E.B. White wrote more than Charlotte's Web and an updating of William Strunk's Elements of Style. He was a brilliant writer and was a vital part of the sparkling magazine that was The New Yorker. At the moment, I'm on the lookout for a cheap (read beat-up, since ordinary copies fetch $60 or more) copy of his Ho Hum, New Yorker fillers that displayed his keen eye for absurdity and the problems inherent in clumsy phrasing.

In the meantime, I've been dipping into a copy of the Rebecca M. Dale-edited Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976 by White and came across the following, published March 4, 1944, in response to a statement by George Seldes in Saturday Review that he "has never known of an editorial writer who wrote as he pleased." White said, "This makes us a kept man. We often wonder about our life in our bordello, whether such an existence erodes one's character or builds it."

White said he'd evolved "a system for the smooth operation of a literary bordello."

"The system is this: We write as we please, and the magazine publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide, something gets into print. When they don't, the reader draws a blank. It is a system we recommend -- the only one, in fact, under which we are willing to be kept."

White did note that it depended on a publication's aims. "As far as we have been able to discover, the keepers of this house have two aims: the first is to make money, the second is to make sense. We have watched for other motives, but we have never turned up any. That makes for good working conditions, and we write this as a sort of small, delayed tribute to our house."

What he said strikes me as providing insight into the business of much publishing in general. Fans should keep in mind that the first aim of publishers who want to stay in business is to make money. And making sense? Well, making no sense is seldom a good plan for an ongoing publisher. The point here is that it's my guess that the majority of comic-book publishers probably have these goals in mind -- and that it's a good idea to keep those aims in mind when evaluating what they produce.