I agree Joe.  It seems that the publishing schedule and even the characters themselves have taken a backseat to the writers and artists.  Of course, JB has said words to this effect many times.  And the saddest part is that the average comic reader of today thinks that it's perfectly fine and indeed preferred to wait a month or two since that is what they are accustomed to.  I used to like fill-in issues most of the time.  DC would contract a new cover and give us a great old story reprint.  Many times as a double issue.  I asked Julie Schwartz about the double sized reprint fill-ins and he told me that it was a way to give the fans something extra since they had to wait for a new story.  Plus doubling the page count was an easy choice due to the fact that reprint royalties were practically non-existant. 

M***** really blew it with the Fanfare title by emptying out the drawers holding the fill-in issues to use in their anthology.  Beautiful stuff in many cases, others not so much, but I would much rather have seen that Michael Golden story re-scheduled in MTU where it was intended before it got delayed.  That seemed to be their answer to slow production.  If a story could not be finished on time and it was a finite, stand-alone story (as most were in those days), it could be filed away with the ready-made fill-ins when completed and used at a later date.  I wonder which EIC came up with that idea.  Beats all hell out of growing roses. 

The kicker about DD Father is that issue six has still yet to come out and Marvel is soliciting the trade or HC for their October solicitations.  

As for Superman/Batman, late or not, I can't knock a guy for writing a comic dedicated to his deceased son. I'm all for fill-ins when needed to make a book on time. But it is nice to see someone work through their sorrow and turn it into something to help others.

Fans today tell me "Artists are slow because if you want quality you must wait!".

Mmh... Romita Sr., Colan, Kirby, Ditko, Byrne and several others gave me the quality in all these years... And they didn't miss the deadlines.
I'll not mention any name (it wouldn't be polite), but there are guys in the industry who I appreciate as artists but not as pros. Because if you need months for drawing 22 pages (22!) you aren't a pro.

Personal tragedies are not to be diminished in any way, ever. But, the fact remains that realistic scheduling would mean they would also have no impact on the work. Coinsider: if Tom Batiuk dropped dead today, FUNKY WINKERBEAN would continue to appear in newspapers around the country, every day, without a break, for the next year.

This is not rocket science.

Somewhere over the years idiot fans and retailers shoved in all kinds of "rules" that had nothing to do with reality, and so what were once perfectly normal publishing schedules came to be seen as somehow negative.

And, of course, it's just a coincidence that one of his first official acts as EiC was to cancel a profitable book that happened to be shipping on schedule every month.