Creators | Robert Crumb pens a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, explaining why he pulled out of the Graphic 2011 festival: "I was quite alarmed when I read the article in the Sunday Telegraph. I showed it to my wife, Aline, who said, 'That's it, you're not going.' She got a very bad feeling from the article. She feared I might be attacked physically by some angry, outraged person who simply saw red at the mention of child molesters. She remarked she'd never seen any article about me as nasty as this one." Sunday Telegraph staff writer Claire Harvey, meanwhile, responds to Crumb's comments and criticisms lobbed at the newspaper: "Crumb seems to be living in fear of the reaction he once sought to provoke. It seems a sad place for any artist to be." [The Sydney Morning Herald]
Passings | Kim Thompson eulogizes Argentina cartoonist Francisco Solano López, who passed away on Friday. [The Comics Journal]
Conventions | Reporting from this weekend's Wizard World Chicago, the Chicago Tribune talks to former comic shop owner Gary Colabuono, who displayed rare ashcan editions of comics from the 1930s and 1940s featuring Superman, Superwoman, Superboy and Supergirl at the show. Blogger Matthew J. Brady has pictures of the ashcans, as well as a report from the show. [Chicago Tribune]
Comics | The Portland Press Herald profiles Renae de Liz, who's coordinating the Womanthology charity anthology. Dan Nadel, meanwhile, calls the project "the most expensive comics anthology I’ve ever heard of." [Portland Press Herald]
Creators | Brian Truitt talks to Michael Coulthard, a.k.a. Shaky Kane, about the November re-release of his "graphic road movie," Monster Truck, by Image Comics. [USA Today]
Comics | NPR revealed the results from their Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy survey, which saw 60,000 people vote. Watchmen and Sandman made the list, coming in at No. 15 and No. 29 respectively, while several of Neil Gaiman's prose books also made the list. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien topped the list. [NPR]
Comics | John Parker looks back at Peter David's long run on The Incredible Hulk. [ComicsAlliance]
Creators | Paul Gravett posts an appreciation of Marjane Satrapi, whose first book, Persepolis, was inspired in part by Art Spiegelman's Maus: “I realised that comics is not a genre, it is just a way of telling a story where I could feel exactly what was going on. Drawing is much closer to a human being than a photo, because you create the world in your own image, it’s very personal, it’s an international language. Before humans started talking, first they started drawing.”. [Paul Gravett]
Manga | Manga bloggers are celebrating Fumi Yoshinaga in this month's Manga Moveable Feast, a sort of bloggers' round robin, and David Welsh kicks things off with a review of a yaoi manga that avoids most of the pitfalls of the genre, Yoshnaga's Ichigenme: The First Course Is Civil Law. [The Manga Curmudgeon]
Publishing | Bikya Masr profiles Marwan Imam and Division Publishing, "the Middle East’s first true comic book publisher." [Bikya Masr]
Reviews | J.L. Bell reviews Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-1941, which takes a look at the dead branches on the evolutionary tree of comics, superheroes who for one reason or another didn't make it. [Oz and Ends]
Analysis | Daniel BT looks at cases where artists have reused the same scene in different panels, not cut-and-pasted but completely redrawn. [Sunday Comics Debt]
Events | Montpelier, Vermont's City Hall will host a 24-Hour Comics Day event Oct. 1. [Times Argus]
Conventions | Perhaps as a result of the March earthquake, attendance at this year's summer Comic Market (Comiket) was down by 20,000 compared to last year. [Anime News Network]
Fandom | "Whoever knows fear burns at the touch of ... hey, get off my lawn!" [Eye on Comics]