Passings | MAD Magazine writer Lou Silverstone has died at age 90. Silverstone was the writer of many of MAD's movie and television satires in the 1960s and 1970s, starting with "Bananaz," a parody of Bonanza. Later he went to work for Cracked, MAD's chief competition, and he also wrote for the Jackson 5 animated series and the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comic, a gig that he got through former MAD artist Wally Wood. The MAD website also pays tribute to Silverstone. [News From ME]
Conventions | Oregon's Cherry City Comic Con has a new owner and a new attitude. The con fell on hard times last year, and at one point this year's show was canceled. New owner John Roache bought the show when he heard that news; he and his wife, artist Nicole Brune, had been to last year's show and enjoyed it. He's keeping the name but changing the format to more of a pop-culture convention, with a long list of entertainment guests, and he has expanded the number of slots available for vendors. The show is scheduled for April 11-12. [Statesman Journal]
Legal | Indian cartoonist Aseem Trivedi praised the Indian Supreme Court's decision striking down Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act, which prohibits objectionable speech on the Internet. Trivedi was arrested in 2012 and charged with violating this law, as well as India's Sedition Act; the charges were later dismissed. The law has been used in recent years to attempt to suppress political speech on social networks, and in one case, a youth was jailed for "liking" a Facebook page critical of a local official. "All of us were unnecessarily harassed," said Trivedi. [Times of India]
Comics | Comics scholar Bart Beaty read more than 900 Archie comics on the way to writing Twelve Cent Archie, billed as "the first scholarly study of the Archie comic," and he's clearly a man with a mission: "I’m in the English department and my colleagues all teach, y’know, Shakespeare and Milton and Blake and they can name all the great writers of the canon. And what struck me is that in comics now, we have certain authors that are sort of becoming our Shakespeares and our Blakes and our Miltons, and then certain comics are just being left out of this conversation. And I wanted to say, well, what would it be like to bring these comics back into the conversation about what comics have been over time? Because in some ways, Archie is a much more typical and more important than any of those books, but nobody thinks so." [The Mary Sue]
Creators | Here's a video tour of Roz Chast's studio. [Fast Company]
Creators | Jillian and Mariko Tamaki talk about working together on This One Summer and other books. [Panel Patter]
Creators | George R.R. Martin goes to the comic shop. [Kotaku]
Creators | Chase Cunningham has created a new superhero, Cynja, a cyber ninja who teaches children about computer safety. [Corsicana Daily Sun]
Publishing | Shawn Starr interviews Raighne Hogan, publisher of the small press 2D Cloud, which publishes work by Gina Wynbrandt, Annie Mok and Blaise Larmee, among others. [Left Me Wanting More]
Conventions | Creator Jeremy Baum (Dörfler) and retailer Bill Boichel (Copacetic Comics Company) look forward to the upcoming PIX independent comics festival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. [Pittsburgh City Paper]