Conventions | Coast City Comicon returns this weekend to Portland, Maine, and Batman artist Chris Burnham, who will be a guest, drums up excitement by explaining the nuances of Batman's nostrils to the local newspaper. Other guests include Mike Norton, Yanick Paquette, Rachel Deering, Ben Templesmith, Alex de Campi, JK Woodard and Lee Weeks. [Portland Press-Herald]
Publishing | Jamal Igle and Kelly Dale have been named marketing co-directors of Action Lab Entertainment, with Igle handling public relations and promotions and Dale coordinating retailer outreach. [ICv2.com]
Creators | Brian Heater interviews Paul Pope for the latest RIYL podcast. [BoingBoing]
Creators | Ed Piskor talks about his love of hip-hop and his latest graphic novel, Hip Hop Family Tree. [TribLive]
Creators | Chris Sims picks up on something interesting about the upcoming Bee and PuppyCat comic — the Sailor Moon influence — in his interview with Natasha Allegri, the producer of both the cartoon and the comic. [Comics Alliance]
Creators | Michael Cavna talks to webcomics creator Rich Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) about his recent cartoon defense of Millennials and the advantages he had because he was born a few years earlier: "I am just young enough to have missed the dot-com bubble. I wound up in a pretty boring phone company job, but it was stable. There was room for a younger person because “HELP! COMPUTERS.” I used the 90 percent of my brain that job didn’t require and started a comic strip." [Comic Riffs]
Creators | Autostraddle profiles Hazel Newlevant, an emerging cartoonist and the recent winner of the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant; her work focuses on music (she does a weekly concert review comic) and love, and her junior thesis project was If This Be Sin, a bio of the Harlem renaissance singer Gladys Bentley. [Autostraddle]
Creators | Jim Hunt gives a short interview about his latest work, a Wacky Packages bubblegum card that satirizes both Boo Berry cereal and reality-show phenomenon Honey Boo Boo. [Annapolis Capital Gazette]
Manga | Shaenon Garrity looks at a classic title, Domu: The Dreams of Children, by Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo. [Anime News Network]
Comics culture | Local artists drew sketches for blood donors at a blood drive aptly named "Cartoonists Draw Blood," co-sponsored by the Red Cross and the Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Cartoonists Association. [The Washington Post]
Editorial cartoons | Judge Smith Haynie reminisces about his father, editorial cartoonist Hugh Haynie, on the occasion of an exhibit of the elder Haynie's work in Louisville, Kentucky. [WFPL News]
History | Ballarat University, in Australia, recently received the "dead man's penny," a bronze plaque issued by the government to the family of a soldier killed in action, for local artist Ted Cannon. Cannon was an art student at the local School of Mines when he enlisted in the army in 1915, during World War I. He was sent to France, and there his superiors recognized his artistic talent and sent him ahead to sketch the enemy lines. Cannon was killed in 1916, but he is remembered with fondness in Ballarat. [ABC Ballarat]