seemed to do well in sales and in the esteem of fans, Schwartz received the necessary permissions from his superiors to proceed with Mystery in Space, a second science fiction title. In its first issue, it featured a single story with Frank Frazetta art. Schwartz would encounter a number of talents who would come to do short pieces of work and then go on to greater fame, leaving him wishing he had enticed them to leave behind more pieces before moving on.

His roots as a science fiction fan and agent became more important from this stage on; he would influence not only DC's science fiction pieces of the 1950s, but would also place a stamp on the creations of DC's superhero-revival of the mid-to-late 1950s. He would drive innovations of a seminal quality (meaning that they inspired other innovations in a domino effect); he would do much to create the nutrient bath of ideas that allowed the Silver Age to happen.

From ill-fated fifties superheroes like Captain Comet to more robust figures like the Martian Manhunter, and through the persistence of titles like Mystery in Space (which would beget Adam Strange, an endearing Silver Age fixture), observers of DC in the fifties would note the encroachment of science fiction into its output. Even strange places like Batman titles began to feature the alien-du jour.

By the time DC really got back into the superhero game, with a series of remade heroes that owed less to magical origins than to natures that partook of science fiction convention, Schwartz' impact showed through as something impossible to deny.

The Silver Age Superhero Revival

Conventional history of the origins of the Silver Age of Comics frequently cites Stan Lee (generally in a golf-course conversation) considering experiments with superhero books based on the success of DC's revival characters and titles, such as the refurbished or recycled versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom, and, possibly, footnote characters like Aquaman and Green Arrow. As such, the "Marvel Revolution" occurred as an echo of DC's Silver Age. The revised Atom, though mostly the work of Gil Kane, nonetheless bore Schwartz' imprint, both in the science-fiction nature of his origin (powers derived from white dwarf star matter) and in the name of his alter ego, Ray Palmer. Schwartz took the name from a Captain Marvel and Superman writer whom he had met through his fan magazine in the 1930s.

Schwartz, in a number of cases, provided the key "why don't we?" questions that started DC back into the business of creating superheroes. He had witnessed the heyday of the superhero in the forties, and had seen his near-extinction after the end of the Second World War. He made the decisions that led to the refurbishment of the Flash and of Green Lantern, and furthermore came up with the notion for the Justice League, the piece most influential in Stan Lee's decision to attempt superheroes again at the ruins of Timely (what became Atlas Comics, and, later, Marvel Comics).

All this defines Schwartz as a figure of importance on a scale to Lee in the developments of the Silver Age, inasmuch as Schwartz' concepts provided the ground in which Lee's metaconcepts (such as the redefinition of the superhero and the creation of a new comics editorial model) could flourish.

Schwartz as Legend

In the eighties, in the last years of Schwartz' editorial career, he began accumulating a number of awards that represented achievements he could tally from even before his entry into the comics business in 1944. The Fandom Hall of Fame Award, the Forry Award recognized his work in science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, and the Alley, Eagle, Inkpot, Jules Verne, and Shazam awards would proclaim his achievements in comics in the second half of that century.

When, at the end of the eighties, Schwartz stepped down from his role as an editor - men do, after all, hope to retire sometime - he nonetheless retained a role as "consultant" at DC Comics, and, perhaps more significantly, gleaned the status of DC's "goodwill ambassador," a role from which he acts as official mouthpiece of DC's history at conventions and public speaking engagements. He had survived the contraction of comics at the end of the Golden Age. He had survived the culling of talent at the end of the sixties that had brought in a younger generation of talent (such as Dennis O'Neil, Dick Giordano, and Neal Adams). He had survived the rise and fall of Carmine Infantino, and had even survived the complete revision of DC's inherited history that appeared as Perez' and Wolfman's Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Schwartz, by that day, had, like some of the characters he routinely worked with, climbed to an iconic role in the mythos of comics (as seen from the production side). And, furthermore, he would ultimately become the material of comics himself, thanks to the absurdist vision of Keith Giffen.

Giffen can conceal truth in some of the silliest places, if you know how to look. In Ambush Bug Nothing Special #1, way back in 1992, he crafted a plot where Ambush Bug couldn't find a job and sought to achieve vocational success by toppling, and replacing, Julius Schwartz as DC's Goodwill Ambassador. The story left Ambush Bug realizing he could never unseat Schwartz in this role - even time travel into the future until the end of time forced the Bug to face the role that Schwartz would live forever and hold the role forever.

If one can truly reverse engineer meaning from Giffen's story, one can note in Ambush Bug's despair that Schwartz, indeed, enjoyed just some such honorary status with DC Comics. The mockery in the content pointed mainly to the mock-epic character of making comics become important to an extent beyond their effect on the real world. Nonetheless, Schwartz, by the nineties, enjoyed a kind of patriarchal status in relation to modern comic books.