Legal | The Malaysian cartoonist Zunar is being investigated once more under the country's Sedition Act, his lawyer revealed Tuesday. Three of Zunar's assistants were arrested last week for selling two of his books, neither of which has been officially banned, and his webmaster has been summoned to talk to police on Thursday. Zunar has also been called in for questioning at a future date. What's more, the Malaysian Home Ministry has appealed the Court of Appeals' decision to remove the ban on two of Zunar's other books. [Malaysia Chronicle]

Publishing | Red Giant Entertainment has announced that retailers ordered about 900,000 copies each of its four anthology comics, which are ad-supported and will be given away for free. The company, which also releases digital comics and paid print comics, kicked off this program with a package of four zero issues on Free Comic Book Day. [ICv2]



Conventions | The first Palestine Comics Festival was not your standard comic con: The work on display had a political slant, and one of the invited guests, the French artist Maximilien LeRoy, was held at Ben Gurion Airport for several hours and then deported; LeRoy, the author of two graphic novels about Gaza and the West Bank, has been banned from Israel and the Palestinian Territories for 10 years. However, Guy Delisle, creator of  Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, and Mohammad Sabaaneh, a Palestinian cartoonist who was arrested and held last year by Israeli authorities for five months, were in attendance. [Free Speech Radio News]

Political cartoons | Australian Senator Jacqui Lambie issued a stinging response to cartoonist David Pope, who objected to an altered version of one of his comics (the text had been completely rewritten) that appeared on Lambie's Facebook page. Pope's newspaper the Canberra Times called Lambie's office, and Pope tweeted "politicians re-captioning cartoons without permission for their own political purposes [probably] needs to be discouraged." Lambie, who apparently took the altered cartoon from an email someone sent her, responded with a sarcastic, typo-filled email threatening legal action and accusing Pope of "anger and self-righteous rage" over the matter. On Twitter, Pope called the response "ugly and unwarranted" and added,“The sane response would have been ‘sorry, didn’t realise, let’s take it down [and] keep focused on the issue.” [The Guardian]



Comics | In an excerpt from the oral history section of Fantagraphics' soon-to-be-released The Complete Zap Comix, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb reminisce about the early days of the underground comics movement. [The Comics Journal]

Creators | In a post that appeared on Veterans Day, Rob McMonigal interviewed Hanna Barry, James Lloyd and Kevin Huizenga about their contributions to the anthology Above the Dreamless Dead, a collection of graphic adaptations of World War I "trench poetry" — poems by those who actually served. [Panel Patter]

Creators | Writer Scott Snyder discusses his Vertigo series The Wake: "For us, the tenet of the series when we signed on to do it was really to be unafraid to explore territory that you’re not supposed to. We wanted that to be the theme of the story itself and also the structural compass for the story, both for the art and for the narrative. So [artist] Sean [Murphy] and I made a deal to just challenge each other with elements that shouldn’t really work in a story, but we would try and make work through the elasticity of this storytelling." [Kindle Post]



Creators | Jim Butcher talks about moving from prose to graphic novels and about his Dynamite series, Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files: War Cry. [Kindle Post]

Graphic novels | Fantagraphics reveals the cover for the latest Hernandez Brothers collection, Love and Rockets: New Stories #7. [Flog]

Festivals | The very first New Orleans Comics and Zines Fest kicks off tomorrow and continues through the weekend. The show will include an exhibit of self-published work by local creators at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library.  [Gambit]