Janelle Asselin

For the fourth year in a row, Diamond is holding their Halloween ComicFest, where comic shops will have special Halloween-related events and offer a bunch of free comics. Basically, it's like a Halloween-themed Free Comic Book Day, which seems like a fun deal all around. Plus, some shops will be selling mini-comic packs of 25 comics that people can give out to trick-or-treaters! There are 21 free comics available this year, and you can check them all out below!

Giant Days #4 comes out this week, and it looks to be another hilarious issue of the entertaining series about college friends. One of the gang turns 18, and that means it's time for a party... but with less drinking than you would think, given that they live in England. Plus, hilarity over zine bootlegs! Writer/creator John Allison and artist Lissa Treiman look like they've really hit their stride together. Check out ComicsAlliance's exclusive preview!

Publishers Weekly released findings from their comics retailer survey last week, and once more all signs point to growth, particularly in regards to female readers. This is great news not just for people who care about representation in comics, but for people who care about the health of the comics industry. An influx of younger readers of any gender is what the comics industry needs so that publishers can engage them and keep them reading for years to come. It seems like a wide variety of publishers are getting this job done.

Every year, nerdcore rapper Adam WarRock runs a donation drive where he offers a lot of different music and other perks in exchange for money to allow him to keep making music. Since most of his music is offered online for free, WarRock explains that this is the best way for him to stay in business. This year, as part of his donation drive, WarRock has released a remix of his song "The Quiet (Sex Criminals)," which you can hear right here on ComicsAlliance.

This week, IDW launched something new and different --- an art gallery. The San Diego Comic Art Gallery is an interesting addition to both IDW's scope of business and to San Diego's comics-related offerings. The first artist featured for this gallery? None other than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman. Check out the gallery below for a look at the launch of the gallery, the art included in the show, and IDW's new offices.

Iron Circus Comics, the publisher of, among other things, Smut Peddler, is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for another anthology called New World. New World is a fantasy/sci-fi anthology about what happens when cultures meet. The campaign is more than 200% funded, but there are still some great rewards for backers who may find this topic intriguing, and higher totals for the campaign can lead to bonuses for the creative teams. As the campaign winds down, Iron Circus has provided ComicsAlliance with this exclusive preview of the first 10 pages of the story "Hosts," by Sophie Goldstein and Carl Antonowicz.

VixenVarsity.com is a fascinating site full of instructive "courses" on a wide range of topics, and site creator MizCaramelVixen has a passion for comics and a lot of thoughts about diversity in the industry, which she's spun into posts, a hashtag, and a website under the banner BlackComicsMonth (which is every month). This weekend, MizCaramelVixen can be seen at the first ever Black Comics Month panel on Saturday at 1:15pm in Theater 2 during Special Edition NYC. We sat down with her to discuss the motivations behind BlackComicsMonth, what people can expect from the panel, and the next steps in her diversity campaign.

Pre-orders started yesterday for an awesome new line of Espionage Cosmetics nail wraps inspired by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro's Bitch Planet and Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals. Nail wraps, for those who aren't familiar with them, are adhesive nail art that can be applied at home easily. Each style was approved by the creative teams on the books and is tastefully but clearly inspired by the excellent comics they're based on. Plus, not only do they have really cool designs, they're also glow-in-the-dark.

James Tynion IV and Michael Dialynas' The Woods, published by Boom Studios, is a sort of sci-fi high school version of Lord of the Flies or Lost. A group of students and teachers disappear from Earth and end up in a mysterious forest world light years away. The 36-issue series has been planned as three volumes of 12 issues each, which means issue #13 is the perfect point for new readers to jump on board and give it a try.

Earlier this week, we told you about the Women in Comics panel at Denver ComicCon that had no women on the panel. As the convention concluded, more information about that panel came to light, and it's emerged that guests of the convention rallied to put on a more relevant Women in Comics panel. A group of creators and experts, including Trina Robbins, Crystal Skillman, Marguerite Bennett, Joelle Jones, and Amanda Conner, led what was apparently a thoughtful roundtable discussion about women in comics.