Awards | The winners of the Cybils book blogger awards, which honor children's and young-adult books, were announced on Saturday. Victoria Jamieson's Roller Girl won the graphic novel prize in the elementary/middle school category, while Noelle Stevenson's Nimona was the winner of the young adult award. [Cybils]
Webcomics | Kirsten Acuna profiles the webcomics company LINE Webtoon, which started in South Korea during a time when the comics industry was in a serious slump. Founder JunKoo Kim decided to start up a webcomics portal and, realizing that most people scroll down when they read on a computer, adopted that as part of the user interface. LINE launched a U.S. site that carries about 50 comics, including a Star Wars comic. All the content is free, but all the creators are paid for their work (and the comics are creator-owned). [Tech Insider]
Creators | Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib, the creators of Zahra's Paradise, are making an online comic, Yousef and Farhad, about the realities of being gay in Iran. [The Huffington Post]
Creators | Jeff Lemire interviews his comics soulmate Matt Kindt, focusing mainly on Kindt's new series, Dept. H. [Paste]
Creators | Michael Frizell is the writer behind those Storm (formerly Bluewater) bio-comics; he got hooked on comics while on a family vacation: "I remember it well. My father had the three of us in the back seat of our, it was a truck. No air conditioning. He wanted to visit all the 13 original colonies in a driving trip one summer. He stopped at a Stuckey's and said, 'Here, this will keep you quiet for a while.'" Frizell has written poems and other things, but his first published work was a letter to Marvel when he was in sixth grade. [ky3.com]
Creators | Artist and comics curator John Weeks rounds up the work of four Cambodian creators with samples and brief bios highlighting the importance of each one. [The Phnom Penh Post]
Comics | Quincy Ledbetter explains how discovering Milestone comics changed his life, not only because the comics were less formulaic and more realistic than the ones he had been reading but also because they featured black superheroes: "It was not until days later that it hit me: This guy looked like me. He was a scrawny, dark-skinned, unassuming, geeky kid who didn’t fit in, couldn’t get the girl he wanted, and generally lacked self confidence. Reading Static was like looking into a mirror and staring back at me was a boy with great power and potential. For the first time, I was a hero." [Mashable]
Manga | The latest episode of Junji Kawai's Kattobase! Kiyohara-kun manga will not appear as scheduled in the Japanese magazine Corocoro Aniki, the editors have announced. While they were vague about it ("various circumstances"), it's worth noting the real-life baseball player on whom the manga is based, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, was arrested last week on charges of drug possession. [Anime News Network]
Retailing | Bill and Tiffany Young talk about the comic shop they recently opened in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Bill has a day job "overseeing a multimillion-dollar company," and Tiffany is a crochet artist; the couple has moved a lot because of Bill's job, and one of the interesting things about this article is that they are pushing back on a perception that Rocky Mount has a bad reputation as a place to live and do business. [WBT]
Retailing | When Chad Sinnott was a kid, a local bookstore sold five comics for $1. "My father bought five and I never looked back," said Sinnott, who opened Mass Media Comics in Zanesville, Ohio, last November. Sinnott has been collecting comics since he was five years old, so much of the store's stock comes from his personal collection, but he also carries new comics, and he compares his store to a bar for comics fans—some just drop in for a few minutes, others come to hang out for a while. [Times Recorder]