You could view the melancholy souls floating through Tomine's comics - graphic short stories, you might call them - as the spiritual offspring of Charles Schulz's creations. They're who the doleful, philosophizing Peanuts kids might have become if they had grown up and moved to the Bay Area in their 20s.

"Take one exasperated Iranian woman. Add a computer. Hook it up to the internet. "And you have a voice in a country where it's very hard to be heard," said Lady Sun, the online identity of one of the first Iranian women to start a blog - a freeform mix of news items, commentaries and whatever else comes to mind. Initially created to defy the nation's tight control on media, these web journals have turned into a cyber-sanctuary - part salon, part therapist's couch - for the vast pool of educated, young and computer-savvy Iranians."

"Since then, Rodgers has received calls from Bush supporters who have offered to pay as much as $135,000 for the domains. He declined to sell, citing animosity toward the incumbent president as the chief reason. "He's a sorry son of a bitch and I'll do anything I can to bring him down," said Rodgers."

"ABS got nervous with the content and how it was being told,” Ruiz explained. “It's very easy for religious organizations and churches alike to criticize and complain about how society is running amok and is out of control. But when it comes time to put your money where your gripes are, indifference and non-commitment are the end result. ABS worried how they would be perceived in the religious community and what affect it would have on their donor base. When they saw what it would take to reach this market, and how it would ruffle the feathers of some in the religious community, it was better to play it safe and not serve the secular market and save face in their own community."

"I kick myself in the butt for not getting a lawyer sooner when I first started developing these products for them. They told me that they would honor a contract and would give me a proprietary stake in the books through verbal and email agreements. I believed them and why not? It's the American Bible Society we are talking about.

"Incidentally, a soothsayer to the Spiderman phenomenon was director Shekhar Kapur, who at the recent Bollywood awards in Singapore, said that as countries like India and China rival the Western economic superpowers, there will be a reverse cultural colonisation.

‘‘We will still have Spiderman, but when Spiderman takes off his mask, he will probably be Chinese or Indian,’’ Kapur predicted. Now we know he was right."

“Conventions are an absolutely vital part of our cash flow, probably more so than other publishers, as I think we do more conventions than any other publisher out there,” Staros said. “This year we're publishing 36 books, mostly graphic novels, to the tune of about $400,000 in printing costs alone - ouch! Do you have any idea how many books you have to sell in the small press to generate that kind of money in a year? It's staggering.”

"On the side of logistics...getting the books to the shows begins to resemble a military maneuver – one that has to be extremely cost conscious...“With Blankets packing ten copies to a box; From Hell, eight; and Box Office Poison, ten, you can start to get the picture of how many boxes it takes to represent even a modest cross section of our titles at a show. So, the most economical way to get the books and people to the shows is to drive to them. So that's how we get to all of them, in a cargo van or large SUV. We even drove to San Diego the last two years from Atlanta, just to save on all the airplane tickets and shipping costs. Egads, that's a long haul.”

"[The book] covers the entire process of creating a graphic novel -- and by that, we mean longer-form comics stories, whether serialized in a pamphlet or released directly in a single book -- and getting it to market," Gertler told CBR News. "So we cover coming up with a concept, fleshing out and designing your characters, finding collaborators, writing the script, penciling, inking, lettering by hand, lettering by computer, coloring, finding a publisher, publishing it yourself, getting distribution, and promoting the work."

"A massive piece of articulated steel. Mercury stands 9 feet tall and weighs around 400 pounds. The hand polished and intricately welded steel skin is coated inside with a rust blocking agent that is used on oil tankers and outside with a tough clear marine varnish. The base is a torch cut steel plate bolted to inch thick plywood with casters."