Oh, by Dennis O’Neil
Sunday, August 17: 155 days left.
Our man the brush clearer is back in Crawford, taking it easy. Having already set a record for presidential vacation days, he’s obviously trying for a record that no future chief executive can possibly hope to break. This may not be how everyone would like to be remembered.
Back when I occupied the celestial throne that is the sinecure of all those noble beings known – here you may genuflect – as editors … make that Editors – this was the time of year when life got calmer. Big travel was done – no trips to distant cities to attend conventions – and the increased summer publishing load completed. We put out fewer issues in the fall because, conventional wisdom had it, the kids were too busy with school concerns to bother with funny books. The same logic dictated that during the summer we cram the newsstands because, presumably, the nation’s youth had nothing better to do with their long, humid days than to laze around getting massive four-color fixes and, besides, since they didn’t have to buy crayons or switchblades or whatever school kids bought, they had disposable income to spend on our productions. Which, of course, was why late spring and early summer demanded industriousness from editorial types. Those printing presses out there in the Midwest were maws…
All that was probably true once. But because the ways comics are marketed, and to some extent read, I doubt that it is true now. But I don’t know. Any editors – working editors, that is – care to enlighten the old man?
The point is, though I was a comics editor at the two major companies for about 23 years… I don’t know. I have a sense that the business has changed a lot in the seven years since I occupied the celestial throne mentioned three paragraphs ago (seven years already?). My skills might be more-or-less okay (though I’m not even sure of that), but my attitudes and assumptions would need work.
Over at io9, the website’s resident comics expert Graeme McMillan has put together a nice analysis of the events leading up to the current "World’s End" relaunch of DC’s Wildstorm line. I was pleasantly surprised by the recent issues #1 of Wildcats and The Authority — mainly because I’ve been a fan of both these series for quite a while and been both terribly excited and subsequently disappointed by prior attempts at re-establishing the universe around each series.
In today’s brand-new episode of 
Over at The Beat, Heidi MacDonald ignited quite the debate (to the tune of more than 50 comments, last I checked) when she posted a cover image from the third issue of Final Crisis, featuring a midriff-and-miniskirt Supergirl looking very uncertain about something, and headlined "Math is hard."
Flight, Volume Five
