Tom Spurgeon interviews Valerie D'Orazio, a former editor at Acclaim Comics and then DC who's gone on to create the must-read Occasional Superheroine blog and currently serves as the president of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group aimed at making comics a more woman-friendly environment (for both creators and fans). At one point, she discusses a lateral career shift that never happened:

"I remember applying for jobs at mainstream publishing houses after Acclaim Comics went under. And I would show them what I was editing—Classics Illustrated, Magnus Robot Fighter, Disney Adventures, etc. And I had one interviewer refer to them patronizingly as my 'school projects.'"

Flash forward to 2008, when major publishers have scrambled to develop manga lines to reach younger readers, a graphic novel's been nominated for a National Book Award, and writer-artists like Charles Burns, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel have made comics respectable reading material for grownups—heck, even the NY Times is running Sunday comics now. It's not hard to imagine what someone like D'Orazio could've contributed to a company looking to take part in that boom.