Entertainment

As we suspected when the news broke, the removal of Persepolis from the seventh grade curriculum at a Chicago high school turned in to a minor media circus pretty quickly, with school officials saying different things all over the place. If you missed all the confusion, the Chicago Tribune has the authoritative round up and Claire Kirch covers it for PW. Basically it emerged that the book was not being removed from school libraries or all schools, but it is being removed from the 7-10 grade curriculum where it is is currently being taught. The person who seems to have decided that is at the very top: Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennnet who wrote

Three pretty interesting posts on book sales and Amazon which, if you triangulate them, give you a good look at where the publishing business stands this Monday morning as Winter turns into Spring 2013:

Confession: I did not know the name of the editor of the University Press of Mississippi's excellent line of books about comics—spanning scholarly works on Chris Ware, Alan Moore, Osamu Tezuka and everyone in between—but his name is Walter Biggins and now he's leaving. But luckily Jeet Heer, who wrote several books for the line, catches up with him first —hopefully USM's strong comics list will continue:

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a stunning coming of age story considered a classic by many, has been ordered removed from Chicago's Lane Technical High School for reasons that remain unclear.

As I tweeted the other day,. I am now definitely HOOKED ON STRIP SEARCH, the Penny Arcade produced reality show about cartoonists. We've now seen the first challenge and the first elimination (both above) and in case you are wondering THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Mike Baron is best known as the co-creator of Nexus and Badger, two of the signature comics series of the indie 80s. While the ups and downs of his nexus co-conspirator Steve Rude have been pretty well documented, what about Baron? We hear he's got a revamp of the Badger simmering at the resurrected First Comics. But he's also staying incredibly busy turning out novels by the bushel. In fact he has turned out three in recent months, with appropriately pulpy covers. Yes they are e-books, but no feverish novel about a spook called in to discover why the world's leaders are spontaneously combusting is complete without a pulpy cover!

Spider-Man is hands down one of the most popular characters ever to leap from the pages of Marvel Comics, and is even a strong...

STRIP SEARCH, the reality show about a house full of cartoonists competing for $15K and a year of "being embedded" at Penny Arcade, debuted earlier this week. You can watch the first episode above and the second episode is now up as well. The show is produced by the Penny Arcade crew, with Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins as judges. (They ran a half million dollar Kickstarter to fund the show last year) 12 cartoonists -- six male, six female, are flown to a house in Seattle to compete for the prize, in the classic format. The 12, chosen from a thousand entrants, are mostly webcomickers, but more on that in a bit.

Since we've been talking about career paths and what not for the last few days, here's another one: after turning down three TV development deals, including Comedy Central, the webcomic Cyanide & Happiness has decided to go DIY.

"Urgent superhero" music motive? Check Hero in a wifebeater? Check CGI helicopters at sunset? Check Hero questioning the meaning of his role as superhero vs his personal...

One of the ways many people stumbled onto their first comic was through the promotional comics that used to come bundled in with action...

Just why is The Walking Dead the most popular cable show of all time? It's gory, unrelentingly grim and even the most likable characters act out of brutal self-preservation. There are no feel good moments, only increasingly distant memories of what it was like to feel good. (When a Tom Waits song, which closed last week's episode, qualifies as a gentle lullaby, you know things have gotten tough.) I guess all of this explains why it's a guilty pleasure: soap opera with the threat of a horrific death at any given moment.