Things to come, by Elayne Riggs
This is the time of year when people usually start to compile "best of" lists and recaps. But as 2007 has been more "the worst of times" for me than "the best of times," I prefer to look forward. After all, as Criswell once "predicted" in a hardly-memorable Ed Wood film, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!"
Crystal ball gazing also helps if you have the retention level of a hyperactive gnat, which I’m afraid is the case for me. I don’t tend to get worked up over details in comic books or TV shows or movies because most entertainment is ephemeral to me; I just don’t feel I need to keep all the minutiae in my head. It carries the added advantage of making rereading the same book a lot more fun to me, a constant surprise as I encounter things again that I didn’t remember from the last time I read them.
In the land of graphic literature, at least in this country, Diamond’s magazine Previews is the only consumer choice in terms of moving from baseless speculation about what may or may not happen in monthly story installments months down the line (that’s more the realm of comics "news" sites, which often busy themselves in breathlessly extolling events yet to happen to the detriment of examining current comics) to actually planning out and ordering one’s reading of choice for the foreseeable future (say, two months down the line). Time was, order forms were the sole purview of retailers. Of course, time was when Previews wasn’t the only game in town. Not that the disappearance of competitors like Capital City and Heroes World constitutes anything like a monopoly for Diamond! At least not according to the antitrust investigation, which didn’t consider comics as separate from other literature. In any case, with all the major companies sewn up with exclusives and treated as Premier customers (some pigs being more equal than other pigs), Previews is the only choice now for readers who wish to support their local retailers, as well as for publishers who want to reach audiences they can’t afford to grow on their own (even in this age of online ordering). Unfortunately, Diamond doesn’t accept every comic published into the hallowed pages of Previews, so now more than ever it pays to see what’s out there in the virtual world, but online content distribution is another column entirely.
Everyone has a story – at least one. Every human life could be told in some way, to illustrate a point, or evoke an emotion, or just entertain an audience. 
attempts to tell some of those stories, or to create stories based on tiny pieces of real people’s lives, almost randomly – to invent stories out of the smallest of seeds.
