Catching up on Tom Spurgeon’s weeklong series of interviews we first have an extensive chat with Will Pfeifer:

SPURGEON: Now that you have a little bit of space between you and the series, what do you think the basis was for so many people to have a negative reaction to Amazons Attack!?

PFEIFER: Was there a negative reaction? [laughter]

I think at its most basic, people have an idea about whatever superhero or character they love and have their ideal version of that character somewhere in their head. When you go against that version, some people are going to react very strongly. Amazons Attack! is right there in the title. They kill that guy and his kid on the very first page. People were really upset about that. But it was supposed to be shocking. It was supposed to be upsetting. It wasn’t supposed to be a triumphant moment for the Amazons. People who have been reading Wonder Woman for however long they’ve been reading Wonder Woman — and some of them have been reading for a long time — they didn’t like the fact that the Amazons were attacking and were evil. They also didn’t like the fact that in Amazons Attack! that there wasn’t enough Wonder Woman, and that Wonder Woman wasn’t driving the plot along. The reason for that is that there’s another book called Wonder Woman [Spurgeon laughs] where all that was happening.

Then there’s this chat with Paris artist Simon Gane:

SPURGEON: I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how much of your professional life is devoted to comics? Do you have other professional obligations? I’m just trying to get a sense of what you do.

GANE: I do take on some graphic design and illustration work but thankfully 90 percent of my professional life is currently devoted to comics, although that’s only since penciling a Vertigo title. Previous to that I was a freelance illustrator, designer and laborer and it was during that time I drew Paris. It was always the last thing I should have been doing because I had bills to pay, of course, but I loved drawing it too much. I guess comics are a compulsion rather than a career.

Finally, we have an interview with Jason Thompson, author of the excellent Manga: The Complete Guide:

SPURGEON: How did you approach the general section and what made you decide on that length as opposed to dropping it altogether or running something 10 times as long?

THOMPSON: The length of the reviews was my preference based on reviewing manga for Animerica and PULP. My first editor did ask me to trim the text, so I went through it and cut some sentences on the first proof. At one point I was worried that the articles might get dropped for space reasons, or that some of the more obscure manga (the old Antarctic and Studio Ironcat stuff, the Japanese bilingual editions) might get dropped, so I made sure to do all those reviews first so there was no chance they’d get cut. But in the end none of the reviews or articles were removed, and Dallas was happy with the length, so it all worked out. The only section that got trimmed down from my original plans was the artist index — I wanted to have bios of many more artists.

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