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With her How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less soon to come out (and getting solid advance reviews) cartoonist Sarah Glidden is embarking on another journey to the Middle East, with hopes of turning it into another non-fiction comic. And she's funding part of the travel via Kickstarter with a project called "Stumbling Towards Damascus". For the project, she'll be working with the Common Language Project, a Seattle-based group of journalists who travel to under-reported on areas. For this trip they'll be journeying to places affected by the Iraq war, including Syria, Turkey and the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Glidden's larger hope is to follow in the tradition established by Joe Sacco, whose "comics journalism" in the Middle East has won multiple awards.

Cuyahoga country coroner Frank Miller has issued a report on Harvey Pekar's July 12th death and ruled it was from natural causes, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. However the cause of death was given as an accidental overdose of fluoxetine and bupropion (commonly sold as Prozac and Wellbutrin.) Pekar suffered from high blood pressure, asthma and clinical depression, and was undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.

The Wildstorm blog has a series of tributes to colorists Jonny Rench who died over the weekend at the age of 28. Among those he worked with, Neil Goodge, Liam Sharp, Trevor Hairsine, and this from Gail SImone, whose Welcome to Tranquility series he colored:

Even with his own financial problems going on, the Dude still has time to help out the CBLDF. What a guy. Support either good cause and get some great art in return.

Although Disney's acquisition of Marvel's character library was seen as a genius move to shore up their boy-skewing movie franchises, there was one wistful little fly in the ointment: Marvel had already assigned rights to most of their iconic super hero franchises to other studios. Undeterred, Disney has just regained a few of the crown jewels: Disney has just acquired marketing and distribution rights to THE AVENGERS and and IRON MAN 3, which will be released May 13, 2013. Disney paid Paramount $115 million for the distribution rights and this will serve as a minimum guarantee against distribution fees.

Colorist Jonny Rench passed away this weekend of a heart attack at the insanely young age of 28, it was reported via Twitter. Rench was a Wildstorm mainstay and colored such books as The Authority, The Highwayman and many, many more. More of his art can be seen here.

The Inkwell Awards for inking were handed out on Sunday at Wizard World New England in Boston, and Mark Morales won Favorite Inker. Klaus Janson and Al Williamson won the Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame awards. Complete winners in bold below.

Courtesy of Milton Griepp, we're happy to present audio of ALL the panels from the ICv2 Conference on Comics and Digital which was held on October 7, 2010. The first part is Griepp's White Paper: The ICv2 2010 White Paper Preview This year's presentation will be a preview of the 2010 market overview planned for early next year, looking at first-half 2010 trends in sales of graphic novels and comics, along with info on digital trends. This would work better with the accompanying slideshow, but we're not there with the technology yet. If you listen through however you'll get analysis on the status of the direct market, bookstores, manga, and digital comics sales. Griepp's analysis is the industry standard and we think you number crunchers will enjoy this.

While comics fans were celebrating comics and other delights at New York Comic Con, publishers and fans in Europe were congregating in Frankfurt, Germany,...

Ardden Entertainment has been in the news a bit of late with their relaunch of Atlas Comics, but they are also losing their editor-inchief, J.M. DeMatteis, who announced on his blog:

Wow, there was SO MUCH going on at New York Comic Con. Kevin Melrose has a great roundup of salient news points, and CBR had an insane number of panel reports. Newsarama has streaming video, and Comics Alliance has their own link roundup. But if you can't digest all that, here's the Slimfast version, specially prepared just for you.

Via Twitter, Marvel Associate Editor Nathan Cosby, who works out of the Mark Paniccia office on such books as the Shanower/Young Oz adaptations, Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers and Marvel Adventures Spider-Man is leaving to do other stuff. He tweeted: