Comics | A Columbus, Ohio, entertainment weekly lays out a case for the city -- home of Jeff Smith, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo -- becoming, like Portland, Oregon, a hub for comic books. “Comics in Columbus is a weird underground, sort of hip-hop thing,” indie publisher Victor Dandridge Jr. says. “We’re like hip-hop in the Bronx in ’79, just on the corner doing our thing.” [Columbus Alive]

Conventions | Bart Beaty files a final report on this year's Angouleme International Comics Festival, and his verdict is ... meh. "There was a consensus all around that the show was flat. People would throw around adjectives like "fine," "good," and "okay." It wasn't a disaster (as were some of the shows disrupted by construction), but it also wasn't that memorable either" [The Comics Reporter]

Conventions | India Comic Con kicks off this week, with representatives from Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, and Vertical Inc. in the building. And it's a rare opportunity for Indian comics fans to get comics and figurines not usually available there. [The Times of India]



Publishing | Todd Allen takes a look at the sales figures for the newly canceled DC Comics series, and three that weren't axed, and concludes that titles that sell fewer than 18,000 copies per month are in the "danger zone." [The Beat]

Creators | Wizzywig creator Ed Piskor has been awarded the Columbus Museum of Art/Thurber House Graphic Novel Residency; he gets a stipend and a three-week stay in an apartment in the historic home of the cartoonist and humorist James Thurber. [Columbus Museum of Art]

Creators | Tom Kaczynski talks about his graphic novel Beta Testing the Apocalypse, which he describes as "Short bursts of science-fictional pulp built on uncertain architectural foundations loosely threaded with apocalyptic fever dreams into an unstable theoretical assemblage. 136 pages. Two-colors throughout. Fully indexed." [The Morton Report]



Creators | Joe Harris discusses his Image Comics series Great Pacific and the garbage that inspired it. [Uproxx]

Creators | Andrea Sorrentino talks about his work on I, Vampire and his plans for his run on Green Arrow. [Man Cave Daily]

Creators | Here's a short but very interesting interview with Nepalese creator Kripa Joshi, who's working on a series of self-published comics about a plump woman who doesn't let her weight get in her way. Joshi, a graduate of the School for Visual Arts in New York, is looking for a publisher for her comics. [DNA]

Manga | In a video interview, former Tokyopop editor Paul Morrissey explains how all that manga was made. [The Vice Pit]

Piracy | Noah Berlatsky has a good analysis and roundup of opinions (including mine) on the ethics of scanlation. [Digital Ethics]

Retailing | The Florida comics-shop chain Coliseum of Comics celebrates its 30th anniversary. [Central Florida Future]