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". 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[ing] social skills I never learned in the ivory tower of academia."

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." 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".)

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. and was designed "to provide a kind of identity or specific line for those sorts of individual creator visions." The aim of the "Maverick" line was to "push the medium a little bit," although Schutz recognized that such titles are often a hard sell.

The eclectic titles had one thing in common, according to Schutz—"it has a lot to do with the particular project being a labor of love for the individual creator,"

During its second year, Schutz highlighted Maverick's "trades program" as standing out, both for collecting previously published materials, including Neil Gaiman and Alice Cooper's The Last Temptation (initially released in 1994 by Marvel Music), and debuting new work, including titles by such legendary individuals as Will Eisner.

In comics A character named Diana Schutz makes a cameo appearance in issue #23 of Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Oeming's comics series Powers (collected in the fifth trade paperback, Powers: Anarchy), as the owner of an eatery called Dark Horse Coffee. Her character discusses the problematic nature of vigilante superheroes who exist above the normal system of law, and why non-powered individuals might feel betrayed by, wary, or resentful of them.