Thanks for this.

D'Orazio claimed everyone had dirt on each other so it was kind of a checkmate situation. Paul Levitz I believe was friends with Carlin and when Harvey Stephenson accused Carlin of being racist he apparently took it quite personally.

The main problem was that like Hollywood it was a Boys club, and society as a whole kinda promoted the "oh it's just boys being boys". The video games industry, the film industry, hell even journalism had that problem (the film industry on a greater scale). Having more women in leadership will help but honestly it's kind of a manifestation of society (Indy Comix ALSO had a lot of misogyny and racism. Hell in some ways they were WORSE, as shown by most things Robert Crumb makes).

It's why movements such as Me Too are so important (and why Comicsgate and other movements are so disgusting). As society evolves DC and others will evolve with it, and the regressives will always try to turn back the clock.

I wouldn't want to speculate, without any evidence, as that gets pretty dangerous.  I know Julie Schwartz was accused of harassing behaviors to women, by Jill Thompson, and others, but he was retired by the 80s and made their little ambassador to fandom (which I also heard just perpetuated things in conventions.

Only thing I have every heard about Denny O'Neil was a drinking problem.

Kind of hard to pull up any name as "beloved," in the 80s.  Karen Berger was highly respected and built Vertigo; but "beloved" is not a term I have heard.  She is also female, but that doesn't preclude working with other women, but it would be a stretch.

You had guys like Andy Helfer and Kevin Dooley, Carlin, O'Neil, Dan Raspler, Joe Orlando (though I think he was promoted to other things, by the 80s), Berger, Len Wein, Roy Thomas, Mike Gold.  Those are off the top of my head.

Who knows?  Archie Goodwin was "beloved," but, I never heard anyone say a bad thing about him, at any point in his career, male or female.

I do know that in The Comic Book Rebels, Colleen Doran talked about an editor at a company (unnamed) booked her into his hotel room, at a convention and she slept in the hotel lobby, instead.  She talked of being harassed (while underage, as she started, professionally, at 15) at conventions and would bring along her mother, to help shield her and they would harass her mother, too.  She had several anecdotes, without naming names.  Then, Richard Pini tried to steal her copyright, for A Distant Soil, as did Donning/Starblaze, when they did the albums.  Pini had other fingers pointed at him over business practices, at WaRP, though just business and not harassment and I never came across any mention of such things relating to Wendy.

I want to say that Mike Richardson's (Dark Horse publisher and owner) Between the Panels had something about a few notorious editors, including one who was a predator of underage girls, and another who liked to talk to young talent and claim he could make them a superstar.

Gary Brodsky, of Solson (son of Sol Brodsky, hence the company name), was a real piece of work, even after imploding, in comics.

Then, there is Gerard Jones.



Crimson Avenger artist Greg Brooks murdered his wife, Elizabeth Kessler, but it got even weirder.  Elizabeth Kessler wasn't her real name, but the identity of a college roommate!  She also had a child from a previous relationship, who was in her mother's custody, that no one who worked with her (she did some coloring work at DC) knew about.

D'Orazio mentions Eddie Berganza being in her corner behind the scenes - one of the first to warn her to "watch her back" around Carlin.  Though I haven't really followed modern comics in over 20 years, I knew that name sounded familiar.  A quick check confirms that, yep, Eddie Berganza also rose to prominence within the company becoming an Executive Editor in 2010 (after Carlin's period of harassment - well, period of harassment covered here) and, yep, Eddie Berganza too was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.  He was demoted in 2012 to Group Editor of the Superman and Wonder Woman titles after a series of incidents and if you want to know what DC did about the fact that as Group Editor he'd be in a position of power over women he could continue to sexually harass, here you go:


In 2010, hearing that Berganza was up for a promotion, at least five people reported their concerns to Human Resources, with at least one saying she didn’t feel safe working with him. Regardless, DC promoted Berganza to executive editor a few months later. This meant that fewer people would be reporting to him, so it was a promotion that isolated him from most potential victims. But not all:

A few months later, DC launched a reboot of its superhero universe. Marsham then was a coordinating editor, which required her to be in often daylong closed-door meetings with a handful of senior editorial staff — all men — including Berganza. She was horrified. She sought out Harras, the editor-in-chief, and asked if Berganza was now officially supervising every book in the DC Universe. Harras, who Marsham said knew about her encounter with Berganza, confirmed that he was.

