Creators | Newsday picks up the story of Al Plastino's original art for the John F. Kennedy comic that was canceled when the president was assassinated, and then published a few months later at the request of the Johnson administration. Plastino, now 91, had been told the artwork would be donated to the Kennedy Library, but last month at New York Comic Con he learned that a private individual had the art and was planning to sell it through Heritage Auctions, which now says it won't move forward until the ownership question is resolved. Copyright lawyer Dale Cendall, former DC Comics President Paul Levitz and artist Neal Adams weigh in on the case. [Newsday]
Kickstarter | In the wake of the successful Fantagraphics Kickstarter campaign, Rob Salkowitz looks at the evolution of the crowdfunding platform from a way for individual creators to connect with their audiences to a pre-sale mechanism that eliminates a lot of the risk for smaller publishers. [ICv2]
Creators | Barbara Aggerholm pays a visit to Seth's house and hears about the imaginary city he is building in his basement, what he wants on his gravestone, and how he really feels about his name. [Guelph Mercury]
Creators | Bill Willingham talks about writing the latest Fables spinoff Fairest in All the Land, a "fair play" murder mystery in which the reader has as much information as the sleuth — in this case, Cinderella. [USA Today]
Comics | Ryan Holmberg pays a visit to a couple of comics rental libraries in Mumbai. Worth a click for the images alone. [The Comics Journal]
Graphic novels | As the Thought Bubble comics festival draws near, Joe Gordon talks to Martin Steenton of the U.K. publisher Blank Slate. [Forbidden Planet]
Graphic novels | This article starts out as a classic explainer about graphic novels, and then about halfway through the real news is dropped in: The son of classic Western writer Louis L'Amour has put together a creative team to adapt his 1945 short story Law of the Desert Born into a graphic novel. Says the younger L'Amour, "It was his vision that if you explored new values in an adaptation then your fans wouldn't get bored because they knew the story. In Law of the Desert Born the new values were the back story and emotional life of all the characters. The original story dealt a lot with the present, the mechanics of the chase and the posse, it didn't go into what caused all the various characters decisions and feelings. So in the graphic novel we use several flashbacks to examine that part of the narrative." [Lake Michigan Shore]
Digital comics | The online manga publisher Otome's Way, which specializes in yaoi manga, is running a Kickstarter to finance the second volume of its Japanese-language textbook, A Fujoshi's Guide to Japanese ("fujoshi" refers to women who are yaoi fans). [RocketNews 24]
Exhibits | The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco has two exhibits at the moment, one on graphic novel pioneer Will Eisner and the other on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. [The Daily Californian]
Exhibits | The Equine Museum of Japan has an exhibit going on now exploring the history of the country through comics and cartoons about horses, from the mid-19th-century magazine The Japan Punch through current manga. [The New Haven Register]
Libraries | The Elizabeth Dafoe Library at the University of Manitoba unveiled a permanent collection of graphic novels by and about indigenous peoples. [The Manitoban]
Retailing | Apparently reality TV is inspiring people to buy the contents of old storage units, and retailer Mike Sterling is seeing the results of that when they find comics ... but so far, the most valuable item has been a Peanuts calendar. [Progressive Ruin]