Cancellation meditations: In this week's "Permanent Damage," Steven Grant takes another look at the cancellations of Wildcats 3.0 and Stormwatch:

"By now you may have recognized that comics companies do a crappy job of promoting, particularly with new 'untested' concepts. Comics companies, like most other American entertainment media these days, are geared toward The Franchise, that 'iconic' product that can generate sales on name alone and will, theoretically, continue to do so for the indefinite future, from a variety of sources. (With a big enough franchise, like Superman, the actual comics sales become irrelevant to the secondary market money.) New properties have a major liability: they aren't franchises and most aren't likely to be, and no one has yet figured out the formula for deciding what the next big franchise will be, try as they might to pretend they do. ... Generally, promotion consists of a blurb (sometimes an ad) in PREVIEWS, some house ads in the other comics they publish, if you're lucky a puff piece or two designed to make the book sound like the answer to the unified field theory on news sites that understandably give equal weight to everything from the death of a giant in the field to a minor character guest-starring in some other character's minor book."