Paul Levitz Remarks on Joining the Fund Board

Following the announcement of his election to the board of directors of the CBLDF at last night's RRP dinner in Baltimore, Paul Levitz delivered the following remarks:

An anecdote, from the early days of comics fandom, by way of explaining why I feel the CBLDF is important.

In the early 1970's, in New York, there were monthly, small, dealers' room-only cons called Second Sunday held in a midtown hotel ballroom. If memory serves, it was around 1973 when these events happened.

A good friend of mine had one of the larger tables selling an eclectic selection of art books relating to comics, print sets, the fancier fan publications like WitzEnd, undergrounds, and the like; I had one of the smaller set-ups, selling my fanzines and those of friends like Nick Landau and Gary Groth. One particular Second Sunday, my friend sold an underground to a young person he thought was of age, and a few minutes later found himself arrested and charged with selling obscene material to a minor.

Over the next year while he battled the charges, my friend was suspended from the part of his work he loved best: he was an English teacher, and he was pulled from the classroom and made to do administrative busy work in what amounted to a holding pen far from his school and students. I was never in his classes, but he often edited my writing and we had spent time discussing creativity and language, and I can tell you he must have been a great English teacher ... and having had Frank McCourt as one of my teachers for the subject, I'm a pretty tough judge.

He twiddled his thumbs at the desk job, and soon gave up "teaching" since real teaching had been taken from him. He threw all his energies into his hobby, and before long, it was a real business. But even after the charges were long settled, and he'd done far better financially from being an entrepreneur than he'd ever have done teaching, he still missed the classroom and the kids to the end of his days.

His name was Phil Seuling, and for the new folks reading this, the business he threw his effort into was SeaGate Distributors, the first direct distributor of comics, and the model for all that came after.

It's a good thing for us that Phil made the best of his bad situation, but, I'm certain that SeaGate would have happened in one incarnation or another anyway. And I'm sure that he would have been happier to continue teaching.

But his case was as outrageous as anything the CBLDF has to deal with. Was as set up as anything the CBLDF has to deal with. Was as serious as anything the CBLDF has to deal with. So it is an honor to be enlisted to serve on the board of this organization.