Banned Books Week | Michael Cavna talks with Jeff Smith, Scott McCloud and Neil Gaiman about the importance of Banned Books Week. Says Gaiman, "I get tired of when people say that no books are banned just because [you can get it elsewhere]. Say you’re a kid in a school district [that banned a book] and there’s not a local Barnes & Noble and you don’t have 20 or 50 bucks in disposable income ... That book is gone. It was there and now it’s not. The fact you can buy it on Amazon doesn’t make that any less bad." [Comic Riffs]
Banned Books Week | Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, discusses comics and censorship in a video interview. [Reason Magazine]
Passings | Michael Smith pens an obituary for the Indian cartoonist Vins, who gently satirized Indian life in his comic Chalta Hai, which ran for 16 years in the English-language weekly Himmat. He died in June. "In his cartoons, which shrewdly depicted political and social life of the times, he always preferred a gentle poke in the ribs, rather than a nasty poke in the eye," Australian journalist Chris Mayor said. "Above all, he lampooned pomposity and hypocrisy." [The Independent]
Creators | David Belasco, co-director of the Lloyd Grief Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business, interviewed Stan Lee onstage at the University of Southern California. Lee talked about his childhood, the appeal of comics, and what he thinks made Marvel in particular so successful. [The Daily Trojan]
Creators | Writers Robert Venditti and Van Jensen discuss what will happen to Wally West in Futures End: The Flash #1. (Warning: Spoilers!) [Hero Complex]
Creators | Jillian Tamaki, the artist of Skim and This One Summer, discusses style and faith in a podcast interview with Dan Berry. [Make It Then Tell Everybody]
Creators | Brad Diller, who draws the newspaper panel Funday Morning, talks about his work, his sense of humor and the cartoons that set people off. [The Charleston Gazette]
Comics | Marvel editor Jordan D. White talks about editing the Star Wars comics, which is a bit more complicated than editing, say, Deadpool, because he has to submit the stories to Lucasfilm before assigning the art. While the first three series are all set in roughly the same period, between the original Star Wars movie and The Empire Strikes Back, White says later series will explore other eras. [Coffee with Kenobi]
Political cartoons | French cartoonist Plantu, founder of the organization Cartooning for Peace, talks about the challenges political cartoonists face around the world and the importance of their work, which is being documented in a new film, Caricaturistes – Fantassins de la Démocratie. [Euronews]