Conventions | The organizers of Salt Lake Comic Con next month hope to break the Guinness World Record for largest gathering of people dressed as comic book characters. The current record of 1,530 was set April 2011 at the opening of World Joyland theme park in China. Since then, several conventions have sought to seize that crown, but none has succeeded. It's not as easy as it may sound, as to be counted for the record, the character must've first appeared in a comic book. And that's just for starters. Salt Lake Comic Con has a rundown of the rules on its website. [KSL]

Creators | Imprisoned Iranian political cartoonist Atena Farghadani is grateful she received the Cartoonist Rights Network International Courage in Cartooning Award, her father said after a visit to her in Evin Prison, and she's hoping an appeals court will reduce her sentence. Farghadani was sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison for drawing a cartoon showing the members of the Iranian parliament with animal heads. [International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran]



Creators | Political satirist Mark Russell talks about his DC Comics series Prez, which is starting to seem eerily prescient given the way the current presidential campaigns are going: "I wrote it as science fiction, but it’s odd how prophetic it has become about the 2016 race." [International Business Times]

Creators | Dr. Benjamin Schwartz talks about his double life as a lecturer in Columbia University's Narrative Medicine program and a New Yorker cartoonist. [Columbia News]

Creators | Andy Piver was a mortgage loan processor during the boom-and-bust period of the 2000s, until it got to be too much for him, so he left his job and started creating comics instead. His latest work is SeeK and the Lost Temple of Yucan Findzit, which he has self-published to raise funds for his children's school. [The East Hampton Star]

Awards | The rejection of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slates at this year's Hugo awards wasn't really about politics or a particular type of storytelling, even though there was a lot of discussion around those topics, says writer John Scalzi: "It was about small group of people acting like jerks, and another, rather larger group, expressing their displeasure at them acting so." Having cataloged the different ways in which the Puppies promoters were acting like jerks, independent of any ideology, he concludes with this: "Mind you, I don’t expect the core Puppies to recognize this; indeed I expect them to say they haven’t done a single thing that has been other than forthright and noble and correct. Well, and here’s the thing about that: acting like an jerk and then asserting that no, it’s everyone else that’s been acting like a jerk, is the biggest jerk maneuver of all." [Whatever]

Retailing | The retailers' organization ComicsPRO has opened registration for Local Comics Day, which will be Nov. 28, the same day as Small Business Saturday. And Oni Press has announced its special comics, which will be exclusive for that event: limited editions of Invader Zim #1 and Rick and Morty #1 and a variant edition of Exodus: The Life After #1. [ICv2]

Retailing | Ryan Seymore, owner of the Northland, Ohio, store Comic Town, talks about how the business has evolved over the years and why he added an "all ages" section. [West Side News]