Remember when editors edited?

I've griped quite a bit about the editor-in-chiefs at the big companies leading from the bench. Mark Waid said over at Kung-Fu Monkey, and firmly agree, that an editor is there to help the writers and artists tell their story, not to have them tell the editor's story. Now the problem has reached racial lines. RUN AND HIDE KIDS!

It's nothing horrible really, but it is sloppy work. The first incident that jumped out at me was in FINAL CRISIS in which Mister Miracle all of a sudden went from being a black guy to a white guy. This definitely made me arch an eyebrow. This was the major event book. How did that slip by? Did they figure the character was really scared, or possibly suddenly anemic? I can understand the confusion on the colorist's part. The original Mister Miracle was Scott Free, who was in fact a white guy. However, the new Mister Miracle (and I'm only saying you relative to Free, the character has been around for a few years now) is Shilo Norman and is black. There's no confusion in reading the book, it's obviously Shilo. But mistakes happen, and the colorist made him the wrong skin color. The editor is supposed to catch mistakes like this.

More recent is this week's FINAL CRISIS AFTERMATH: RUN which is an even more glaring error. It involves Firestorm. Firestorm is another legacy character, meaning more than one person has had the name. The first one was Ronnie Raymond who combined with Professor Martin Stein to become the hero. Both of them were white guys. After Ronnie's death there was a new Firestorm, Jason Rusch, a young black guy. 'New' again being relative since Jason has been Firestorm for a few years now as well. Yet again, there was a coloring error in which suddenly Firestorm was a white guy again. More glaring was that the writing made it seem like it was Ronnie Raymond again. The character showed a connection to the now deceased Martian Manhunter whom Ronnie was friends with and worked with for a long time. Jason did not know the Manhunter. The editor dropped the ball big time on this one.

The DCU has done interesting things of late with it's legacy heroes in representing minorities who are under-represented in comics. I'm not saying that these slips are anything more than they are, they're mistakes. Still, it's an insanely obvious mistake to anyone who's been following these characters and we expect better from the "big" companies.