I should be heading home to watch a full night of television (Prison Break, Heroes, Studio 60), but instead I'm sitting here typing out another message just for you. I guess I still feel guilty about having that one week off a little while back.
Anyway, it feels a little bit like I've been playing defense on this blog for the last little while. Which is natural, I guess--the ideas for what to write about on a given day come from what's being talked about out in the world, and how I respond to it. But in the same way I don't want this to be some mindless shill-fest, I also don't want it to become "Tom Justifies It All."
At the end of the day, these are good problems to have. Not everybody gets the opportunity to do a job like this one--I get to live the dream, every day. And sure, some days it's the kind of dream you have after eating a big, spicy sandwich, but more often than not it's pretty durned cool.
I just got an advance copy of STAN LEE MEETS SPIDER-MAN, which should be on sale this Wednesday. Now, nobody's going to mistake this comic book for great literature, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun. And I got to work with Stan on it, and Joss Whedon as well--plus I was able to finagle two pages out of Fred Hembeck for it. It's also pretty likely that I'm going to hear back from Stan once he has a chance to look over the copy we sent out to him today, which is cool all by itself. (Hopefully I got his name spelled right...)
And most of the lettering is in on CIVIL WAR: CHOOSING SIDES. We pulled this special together in just about no time at all--thirty days from package to plate. (And by we, I man all of the folks in and around my office, including Andy Schmidt, Warren Simons, Aubrey Sitterson and Molly Lazer.)And it looks and reads really, really well--I think people will be pleasantly surprised by it
And best of all, it looks as though the remaining holes in my editorial office have been filled, which means I'll be able to move ahead with my overall planning for 2007 in just a few weeks' time. The departure of Mike Marts caused a ripple effect up and down the editorial department, but now that we seem to have everything shaken out, I can start devoting some time and energy to the new books that'll start coming out of my office.
Finally, if you want to avoid another blather-filled entry like this one, what I could really use are a couple of topics you'd like to see me sound off on. I know people have asked questions in the past in the comments sections of earlier posts, but it's always a pain to try to dig those out days after the fact--which is wy, when I do answer them, I tend to do so the day after they were posted. Doesn't mean I don't want to hear the suggestions, just that I'm lazy about it. So if you post your topics and questions here, I'll at least know where to look for them.
More later.
Tom B
