The funnies are people, too

Today I was exposed to another element of journalism that honestly I hadn't given much thought to previously.

I walked into my editor's office early this morning expecting to sit in on a campaign endorsement interview, which would have been interesting but not incredibly stimulating at 8:45 a.m. Instead, my editor says, "You wanna come in and talk comics?" Um, of course?!

And so the process of pitching comics, games and applications was revealed to me. I had never really thought about where Blondie and Sudoku and Word Jumble come from. They just appear on the page, and they're fun, so it was really interesting to see how the process works. The salesman pitched various comics, columnists and puzzles, listened to what my editor had to say about them - whether he was interested or whether something wasn't an option, and was very convincing and organized. My editor really only had eyes for online games, but all of the products that were unveiled to us were top-notch and fun. It'd probably be easy to sucker me into some of that stuff...