“You know I can’t edit books that [Berganza] has oversight on,” Marsham said she told Harras. “I guess I just won’t be able to edit any books.”

Harras, she recalled, didn’t protest. He asked if she was OK with that.

After that conversation, Marsham stopped editing books.


I don’t know anything about working at DC other than what I read on the internet, but if this is true, it’s pretty damning. If you have someone on staff that people don’t feel safe working with, the correct response is not to allow your staff to avoid him at the cost of their own careers. The correct response is to remove him or at the very least make it clear that he will be monitored at all times, and defend the rights of everyone else to do their jobs without harassment. DC apparently failed at this. As Alex De Campi wrote in 2015:

Now, the Superman office allegedly employs no women, and a cursory glance over the mastheads of several Superman titles and Wonder Woman seems to confirm that allegation. The reason, I’ve been told by several people who work or used to work at DC, is because one of the most senior editors is a sexual harasser with multiple incidents on his HR file.

Here’s what journalist and former DC staffer Heidi MacDonald had to say around the same time:

There are at least three editors who worked at DC comics while I was there who had complaints filed against them with HR. I know this because the people who filed the reports told me this directly. Over the years very few female staffers would be hired by DC editorial and the constant weirdness and inappropriate behavior drove most of them away, or led them to question themselves so much that their work suffered and they had to leave. Because women can’t handle drawing superhero comics, you know. I was told that by my supervisor when I worked at DC. Yep.

smashpages.net/2017/11/13/missing-the-point-the-eddie-berganza-story/



Julie Schwartz, Mike Carlin, Eddie Berganza - you know something's wrong when Mort Weisigner starts looking like a saint in comparison to his successors.

I feel like I need to wash my eyes and also want to bounce a few heads against some walls, before putting a foot 6 feet up their @$$.

Here's the thing; you might hear someone say, well why didn't you go to HR? HR Departments exist to protect the company, not the employees. If the company wants to bury this away, they will, instead of making examples of the perpetrators and exile them to some ice flow somewhere to die as the sad, pathetic little ba$%@&*s they are.

I saw too much of this kind of thing in the military, from an organizational myopia. We had to sit through the same , badly produced sexual harassment training film and it was just the most blatant examples of things, which anyone would recognize as harassment. And then people crack jokes that are insulting. The Tailhook incident occurs. For the uninitiated, the Tailhook Association was a group of naval aviators (John McCain was an early member) and they had these annual conventions with juvenile behavior. Normally, they had strippers and things for their amusement. Bad enough, but at least they are paid for putting up with these idiots. After the Gulf War victory, they had a huge gathering in Las Vegas, in a complex where a couple of professional conferences were going on. There were multiple accounts of harassment, from verbal to physical groping. There were hospitality suites with with leg shaving and other semi-intimate things going on. Women from other conferences were subjected to "gauntlets." An admiral's aid, a woman with a promising career, was assaulted. She went to the admiral and heard "boys will be boys." She wasn't taking that and took it up the chain of command. The noise led to investigations. The Secretary of the Navy had to resign, because they were in attendance. A couple of senior ranks had to resign. However, at the end of everything, the official report (which we got at Barnes & Nobel, after I first started working there), detailed all of the reported incidents (somewhere around 80 individual incidents). Not a single person faced a court martial. Nothing harsher than a letter of reprimand appeared in anyone's service record. The officers at the Naval Station, Charleston, had to assemble in the base auditorium for a lecture from the base commander, where he proceeded to make statements about junior officers not acting with decorum and such. I sat there and thought, but didn't voice, "What about all of the officers at or above the rank of lieutenant commander? There were tons of them, involved at every level. Junior officers follow the example set by their superiors, just as a child mimics the behavior of their parents. No one was holding leadership accountable. I was already soured on a military career after the Iowa incident and the cover-up and hatchet job that was the investigation and my own experiences on my first ship, with a dysfunctional wardroom. Tailhook cemented my decision (mostly it just confirmed what I had all but put in writing) that I didn't want to be a part of this organizational insanity. I knew plenty of professionals who did their job without being a-holes and predators; but, I wasn't proud of the organization that was running things, then.

I've seen this mentality at a couple of companies, at different levels. In one case, once upper management was aware, the situation was resolved. At another, they had bigger troubles and I got the hell out of there, before the whole thing collapsed on me. Dysfunctional organizations can really damage good people.

My God.

It seems endemic in almost every type of entertainment industry.