Disney Adventures Magazine has been cancelled, The Beat reports. The magazine had included comics among its contents. Most of these were based upon Disney properties, but the magazine at one point serialized Jeff Smith’s Bone and has included work by cartoonists including Evan Dorkin and Rick Geary.

PopCultureShock reviews Casper the Friendly Ghost, the first in Dark Horse Comics’ series of books reprinting Harvey children’s comics.

Unlike some of the other children’s comics that are currently being reprinted–notably Carl Barks’s Duck stories and John Stanley and Irving Trip’s Little Lulu–the Casper comics are not good in any traditional sense. They are perfectly serviceable children’s stories, but there’s no reason for a grown-up to read them. Comparing Lulu to Casper is like comparing Edward Lear to Stan and Jan Berenstain… Yet there is one reason why an intelligent adult might want to pick up this collection. Simply put, Casper featured some of the best art ever to grace a comics page.

The next volume in the series will reprint selected stories from Richie Rich.

Neil Cohn examines a pair of studies examining childhood comprehension of motion lines and other visual indicators of movement as conventionalized in comics. Both papers compare understanding of action lines with that of other visual cues, including body posture and “polymorphic features (i.e. repeating legs over and over to show motion).”

The September/October issue of The Horn Book features J. D. Ho’s piece “Gender Alchemy: The Transformative Power of Manga,” about the appeal shonen-ai “boys’ love” manga holds for girls. The piece is available in full on the magazine’s website.

Elizabeth Bird reviews The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert at the School Library Journal’s website. The book has been translated from the original French and published in the U.S. by First Second Books.

The Daily Cross Hatch runs a three part interview with Nickelodeon Magazine editor Chris Duffy specifically about that publication’s inclusion of comics for kids. Duffy edits the monthly magazine’s regular “Comic Book” insert, which often features work for children by cartoonists such as Jason Lutes, Johnny Ryan and R. Sikoryak who work primarily for adult readers.

The following is an excerpt from an unsourced television interview with Carl Barks, circa 1983:

Elizabeth Bird reviews Laika by Nick Abadzis at the School Library Journal’s website. The graphic novel, which tells the story of the first dog in space, is forthcoming from First Second Books.

The Newsarama comics news website interviews Shaun Tan about his wordless comics picture story The Arrival. Tan‘s book, already published in his native Australia, is due this fall in a U.S. edition from Scholastic.

The current issue of the online journal ImageTexT is dedicated to the theme of Comics and Childhood. The special issue, edited by Cathlena Martin and Charles Hatfield, considers such topics as pedagogy, play, and culture and examines work by George Carlson, Lynn Johnston and Toni Morrison, among others.