§ Dan Nadel has a nice picture-laved post in which he gets to go to Europe and visit with Moebius and many other arty folk.

§ Marjane Satrapi has a MySpace page.

§This year’s Rube Goldberg competition set a new record for inefficiency . In the contest, entrants vie to create the most complicated contraption, ala the famed cartoonist:

A team of college students from Ferris State University in Michigan took inefficiency to new heights over the weekend with a machine that needs 345 separate procedures to make a glass of orange juice.

§ Go Nagai, creator of MAZINGER, DEVILMAN and CUTEY HONEY interviewed about his sexy comics:

“Sex didn’t come into things at all when we first started. It’s not like you’re nude when you go through a physical examination, and even in those scenes all you could see was pictures from the shoulders up. But, just because there were so many girls in the comic, it became really popular and people really praised the pictures of the girls. I must admit that I really like pictures of nude girls and that influenced the way I drew,” Nagai says. “It was fun drawing the strip. I found myself always getting an unexpected thrill out of it. It really picked me up when I was working overnight on it; it was sort of like letting instinct go to work while I went to sleep. And because the strip was so popular, the editor pushed me to go further and I liked what I was doing, so I did go as far as I could.”

§ PopCulture shock looks at the upcoming line of Shakespeare manga from SelfMadeManga

§ Newindpress.com profiles the woman touted as India’s only female political cartoonist:

Little had we heard about her. It was without any back-up files that we set out to meet her, whom we were told is the only female political cartoonist in the country now – Shugufta Khalidi, the cartoonist-cum-correspondent of ‘The Kashmir Times’, a leading newspaper in Jammu and Kashmir.

She is travelling out of her State for the first time (Kerala Cartoon Academy made that happen), she is not comfortable with speaking in English, walks around always in a purdah and is accompanied by her husband – enough reasons to doubt whether she would talk at all with the press (Shugufta was in Thiruvananthapuram to attend a seminar on Cartoon and Women organised by Kerala Cartoon Academy and Thiruvananthapuram Press Club).