It pains me to point out that we recently published an item that should never have been published. A recent installment of Comics Panel featured a review of the book Genius Isolated: The Life & Art Of Alex Toth. This afternoon, a reader contacted me on Twitter alerting me to this item on the site ComicsComics. I am sorry to say it is accurate. One of our Comics Panel writers wrote the review despite being unable to acquire the book for now sadly obvious reasons. It should go without saying that this goes against every standard to which we hold ourselves at The A.V. Club.

I don’t want to speculate on the writer’s motivations, but I can say that in no way was the publisher of the book, IDW, involved. This sort of behavior is absolutely unacceptable, and we will not be working with the writer again in any capacity going forward.

We’ve always asked you to trust us. And we believe that one breach in ethics is all it takes to break that trust. I want to offer my apologies for this incident and my assurances that we will take every measure to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Has this writer produced other work for the A.V. Club? And if so, is the Onion going to examine his/her previous contributions for problems?

In last week’s paper, The Onion accidentally omitted the final line of Gabe Blanchard’s second-place entry in the 2009 Eighth-Grade Essay Contest. It should have read, "And with the smell of sulfur still hanging heavy in the air, we will toast the end of the Zionist conspiracy." The Onion regrets the error.

Thanks, Liam!

Thanks, Dave!