Conventions | With the long-planned expansion of the San Diego Convention Center stalled indefinitely, the Los Angeles Times offers an overview of efforts to keep Comic-Con International in the city past 2016, and what suitors like Los Angeles and Anaheim, California, have to offer. "The proposals we've received are pretty amazing," says Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer. "It's not an easy decision." However, the San Diego Tourism Authority remains confident that convention organizers will sign a deal -- possibly with a month -- to remain in the city through 2018, based on an agreement for nearby hotels to offer their meeting space for Comic-Con programming. (The Tourism Authority has already asked hotels in the Comic-Con room block to freeze their rates at 2015 levels for the next two years.) [Los Angeles Times]

Awards | Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? has been nominated for yet another award: This time it's the Autobiography category of the National Book Critics Circle awards. [Newsday]

Publishing | The cartoonist Riss (Laurent Sourisseau), who was injured in the Jan. 7 attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, will take over as editor. Riss co-edited the magazine with Stephane Charbonnier (Charb), who was killed in the massacre. The next issue will be delayed by several weeks, and Riss said the magazine will have to be "reinvented," because so much of the content stemmed from the "collective dynamic" of the staff, many of whom are now dead. [Le Monde]

Auctions | A bound collection of the first 24 issues of Magic, a British comic that was launched in 1939 and ran for 80 issues, has sold at auction for £15,600 (more than $23,500), far above the initial estimate of £2,000 to 3,000. The comic was published by DC Thomson, publisher of the slightly older and more long-lived Beano and Dandy, but it was canceled in 1941 due to paper rationing. Auctioneer Steve Dewar of the auction house of Curr and Dewar  reckons that there are only eight to 10 copies of the first issue in existence; two of them sold in 2004 and 2005 for between £1,000 and £2,000 each. [BBC News]

Publishing | First Second editorial director Mark Siegel and associate marketing and publicity manager Gina Gagliano discuss the kids' graphic novel scene and how it has changed, how First Second has changed, and why more publishers aren't launching their own graphic novel imprints. There's also a good interview of First Second's 2014 releases and what to expect in 2015. [A Fuse #8 Production]

Creators | Terry Moore goes in depth about Rachel Rising and talks about some of his other work as well. [Comicbook.com]

Creators | Box Brown discusses creativity, his process and Retrofit Comics. [Darling Sleeper]

Creators | Aisha Franz talks about moving from self-publishing to being published by others, and about how she constructed the story for her graphic novel Earthling: "With Earthling, in the beginning, I focused on the little scenes, and then one scene and then the next one, and then it started to develop a kind of rhythm, but of course I collected a lot of materials, and ideas. I threw out a lot of stuff, but I always had to stop and think about it, if this was really working." [The Hairpin]

Creators | Michael DeForge talks about the "meandering" structure of his stories, his changing palette, and his favorite webcomics (all of which begin with the letter S). [Paste]

Creators | Roman Muradov discusses his first full-length graphic novel, (In A Sense) Lost and Found, published by Nobrow. [Broken Frontier]

Graphic novels | Here's a point of view you don't see too often: Monica Edinger argues that Cece Bell's El Deafo should be eligible for a Newbery Award because the text carries the story. [Educating Alice]

Crowdfunding | The Kickstarter for the game Exploding Kittens reached its $10,000 goal in just eight minutes, probably because one of the creators is Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. Gary Tyrrell checked in at the 17-minute mark, when the number was around $65,000, and in the time it took him to write a blog post about it, the total rocketed to almost $300,000. (It's $1.6 million as of this writing, but obviously that's a moving target.) [Fleen]