Joe McCulloch is here this morning with his weekly guide to the Week in Comics!, this time with spotlight picks from Satoshi Kon and Adrian Tomine.
And the great Sam Henderson is on day two of his tenure creating our Cartoonist's Diary. Inn today's entry, he lays down the law to his new cartooning students.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—News. The Committee to Protect Journalists has released a report on the threats facing cartoonists around the world, including “censorship, punitive lawsuits, physical assault, imprisonment, disappearance and murder." It focuses on cartoonists ranging from Zunar in Malaysia and Aseem Trivedi in India to the staff of Charlie Hebdo in France, Arifur Rahman in Bangladesh, and Molly Norris in Seattle:
The fear of radical Islamic reprisal drove American cartoonist Molly Norris into hiding after she made a tongue-in-cheek call in 2010 on her Facebook page for an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Norris’s cartoon did not directly depict the Prophet Muhammad, but included caricatures of a tea cup, thimble, and domino, according to news reports.
Norris received death threats from religious extremists, including the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who, before he was killed in 2011, wrote an article in Inspire saying that Norris’s cartoons made her a “prime target” for killing. She was advised by the FBI to “go ghost,” changing her identity, home, and job to preempt possible reprisals. Her former editor, Mark Baumgarten, said Norris has not been heard from since sending a brief farewell email in the fall of 2010.
The photographer and comics creator Seth Kushner passed away this weekend after a long battle with leukemia. Kushner leaves behind a wife and a young son, and the GoFundMe page they had originally set up for helping to defray the costs of his medical treatment can still be used to help them with funeral and other expenses.
—Reviews & Commentary. Mark Evanier reviews Bill Schelly's biography of Harvey Kurtzman. Tom Spurgeon reviews John Porcellino's King-Cat #75.
—Interviews. Paste talks to Jason Little.
Archie CEO Jon Goldwater talked to CBR about why they decided to cancel their controversial Kickstarter, claiming they stopped it to protect the creators from "negative attention."
—A/V. The latest guest on Virtual Memories is Chester Brown. The latest guest on Inkstuds is Last Gasp's Ron Turner. The latest guest on Deconstructing Comics is our own Frank Santoro.
The great comics historian Patrick Rosenkranz recently posted rare video from Art Spiegelman's 1991 Maus promotional tour:
