In the mid-fifties, nothing was selling well at DC Comics. The marketplace was so fragile that Publisher Jack Liebowitz was afraid of launching new comics for fear that they might all flop and further injure retailer confidence. The solution, conceived by Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld, was a new book called Showcase wherein they could try out concepts before perhaps launching them as full-fledged, ongoing books. The task of filling this book rotated between the various DC editors, and a kind of competition erupted among them. It was most intense between Mort Weisinger, who edited the Superman titles, and Jack Schiff, who helmed the Batman books. DC then had no editor-in-chief and the two men both coveted the post. Each sought to prove his commercial skills by midwifing the first Showcase feature that proved worthy of graduating to a regular book. As it happened, Weisinger's first Showcase effort (Fire Fighters) flopped but he got DC to okay a regular book of his second, Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, the same month they also launched Schiff's new acquisition, Challengers of the Unknown. Partly because they'd more-or-less tied, and partly because one would have quit if the other got the job, DC never did name an editor-in-chief that decade or the next.
But in hindsight, the guy who really won that contest was Julius Schwartz. His contender, The Flash, was the third Showcase feature to get its own book but it was the one that demonstrated the most editorial savvy. Lois Lane was just an extension of a book that was already DC's top, and Challengers was a book Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had created outside of DC and just handed to Schiff. Schwartz had actually worked with writers and artists to develop The Flash out of a then-worthless property. More to the point, The Flash gave DC a new franchise and a new direction. There were no spin-offs from Challengers, and Lois Lane — though successful — actually seemed to be drawing some of its sales from the Superman title. Schwartz's Flash, however, outlasted both books and pointed the way to DC's future. Which may explain why Julius Schwartz's tenure as a DC editor far outlasted both Weisinger's and Schiff's.