Digital comics | In today's Amazon-acquires-comiXology article, Rachel Edidin deflates much of the hype, and the panic, surrounding the deal, pointing out that comics distribution is already a monopoly, large corporations already run the comics market, and comics have been available on Kindle all along: "Is the concern [...] a distribution monopoly? If so, the direct market is in no position to criticize: over the last 15 years, Diamond Comics Distributors has consumed almost all independent print distribution in comics, and dictates practices and policy to retailers and publishers alike. The idea that print comics are somehow more independent than their digital cousins — or a scrappy underdog fighting the good fight against evil corporate profiteers — is frankly ridiculous." [Wired]
Awards | Michael Cavna talks with Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer about winning the Pulitzer Prize in cartooning. [Comic Riffs]
Creators | Mimi Pond talks about her graphic memoir of being a waitress in the 1970s, Over Easy: "The thing is, when you're young, there's always someone slightly older than you who tells you you just missed the boat: 'Oh, you should've been here five years ago, that's when it was really cool!' It takes you years to realize that the time you were living in really was dynamic and exciting." Pond also talks about the real lives of a couple of the characters and why it took her 15 years to finish the book. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed mines the book for some wisdom about working in a restaurant. [USA Today]
Creators | "Think of it as a pixelated Peanuts with dick jokes": Rich Stevens talks about his webcomic Diesel Sweeties. [SplitSider]
Creators | Batman writer Scott Snyder talks about the Bat-Blimp, the wordless sequence in Batman #29, and more. [Hero Complex]
Creators | In a radio interview, Matt Faulkner discusses his graphic novel Gaijin, which tells the story of the Japanese internment camps from the point of view of a half-Japanese teenager. [Michigan Radio]
Creators | Writer Van Jensen talks about his work on Green Lantern Corps. [Comicosity]
Creators | The Dennis, Massachusetts, newspaper profiles local creator Tom Coute, a junior in high school who has already won several prizes and filled notebooks with comic strips. [The Register]
Comics | Adi Tantameh searches for an only partly remembered story from a British girls' comic of the 1970s — and finds it, with some help from Paul Gravett and Alex DeCampi, among others. [Bleeding Cool]
Comics | Robert Stiebel shows off some really, really early Jack Kirby art, including a newspaper comic from the late 1930s called Facts You Never Knew!!! and another about good health habits. [The Comics Journal]
Libraries | The York [Pennsylvania] County Libraries are seeing an uptick in demand for manga and graphic novels, and they have responded not only by buying more books but also by subscribing to iVerse's digital comics service, Comics Plus Library Edition. This is an interesting discussion of Comics Plus from the user's point of view, and the local comics shops chime in as well. [York Daily Record]