(hangs head in shame)

I disagree about the story, though: I think the current direction is great, and but for Urru's lousy artwork, I think Lynch's stuff is of a piece with the writing in season 5 (which is possibly the highest compliment I can pay).

Just more of the same old lame storylines, sold at high prices. At least when they only cost 50 cents, I could enjoy it as mindless entertainment. But at $3.00+ a pop, these comic companies HAVE to do better than this lazy, unimaginative crap they pump out month after month.

If you're thinking of the paint splatter guy in the loft howling because his feelings can't be rushed, yer thinking of the movies. Like they say on AICN, Artistic Soul's Gotta Eat.

You like movies? Very few spec scripts get made, so the screenwriter has a deadline and if he or she doesn't make it, the producer can get 100,000 people to step up and take the job (including many of us right here). The director, even if its' Scorsese, has some sort of deadline.

What about the late Stanley Kubrick, Mr. Maverik?

Buzz lights a smoke. "Glad you asked that, Timmy. Even Stanley Kubrick. Sure, he went way over schedule, but he was Stanley Kubrick, not some guy drawing Ultimate Man Thing, however talented that artist is. And his vision was compromised for it. If Mr. Kubrick would have wanted to cast Sydney Pollack and some vaguely European actress, he wouldn't have originally filmed their parts with Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Also, actor's careers were damaged. Anthony Michael Hall is doing okay with THE DEAD ZONE series and all, but his career (and Matthew Modines) may have taken different courses if he'd played Sgt. Joker in FULL METAL JACKET, etc.

Certainly, novelists have deadlines. There's marketing and competition to consider.

Musicians have to think of their own careers. I think we're waiting more for democracy in China instead of CHINESE DEMOCRACY.

So comic book boy isn't painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo had deadline!) or sculpting Mt. Rushmore (deadline-- if nothing else, the guy wanted to finish before he died, right?). He's pro. So he should quit surfing the net and playing video games and start drawing. And we need to quit making excuses for these guys.

But it's not only the artist missing the deadline. The publisher is screwing up by not bringing in another artist to get their books out. Comic publishers have accepted a far more limited market (i.e. addicts who HAVE to buy comics) than they did in the past. And we accept the limitations and enable them to happen.

It's actually Stan Lee's fault. He created personality in comic publishing (sorta based on Bill Gaine's EC pages, but...). Now, we think Hitch is our buddy. And the artists still think, "Well, Liefield got away with it..." even though everyone is going to distance themselves from RL in every other possible way...