Awards | Roz Chast won the Reuben Award for cartoonist of the year, presented over the weekend in Washington, D.C., by the National Cartoonists Society. Divisional award winners of note include Jules Feiffer (Kill My Mother) for Graphic Novel, Jason Latour (Southern Bastards) for Comic Book, Danielle Corsetto (Girls with Slingshots) for Online Comics-Short Form, Minna Sundberg (Stand Still, Stay Silent) for Online Comics-Long Form, Hilary Price (Rhymes with Orange) for Newspaper Panel Cartoon, and Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) for Newspaper Comic Strip. [National Cartoonists Society]



Publishing | Peggy Burns, who's succeeding Chris Olveros as publisher of Drawn and Quarterly, talks about how she and her husband Tom Devlin (who will be the new executive editor) came to D+Q in the first place and how the company and its retail store have developed over the years. [Montreal Gazette]

Collectives | The Michigan Comics Collective, whose first title Wild Bullets debuted at Motor City Comic Con, is a group of creators and retailers who want to put Michigan on the map as a center of comics creativity. "Look at what The White Stripes did for Detroit," said retailer John Cashman of Cashman's Comics, one of the founders of the collective. "It's a scene, it's a sound. It just brings attention to that area. I can see Michigan doing that, because there's a lot of talented artists doing that here that probably wouldn't be discovered if it wasn't for the collective." [The Bay City Times]



Creators | Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis talks about meeting Charles Schulz, collaborating with Bill Watterson, and changing careers from law to cartooning: "I understand my contracts a little better than the average cartoonist. But what helps me the most is knowing that I never want to go back. It makes me try harder." [Economic Times]

Creators | Guy Gilchrist, who has been the artist for the comic strip Nancy for the past 20 years, talks about the timeless nature of the comic, the changes in the medium, and how his Christian faith affects his work. Gilchrist donates part of his earnings from Nancy to charities that benefit orphans (because the characters are orphans), and he talks about a recent visit to an orphanage in Haiti. [TAP Into]

Creators | Roz Chast, author of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, was the keynote speaker last week at a conference on aging in Sonoma County, California. [The Press Democrat]



Creators | Chris Schweizer, creator of The Crogan Adventures, talks about sketching, cartooning, art school and his newest work, The Creeps. [Panel Patter]

Creators | Nikhil Gulati is re-creating the history of the Indian fort of Golconda in his graphic novel Shepherd's Hill. [New Indian Express]

Publishing | A St. Louis news station profiles local publisher Lion Forge. [KSDK]

Publishing | A group of French publishers plans to meet today in New York to discuss how to make further incursions into the North American market. [Publishers Weekly]

Festivals | Zainab Akhtar jots down her impressions of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and shows off the comics she bought there and at Toronto comic shop The Beguiling. [Comics and Cola]

Festivals | Ash Brown also reports on TCAF from a different, more manga-focused, point of view, and gets bonus points for covering the two panels I moderated, one on subscription comics and the other an onstage conversation with manga creator Aya Kanno, as well as panels featuring Noelle Stevenson (Nimona), Gengoroh Tagame, and Gurihiru, the Japanese team that illustrates the Avatar the Last Airbender graphic novels. [Experiments in Manga]

Retailing | "I like to tell people I got into the business because I got fired from one too many corporate jobs. At the time I bought the store, I was down to my last $5,000 and comics were getting hot," said Tom Marcone, who is retiring after 27 years as the owner of Bailey's Comics in Lindenhurst, New York. The new owner is Trung Nguyen, whom Marcone hired to help out 24 years ago, when he was 16. [Newsday]