On Lateness (Mine and Others)

Sorry we haven't been around much the last week or so -- I was on vacation in Florida, and while you might think that vacation would be a fantastic time to do some heavy-duty comics blogging, the fact of the matter was I didn't feel like doing much of anything that required much mental effort. (Please save your "this blog couldn't require much mental effort" jokes, thank you.)

I'm also seriously behind on reading other comics blogs. My RSS reader has hundreds of posts for me to work through just under my "comics" label, but I hope to catch up on that over the next few days. Hell, Caleb at Every Day Is Like Wednesday by himself had something like 25 posts for me to get through. Damn you people and your consistent blogging!

Speaking of Caleb: as I'm trying to catch up, I'm finding a couple of good reads out there, including Caleb's post on how editorial should handle the late-shipping-comics epidemic which lines up pretty well with my views on the subject. For special projects, fill-ins aren't an option; would anyone really want to see an issue of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder by the fill-in team of, say, Fabian Niceiza and Mike McKone? Those guys could probably craft a really solid Batman story I'd love to read in one of the regular Batman books, but people buying ASBaRtBW do so mainly because of Frank Miller and Jim Lee -- they're not looking for just an out-of-continuity Batman story, but rather a Batman story by Miller and Lee. And that's totally cool by me. I'm willing to wait for creators I like, though I'll admit the year between issues of ASBaRtBW was juuuust a little ridiculous.

The line from Caleb which most got me nodding my head in assent:

The first thing you do is that you only hire professionals with strong reputations of meeting their deadlines for the creative rosters on these books.

Bingo. Why would DC, for instance, hitch their Wonder Woman wagon to a writer they know has a time-intensive day job (Allan Heinberg) which will have to take precedence over side-project comics writing, exponentially increasing the likelihood of lateness? It's not like Heinberg's run on Young Avengers, as much as I liked it, was known for its punctuality. And they followed up that mistake by effectively wasting best-selling author Jodi Piccoult ("best-selling novelist" being another time-intensive day job) by asking her to write the book when it's in the middle of a nightmarishly bad crossover event. They've finally done what they should have done in the first place: bringing in Gail Simone, a professional who's repeatedly proven she can consistently bring in quality scripts on time. (Plus, c'mon, Simone on Wonder Woman's a no-brainer. Perfect fit.)

Anyway, Caleb's got much more to say on the subject than I've got time for right now, and I agree with most of his opinions on this topic, so go read his post. Go. Now. C'mon, shoo, get off'a my porch.