The municipality I work with actually stays open til 7:30 at least once a week because "we need to make sure people can actually access the services they pay for." It's not perfect, but at least once a week all city offices are open and reachable after a 9-5 shift, which I dig.
I do that too as part of my bipolar routine. I know when I'm up I get a little freer with money so I may as well just buy toys that I was going to buy anyway. And then I keep some for when the lows hot... Kind of hard to be down when you've got a fun toy.
Both?
This is a wild swerve but this reminds me of the time when basically every main member of Stormwatch was *canonically* killed because of an outbreak of xenomorphs from Alien.
I remember Ellis saying something like - they'd been informed that there was no way to salvage the book at that point and so the ALIEN crossover was a way to just provide some (brutal) closure to characters who weren't going to get any. At the end of Stormwatch (and those last four arcs are probably my favorite thing old school Image did) the book's numbers were so low the creative team felt bad cashing their checks but the Image leadership just kept funding it because they wanted to see where the story went.
Yeah, Stormwatch was doing some interesting things. I think if I went back a lot of it probably hasn't aged well (and I might be able to more easily identify the stuff Ellis was almost certainly paying homage to), but at the time it felt really different and new.
It's been a few years since I reread it but I honestly think Stormwatch has aged better than other meta-superhero stories that had a self-referential look at the genre, because the creative team was playing with someone else's toys and actually showed restraint. A lot of those 90s books aged poorly but at least when I last read it five or eight years ago nothing set off my OH NO alarm bells for stuff aging supremely badly.
Love that Authority run up until Hitch and Ellis step off. I was... shall we say... less fond of Millar's writing.