Awards | Stephen Collins' The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil won the inaugural 9th Art Award, announced Sunday during the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Presented by Graphic Scotland, the prize recognizes the year’s best English-language graphic novel. The other finalists were: Building Stories, by Chris Ware; Days of the Bagnold Summer, by Joff Winterhart; Naming Monsters, by Hannah Eaton; and The Nao of Brown, by Glyn Dillon. [9th Art Award]
Manga | Raina Telgemeier's comic about Barefoot Gen has attracted attention in Japan, where one city recently removed the manga from elementary-school classrooms, claiming it's too violent for children (the manga depicts the bombing of Hiroshima). "I was lucky to have adults in my life who were willing to discuss the violent subject matter with me, and help me put the story in historical context, and clarify things I might not yet understand," Telgemeier told The Asahi Shimbun. "After I finished volume 1 of Barefoot Gen, I was deeply upset. (But) as a child, I believed that if people simply saw what war was all about, they would take care that it wouldn’t happen anymore." [The Asahi Shimbun]
Comics | Tom Spurgeon talks to writer-about-comics Ken Parille, editor of The Daniel Clowes Reader. [The Comics Reporter]
Creators | British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe talks about his adventures (he was carjacked in Northern Ireland and caught up in an armed robbery in Paris), his work and the reactions it has provoked over the years (a group of schoolgirls threatened to castrate him over a cartoon about Mick Jagger), and the time he walked into a gallery and started taking his drawings off the wall because some of his sexually explicit works had been removed from the show. [Wales Online]
Creators | In town for the Intervention comics convention, webcomics creator and manga editor and maven Shaenon Garrity talks about her life, her work, and why she keeps coming back. [Washington City Paper]
People | Garrity's husband Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, talks about his work and his influences as well. [Washington City Paper]
Manga | Sean Gaffney rounds up the manga license announcements from this past weekend's Japan Expo, including two Sword Art Online manga from Yen, a Masamune Shirow art book from Dark Horse, and the return of Arina Tanemura's Phantom Thief Jeanne (originally released here by CMX under the title Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne) from Viz. [A Case Suitable for Treatment]
Digital comics | Tim Beyers explains why Apple may be the most important company in comics: because the iPad was the first acceptable platform for reading digital comics. [The Motley Fool]
Digital comics | Beyers also sees Image Comics, with its download-to-own program, as a disruptive force in the comics market, as Amazon once was with music. [The Motley Fool]