“Vacation / All I ever wanted / Vacation / Had to get away.”
Vacation, The Go-Go’s
The number one reason we do Retcon Punch is because it’s fun. We like comics, and we like writing about comics, and that’s basically all that goes on here. “Fun” has been my driving force on all of this from day one. Whenever we approached a new challenge, the first question out of my mouth was always “okay, how do we have fun with this?” Putting together our daily discussions is also a lot of work. Like a lot. The Summer time brings a lot of changes to people’s schedules and priorities, and we’re in a place right now where the work-to-fun ratio isn’t playing about quite how we’d like it.
With that in mind, I’d like to announce that we’re transitioning into Summer Hours, which will mean significantly less coverage than usual. In fact, we’ve whittled down the next two months of releases to a list of absolute cannot-miss comics, and those are the only issues that we’ll be doing in-depth Alternating Currents for. We’re hoping to re-introduce weekly round-ups, so the breadth of coverage should still be there too, just not quite in the same way as it has been.
I want to thank all of our readers for sticking around with us during this time. July is Retcon Punch’s 30th month, and Drew and I have never taken any time off from the site. I’ve known people to get degrees in less time. Degrees! My hope is that we can all rally around the pieces that we will be posting and can keep an active dialogue there. If you’re reading this piece right here, that means that you are important to us. So thank you for your understanding, and your patience, and for talking about comics with us for however long you’ve been reading.
Also, just because we’re dialing down for a bit doesn’t mean that we’re not coming back. We’re going to be returning to a regular schedule after Labor Day, with more writers and a renewed sense of purpose. In the meantime, thanks for sticking with us, and here’s a list of the comics we’ll be talking about over the next two months:
Batman 33, Wonder Woman 33, Sex Criminals 7, Daredevil 6, Saga 21, Trees 3, Zero 10, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles In Time 2, Hawkeye 19, Outcast 2, Trees 4, Moon Knight 6, The Multiversity 1, Wonder Woman 34, Sex Criminals 8, Daredevil 7, Saga 22 and Original Sin 8
Comic release schedules being what they are, you can always check out Pull List to get more specific dates on when we’re posting about what.
Patrick Ehlers, Co-Editor-In-Chief
Retcon Punch 
Enjoy the time “off”, y’all deserve it. Even though the time I can spend reading/thinking/talking about comics has been greatly reduced these last few months with school and work and my daughter, this is the only comics site I still check everyday and it’s always worth my time, even if I don’t chime in as much as I used to. Keep up the great work, this is is gem you’ve got here.
Thanks so much for the kind words, Gino! We debated long and hard about how to approach the summer, and I genuinely think this schedule is the best solution. We won’t be posting every day, but we look forward to hearing from you on the posts we listed (oh, and if anybody is dying to talk about something we didn’t list, just let us know, and we’ll see what we can arrange).
Verily! I wish you guys the best in summer fun and summertime relaxation; you’ve certainly earned it. I know more so-called “professional” sites that have only updated half as frequently as you guys, but with nowhere near the level and depth of your critical analysis.
Thanks for always being a consistent source of thoughtful discussion and entertaining discourse that has also served as something of an educational experience as well. Basically, thanks for helping me see my favorite medium in a new and often better light than before.
I eagerly await your slightly less frequent–but no less awesome–coverage on the comics that shape our palate and engage our minds. Have fun during the summer!
Enjoy the time off. You guys put out so much so often I kind of wonder how you do it.
I’m trying to come up a joke about making it look like you’re working harder than you really are by choosing Hawkeye, which comes out once a year, to do on break. But I can’t. Really, what the hell, Fraction. Get a little press about your sex book and all of a sudden Dork with a Bow gets no love.
For some reason I had assumed it was Aja gumming up the works in regards to getting Hawkguy out on time, but maybe I’m wrong. Hm.
Fraction confirmed that Hawkeye 19 is out the last Wednesday of July, which is why it made the list; if 20 comes out before summer hours are over I’m going to push to cover it, but it depends on how many other books we’re covering that week; some we’re stretched pretty thin on while others we’re not writing about much of anything.
But I actually made a pretty similar joke about Hawkeye when we were putting this list together (“Hawkeye, the book where we get four issues in five weeks then nothing else for six months”).
And thanks for the kind words! We appreciate having you as a reader, and that goes for everyone else who reads and replies to this thread! Love you guys!
Actually, I think I heard it was Aja too (although I don’t recall where).
It just actually proved a point to me – I consider a comic to be primarily the writers work. It’s probably not fair and this could turn into a LONG comment about the collaborative nature of comics and how great artists save mediocre stories and the other way around, but in my head, my comics are sorted by who wrote them, not who drew them.
It’s interesting — I definitely shared your opinion when I first started reading comics, but this site has slowly shown me exactly how important the artist is to the success of a series. Especially after talking to writers and artists and getting a better sense of what they’re contributing to an issue. We don’t need to rehash the whole conversation, but I left a few lengthy comments on a recent She Hulk writeup about auteurship of comics. I think cases can be made for the writer, the artist, and even the editor, but for me, the most compelling argument is in favor of the artist as the auteur of a given comic.
More to your point, though: I tend to assume delays are caused by the artist — a writer can pound out a script overnight if they need to hit a deadline, but I don’t know any superhero artists that can crank out more than two pages a day (and even that is really pushing it). Sure, the artist could be delayed by the writer being late, but in the grand scheme of things, I think it’s much easier for a writer to hit their deadlines.
Yeah, my gut says the same thing about delays (we have so many examples, but I think Jim Lee is one of the most prominent), but word on the street is that Sandman is progressing as slowly as it is because Gaiman is dragging his ass, not because Williams is a slouch. Which is absolutely astounding, by the way. Not to devalue Gaiman’s scripts, but J. H. Williams is producing legitimate magic on the page.