Shipping Late, by Martha Thomases
This column is unusual in that I’m starting to write it in the doctor’s office. There’s no emergency – it’s just time for my annual mammogram and breast sonogram, and the doctors are running late.
My appointment was for 11 this morning. I arrived at 10:30 because I walked faster than I expected, and because I wanted to get the paperwork out of the way. Also, I’m compulsively early. My mother raised me to believe that if I’m not at least five minutes early, I’m inconveniencing everybody else. My grandmother took this a step further, waiting at the airport in New York before our plane had even taken off from Ohio.
I’ve been here for two hours.
The world is made up of people who are on time and people who are late. I imagine that we each drive the other bonkers. I know that, when I’m waiting for someone to arrive who is more than 15 minutes late (which is the window I allow because, hey, the subway could be screwed up), I’m furious that I might be missing something just because the person I’m waiting for doesn’t have the consideration to think my time is valuable.
I don’t know what people who are late are thinking, but I imagine they are thinking that life is so complicated, and there are so many things that demand their attention, and nothing ever comes out as they plan. Perhaps they also think that meeting times are just an estimate, and it’s no big deal if they are late. Perhaps they think I have nothing better to do than wait for them, and that it’s privilege enough to bask in their glory.
Oddly, I am not bothered when my comics are late. I know that retailers are annoyed – and worse, since it’s their money on the line – but I’m not. When I walk into the comic book store for my weekly fix, I don’t particularly care which books are available. I like enough different kinds of stories that I’ll be able to find something I’ll enjoy reading. Even if it’s a skip week, there will be something I haven’t read, or a new magazine.
DC Comics got a lot of press last year when they signed up bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to write their monthly [[[Wonder Woman]]] series – gallons of ink about her being the first female “regular writer” on the series, and about how this would finally catapult WW into the position DC keeps insisting she already has: a central, iconic figure whose comics people actually buy and read.
The past few months have brought a swell of attention to indie comics writer Elizabeth Genco, who scored a coup by having a story included in the Tori Amos Comic Book Tattoo collection from Image Comics, and then her graphic novel Blue — a modernization of the Bluebeard legend — sold well in part thanks to a plug from Brian Wood.
Lately, my wife Linda and I have been watching the Maverick
By my count, there are four good reasons to buy [[[The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives]]], now out from Vertigo.
Poking through the stack of manga to be reviewed, earlier this week, I noticed several books featuring characters with wings of one kind or another. Quick to sense a theme, I dragged them together, and here they are:
