Publishing | Retail news and analysis website ICv2 breaks down November's comics sales to the direct market and finds year-to-date sales up 9.33 percent over last year, with an 11.09 percent increase in comics and 5.55 percent in graphic novels. Batman #25 topped the comics chart with more than 125,000 copies, followed at No. 2 by Harley Quinn #0 with about 114,000.  In the graphic novel category, the latest volume of The Walking Dead led with about 25,000 copies sold in November. ICv2 also lists the top 300 comics and graphic novels for November. [ICv2]

Creators | Molly Crabapple talks to Art Spiegelman, and draws his portrait as well. [Vice]

Creators | Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner talk about writing the new Harley Quinn series [USA Today]

Creators | As she closes the first arc of the new Red Sonja, Gail Simone discusses the appeal of the character and how her "voice" differs from that of the previous incarnations. [The Beat]

Creators | Locke & Key artist Gabriel Rodriguez talks about winding up the story in Locke & Key: Alpha #2. [Hero Complex]

Creators | Neill Cameron chats about making a building-sized comic to be mounted on the side of the Story Museum in Oxford, England. [Forbidden Planet]

Creators | Paul Gravett profiles Yves Chaland, the French artist who dreamed of drawing the classic Belgian comic Spirou — and succeeded with some oddly retro stories and "fake" covers. [Paul Gravett]

Creators | Don McGregor tells of the editorial wrangling he had to go through to write Marvel's first story with an interracial kiss, back in 1973. [13th Dimension]

Art | John Hogan compares the self-referential gag comics of Mark Newgarden to the conceptual art of Richard Prince, who appropriates New Yorker-style cartoons and switches the captions and ties both in to the larger art movements of the time, and he also raises some interesting issues of appropriation. [The Comics Journal]