Retailing | The Manchester, Connecticut, comics store Buried Under Comics will reopen with a new name, A Hero's Journey, and a new owner, April Kenney. A friend of previous owner Brian Kozicki, who died unexpectedly last month, Kenney arranged to purchase the store from Kozicki's family. [Patch.com]

Retailing | Toronto retailer Silver Snail has moved from its longtime location on Queen Street to Yonge Street. [CityNews]

Publishing | Brian Smith, the DC Comics associate editor publicly ridiculed by Rob Liefeld last month, has announced his departure from the company, apparently under amicable circumstances. Nonetheless, Liefeld took a parting shot on Twitter. [Blog@Newsarama]

Creators | Sean T. Collins interviews "the Four Horsemen of Altcomix" -- Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware -- at the Small Press Expo. [Rolling Stone]

Creators | Brian Heater was in Cologne, Germany, and was able to catch Art Spiegelman's talk the night before the opening of his retrospective there. [The Beat]



Creators | Randall Munroe discusses his webcomic xkcd and his new blog What If?, in which he takes on some very imaginative physics questions and stretches them to extremes. [The Atlantic]

Creators | The Irish Times talks to Chris Ware about his work, his influences, and why he decided to pursue cartooning rather than "fine art": "He liked how the low cultural status of comics empowered the readers. 'If I went to an art museum and didn’t understand the painting, it was because I wasn’t smart enough, but if I didn’t understand a comic strip, it was because the cartoonist was an idiot.'" [The Irish Times]

Creators | In an interview conducted at the Cincinnati Comics Expo, David Petersen discusses how long it takes him to do an issue of Mouse Guard (three months), why the comic is square (he wanted it to look different), and why there will never be a Fables/Mice Templar/Mouse Guard crossover: "I like both of those books, but there are enough differences that a crossover would diminish all the properties." But it's worth noting that Fables creator Bill Willingham will be writing and drawing a story for the new Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard anthology. [The Outhousers]



Creators | Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson discuss their new series Happy (images may be NSFW). [Comics Alliance]

Creators | Matt Wagner talks about developing The Tower Chronicles for Legendary Comics. [The Beat]

Creators | Philip Nel sketches out Crockett Johnson's early years, including his time as art director for Aviation Weekly and The New Masses, and he includes some superb examples of the young Johnson's art. [The Comics Journal]

Creators | Matthew Parker talks about his first graphic novel Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education, which traces his journey from drugs and crime to prison and then college and graduate school. Parker, who recently received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, says the failure rates for drug-addiction treatment and MFA programs in writing are about the same; 80 to 90 percent of the "graduates" never achieve their goal of sobriety for the one or having a book published for the other. [Phoenix New Times]