Diana Schutz

Diana Schutz (born February 1, 1955) is a Canadian-born comic book editor, serving as editor in chief of Comico during its peak years, followed by a 25-year tenure at Dark Horse Comics. Some of the best-known works she has edited are Frank Miller's ''Sin City'' and '' 300'', Matt Wagner's ''Grendel'', Stan Sakai's ''Usagi Yojimbo'', and Paul Chadwick's ''Concrete''. She was known to her letter-column readers as "Auntie Dydie".Interview with Diana Schutz, 2001
Accessed March 18, 2008 She was an adjunct instructor of comics history and criticism at Portland Community College.

Early life

Diana Schutz was born on February 1, 1955 in Canada. She read comics as a child. By her early teens, she began drifting towards romance titles, and then away from comics altogether until college, where she studied philosophy and creative writing. Finding comics, including Steve Gerber's ''Howard the Duck'' a welcome diversion from — if ultimately not a polar opposite to — "Plato, Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant," she found herself pulled back into the world of comics. Frequenting the comic shop called "The ComicShop" (owned by Ken Witcher and Ron Norton) in Vancouver, British Columbia, she ultimately dropped out of graduate philosophy (with an undergraduate degree in creative writing) to move (in 1978) from being one of the ComicShop's few female customers to being one of its few "counter people," where she says she found herself "learn ngsocial skills I never learned in the ivory tower of academia."Thomas, Michae
"Reining in a Dark Horse: An Interview with Diana Schutz"
Comic Book Resources. December 20, 2001. Accessed March 17, 2008

Witcher, Norton, and The ComicShop swiftly proved able sources for Schutz to discover comics, including "Barry Windsor-Smith's '' Conan''; Jim Starlin's '' Captain Marvel''; Craig Russell's ''Killraven''; and Dave Sim's ''Cerebus'', of which she was "one of the first 2,000 readers to actually buy issue 1."

Career

Schutz worked in comics stores for six years, moving from Vancouver to California and from The ComicShop to Comics and Comix in 1981. By 1982, she was making the move from retail towards publishing by means of a "bimonthly, 32-page newsletter that heput together for Comics & Comix entitled ''The Telegraph Wire'' which was modeled on ''The Comics Journal'' (each issue containing an interview, reviews, news and adverts), and its production swiftly became her role at C&C.

Networking and early roles

Working on ''The Telegraph Wire'' "put me in touch with creators whom I would interview ndpublishers from whom I would solicit advertising to help underwrite the cost of this "newsletter" that we would give out for free at each of the seven Comics & Comix stores." These contacts were added to by her attendance at an increasing numbers of conventions, including the Creation Conventions and the San Diego convention:
:"Creation, at that time, used to run a comic book show virtually every weekend in some part of the country. It was then that I met my future . . . husband, Bob Schreck, who was working for Creation in those days."

In addition to meeting and mingling with publishers, distributors, promotion teams and all manner of creators, Schutz started freelance work for "various other fan publications", including ''Comics Buyer's Guide'', ''The Comics Journal'', ''Amazing Heroes'' and ''Comics Scene'', from which she graduated to a very brief — four-day — job with Marvel Comics as an assistant editor.

Recommended by friend Chris Claremont, Schutz was to be (at age 29) Ann Nocenti's assistant editor on the ''X-Men'', but found herself entering her new job with "unrealistic expectations"; ultimately handing in her notice after a mere four days. Several months later (in 1985), she (and Bob Schreck) began work at Comico, which "with its opportunities for creator ownership, and the fact that it was much smaller and more personable, was much more erstyle". Schutz's first comic book editing credit was '' Robotech: The Macross Saga'' #3. Having picked up in her brief tenure at Marvel some knowledge "from Virginia Romita how to create and enforce production schedules", Schutz took over as Comico's primary editor. (Schreck oversaw "all the marketing and publishing type aspects".)

Dave Sim and ''Cerebus''

Having been one of the small core of readers who bought the first issue of Dave Sim's ''Cerebus'', Schutz got to know the man himself, and began working for him as a proofreader, first unofficially, and then officially from the "middle of '94" until early 2001. She explains that she "never proofed the book itself," " st the text, the typeset text" feeling that her respect for his abilities outweighed any potential "qualms" about the book's often-contentious content.

Schutz's stated stance (which has largely held sway throughout her entire editorial career) is that her role is not to interfere with an artist's story, merely to make sure that their work is "as grammatically clear as it could be." This she did for Sim for several years, balking only when Sim sent her a "boxing challenge to proofread" which she felt was a personal attack on a friend (and one introduced to her by Sim himself). Schutz promptly resigned in January 2001, and Sim even published her resignation letter in ''Cerebus'' #265. This issue also included a "20-page anti-female diatribe," and Schutz remains mildly aggravated over this juxtaposition, since she thinks some readers might equate the two—she did not, and found herself having to explain that she had no problem proofreading "an argument, no matter how faulty, in which Dave believes," no matter her personal views, and that she had resigned over the boxing challenge itself from the previous issue, #264. Indeed, even while Schutz was performing proofreading duties, she did so via fax, and had very little—if any—personal contact with Sim himself.

Dark Horse

By 1990, Schutz began work for Dark Horse Comics, rising (by 2007) to the position of Executive Editor, having variously held the roles of Senior Editor, Managing Editor, and Editor-in-Chief. In December 2001, she was the fifth-most-senior staff member in terms of length-of-employment (after, respectively, Mike Richardson, Randy Stradley, Neil Hankerson and Cary Grazzini), but stated that she had originally relinquished the job of Editor-in-Chief in December 1995, after almost two years, "because what it did is it put me in meetings all the damn time, writing memos and holding people's hands and I wasn't able to make good comics anymore".

Concurrent with her move to Oregon, Schutz returned to graduate studies, and in 1994 she received a Master of Arts degree in Communication Studies from the University of Portland, writing her M.A. thesis on female cartoonists Julie Doucet

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