Awards | All the presenters for last weekend's Ignatz Awards ceremony were women, and that was no accident: This year's host, New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly, explains, "More and more of us are now in the business, unlike previous years, and I wanted to celebrate that fact by bringing attention to it." [Comic Riffs]

Creators | Tom Spurgeon has an in-depth interview with experimental cartoonist Warren Craghead. [The Comics Reporter]

Creators | Stan Lee, in town for Wizard World Ohio Comic Con, chats with reporter Michael Grossberg about superheroes as modern fairy tales. [The Columbus Dispatch]



Creators | Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat explains how he managed to publish cartoons about the Assad regime without being censored: "I dealt with the regime as though I was dealing with a venomous cobra. I had to attack them from a place where they couldn’t see me; so, I tackled issues that could have applied to them, but they could not say for certain that [the drawings were] definitely about them." That saved his cartoons from censors but it didn't save Ferzat from Assad; he was attacked and beaten by Assad's security forces, who broke both his hands and left him for dead. [Iranian.com]

Creators | Center for Cartoon Studies Director James Sturm conducts an "exit interview" with outgoing CCS Fellow Connor Willumsen. [Cartoon Studies]



Creators | Lily Allen talks to animator and comics artist Colleen Lynne Cox about her graphic novel Vore Club. [Bustle]

Conventions | Joe McCulloch was on assignment from the Library of Congress at the Small Press Expo: As a guest curator, he was responsible for choosing minicomics and self-published comics for the library's collection. That may sound like a dream job, but as McCulloch explains, it's more complicated than you might think. [The Comics Journal]

Conventions | Zoe Di Giorgio files a comprehensive con report on SPX. [The Diamondback]

Collecting | One problem with thinking of comics as an investment is that they are vulnerable to physical damage, as Wayne Winsett of Longmont, Colorado, discovered: He had a comics collection, including a copy of Superman #5, that he was hoping would fund his retirement, but they were destroyed in the recent flooding. [CBS 4 Denver]

Retailing | Kim Dailey takes a look at local comics shops that are planning tie-ins to this weekend's Wizard World Ohio comic con. [The Lantern]