Legal | Witnesses testified Wednesday in a preliminary hearing that driver Matthew Pocci honked his horn and drove through the crowd of spectators last year during the annual SDCC ZombieWalk: San Diego, despite attempts by spectators stop him. Pocci, who is deaf, has been charged with felony reckless driving causing serious injury. But Pocci's fiancee, April Armstrong, said the crowd had mostly passed when he started the car, and that the people surrounding them were frightening: "People then started laughing at us. People were getting close to us. I started to freak out. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was looking back at my son, he was scared. I told Matt, 'please let’s go.'" Armstrong also testified, however, she had told a neighbor she felt she couldn't tell the true story because of her relationship with Pocci. [San Diego Union-Tribune]
Graphic novels | The usual suspects were mostly absent from the May BookScan chart of the Top 20 graphic novels sold in bookstores and mass market channels: There were no volumes of Attack on Titan and just one of The Walking Dead, although that one topped the list. Shotaro Ishinomori's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past took the No. 2 slot.[ICv2]
Publishing | Heidi MacDonald and Calvin Reid round up the kids' graphic novel scene at Book Expo America. [Publishers Weekly]
Legal | Rob Salkowitz writes about copyright, fair use and appropriation in three different circumstances: lightly changing someone's work and selling it as your own art, fan art at conventions, and putting comics art on bumper stickers and other objects without permission. [ICv2]
Creators | Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan explain how their webcomic Oh Joy Sex Toy brings in serious money despite having a relatively small readership. [The Verge]
Creators | Robot 6 contributor J. Caleb Mozzocco interviews Jillian Tamaki about her new book SuperMutant Magic Academy. [Comics Alliance]
Creators | Ilan Stavans interviews Alejandro Jodorowsky. [Lit Hub]
Graphic novels | An interdisciplinary class at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center has created an interactive graphic novel, Decisions That Matter, designed to help students react better in situations where another person may be in danger of sexual assault — basically, a guide to bystander intervention. The students went into this fully aware of the limitations of most similar products and set out to make something they wouldn't "roll their eyes at." As one student, Savannah Badalich, commented, it features "a diverse group of students saying things students would actually say." [The Huffington Post]
Process | Artist John Green shows how a page of his comic Teen Boat (written by Dave Roman) goes from script through thumbnail, pencils, inks, and final colors in a single GIF. [io9]
Libraries | Maureen Donovan, Japanese Studies librarian for the Ohio State University Libraries, talks about her 37 years at the library, during which she amassed a manga collection that now numbers more than 20,000 items. [Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Blog]
Conventions | Flame Con, New York's first LGBTQ comic convention, takes place the weekend of June 13, and organizer Joey Stern as well as creators Jennie Wood and Max Wittert talk about why comics are so important to them. [Slate]