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I think I should create a graphic novel series called The Editorial Avenger: a mild-mannered editor pushed beyond her tolerance by sloppy writing, uncooperative authors, and the proliferating typos and rogue punctuation rampant in society. Her outfit would be black, of course, maybe with a nice cloak and some really cool boots, and her identity obscured by a mask in the shape of an ink smudge. Weapons would of course be red pens, blue pencils, razor-edged index cards, and, for those really formal fights, deadly fountain pens. For electronic crusades, she could use a formidable strikethrough font and vicious comment balloons. She could go after recalcitrant writers who copy things off the Web and submit them as their own work, people who don’t use spellcheck — or those who think Microsoft’s spellcheck is always right and absolutely perfect and thus accept changes without looking at them, the people who are responsible for the atrocities perpetrated on the Burger King sign at Toco Hills (really, a “vaule meal”? honestly!), and whoever is in charge of closed captioning television programs. People who don’t follow manuscript submission processes, or who fill out forms incorrectly or incompletely, would have the URLs for the pages with proper instructions tattooed on their foreheads in reverse, so they could read them in the mirror, using a lovely flowing Elvish-like script. People who don’t track changes as requested would be given really wicked paper cuts. Attempted plagiarists would be forced to watch as their ill-gotten manuscripts were fed into the shredder, and the remnants mercilessly recycled. Repeat offenders would live in fear of being dunked into her industrial-sized bottle of correcting fluid.

Wherever people are pluralizing improperly by using apostrophes, she would be there to whack them across the knuckles with a pica stick. Wherever people attempt to use quotation marks for emphasis, or use more than one exclamation point in a row, she would be there to break their keyboards into shards or confiscate their markers. Wherever people use random capitalization in a nonfacetious manner and are not imitating Age of Enlightenment-type writing, she would be there to pry the SHIFT key off their keyboards.

It would be a hit, really. Or at least cathartic. Well, for me.