A Prickly Situation

Some things you’re just better off not knowing.

DC made a bunch of more executive changes and appointments this week. About a month back, Bob Harras was named the new Editor in Chief. This week he named off the new editorial staff that will be working under him. First off, Eddie Berganza was named Executive Editor for the DC Universe. We’re very excited by this as Berganza has been the long time editor on the Green Lantern books as well as editor of most of the major events in the last couple of years starting with Infinite Crisis all the way to the very well organized Blackest Night. Along with his new duties as executive editor, he’ll continue to be the editor for Green Lantern and JLA. He’ll also be the editor for the Flashpoint event next year.

The existing editors for Vertigo and Mad Magazine will be staying on in their roles. I know that some people have complained that Vertigo has declined in recent years under Karen Berger’s editorial leadership, but Kris and I aren’t that concerned. If Vertigo is going to continue to stay focused on creator owned works, then they’re going to be taking some risks with innovative and new titles. Not every one of these titles can be a huge success. For every American Vampire and Sweet Tooth, we’re going to have several titles with mediocre sales that nobody’s interested in. If Vertigo didn’t take the risk and put those titles out, then we might never have discovered these gems and their authors. Both Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire are now writing mainstream DCU titles (Detective Comics and Superboy, respectively) to critical success.

The other big news is that Mark Chiarello has been promoted to the newly created position of Vice President of Art Direction & Design. I’m not 100% sure what this new position would entail, but it will involve “establishing the style, visual look and graphic design across all of DC’s imprints.” One way to interpret that is somehow trying to create a consistent visual style across all of the books. I’m sure it’s a simplistic way to look at it, but I feel like doing more than stuff like “Superman should always be taller than Batman” and making sure a character’s costume stays consistent would dampen the artistic freedoms of the artists, lessening the books. It’ll be interesting to see what exactly this means, but with Chiarello’s pedigree of editorial art direction ofver titles like Batman:Hush, DC: The New Frontier, and Wednesday Comics I think they found the right man for the job.

New comics didn’t come out until Thursday this week. I had to work late and Kris was tired after a hard day, so neither of us were able to pick up our comics. We’ll read them over the weekend and have our pull list thoughts for you on Monday.