New editor for Modern Tales

You didn't read it here first, but Shaenon Garrity (she of Narbonic, as well as Smithson and L’il Mell and Sergio) is the new editor of Modern Tales, probably the biggest edited collection of webcomics around. It started off as a subscription based site, but is now mostly free and readers can benefit from having someone round up and show off the best webcomics. That someone is now Shaenon, who has pretty much awesome taste and knows a thing or two about comics, period.

So what does this mean? Of the Modern Tales family of sites, each with an editor and vision of which type of comics to bring together, half are now edited by a woman.
So, yeah, well, that's a nice little thing, but the best thing is that when I first read this, my first thought was "Oh, duh! Perfect!". Only then did I think "What happened to Eric?". Eric Burns would probably have been a great editor as well, but life happens, it seems. Actually, I think I like the choice of Shaenon better. Eric knows his webcomics and knows what he likes, but he's already been picking through them and showing off what he likes. As a reader, I'm much more interested to see what Shaenon will bring in.

I also bet you that very few reposts of the press release or comments on the change will deal with Shaenon's gender. While I realize that often being "colorblind" or "genderblind" can set back dealing with issues of racism or sexism, in some cases it's good that people will only care about the person and sex won't even enter into it.