Crime | OneBookShelf, which operates the digital-comics website DriveThruComics and several other retail sites, has suffered a data breach. "A hacker found a crack in our defenses and got in," the company said in a Q&A on its websites. Hackers stole credit card information from transactions processed between July 10 and Aug. 6, and used the OneBookShelf's servers to launch DDOS attack on other sites. It's not clear which numbers were exposed, but the company recommends customers who made transactions, or had credit card information stored on the site during that time, get new cards. [ICv2]
Passings | Randy Glasbergen, whom Alan Gardner describes as "perhaps one of the most prolific cartoonists in America," has died at age 58. Glasbergen took over the comic strip The Better Half in 1982 from creator Vin Vinson and drew it until last year, when he retired to devote himself full-time to his burgeoning freelance business, including his own licensing service. King Features Syndicate ended the strip when Glasbergen left it. He also drew two other panel comics, Glasbergen Cartoons and Thin Lines. [The Daily Cartoonist]
Creators | Seattle Weekly has named Ellen Forney the Best Comics Artist in Seattle, noting, "Forney has a clarity and asperity in her linework that looks back to the newspaper comic strips of her youth (and the record albums, and the gig posters ...), but she’s never one to wallow in nostalgia. Her art engages with Seattle as it is now, not as we sometimes remember it." [Seattle Weekly]
Political cartoons | Apala Barclay talks about his days as a political cartoonist in Liberia during that country's civil war, including illustrating the aftermath of the Cow Field Massacre: "The soldiers, you could almost see death in these guys eyes, he said. "They allow us to go in, we see dead bodies burned. We see all these gruesome things." Apala found an elderly man who had been hiding, and they hid in a ditch when the shooting resumed. The story raised the ire of warlord Charles Taylor, and Barclay was a "marked person" for a time. [Street Roots News]
Creators | Nancy Updike interviews Phoebe Gloeckner in depth about her graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl. [Jezebel]
Creators | Ariel Schrag talks about her graphic novel memoirs of her teenage years, and the comics that inspired them — Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse and Ariel Bordeaux's Deep Girl — and how it feels to look back, at the age of 35, on such intimate works about her adolescence. [KALW]
Graphic Novels | Syrian refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan drew their experiences, from the mundane to the dramatic, in a graphic novel workshop taught by Canadian creator Jean Bradbury. [albawaba]
Process | ODY-C artist Christian Ward shows step-by-step illustrations and explains how he went full digital. [Sktchd]
Retailing | Comic Book Zen in Port Huron, Michigan, has a determinedly old-school bent: "I don’t have any of the newer comic books that are published every month," said owner Jason Sawyer. "I found people around here are more interested in the original series and finding out when certain characters first appeared." He's already sold out of Deadpool comics, for instance, well ahead of the opening of the movie. He also doesn't hold with trade paperbacks, which he says are "just copies": "The real value of comic books comes from the original issues that are published each month and if you want an original issue you need to come to people like me." [The Times Herald]