Comic Book Resources

‘I was thinking of kneecapping Paul Pope,’ Dorkin confesses

How do you ensure that an ambitious anthology involving more than a dozen creative teams comes out weekly without a hitch?

If you’re Wednesday Comics editor Mark Chiarello, you have a spare completed page waiting in the wings — just in case.

“I had an insurance page written and drawn just in case somebody didn’t come through so I could plug it in,” Chiarello told Comic Book Resources last week. “And it’s a Plastic Man page written by Evan Dorkin and drawn by Stephen DeStefano. And it’s just gorgeous and I’m just really sad that we’re not going to be able to use it.”

With the silence broken, Dorkin expressed “a bit of disappointment” that the Plastic Man strip wasn’t needed.

“I really wanted to see the strip in print, large, on newsprint, old school,” he wrote on his blog. “I was thinking of kneecapping Paul Pope or having Jimmy Palmiotti held captive for a week, but I couldn’t afford any minions and I’m too chickenshit to pull that kind of crap myself.”