Wizard Magazine’s website runs an interview with Jordan Crane, whose works include the kid-friendly graphic novel The Clouds Above:

So with The Clouds Above, you didn’t sit down and decide to do a children’s book?

CRANE: No. I love children’s books. And it’s not a children’s book—I was trying to do a children’s book, and they’re f—ing hard. I like fantastical stories with kids and I wanted to do an adventure story. There was a certain mood that I wanted to create in the story. It wasn’t that I was thinking that I wanted to hit a certain age group. If anything, Clouds Above isn’t malicious and f—ed-up enough. It needs to be way more malicious—which would remove it from the age group that it’s about and make it practically unreadable for kids. But there are plenty of kids’ stories that are totally f–ed up, and kids read them. I just wanted to create something that struck a certain emotional tone. That’s how I tried to go about it.

The September issue of the School Library Journal has been posted on that magazine’s website. Comics related contents include reviews of graphic novels for various age groups, a piece about Little, Brown’s planned American edition of Tintin in the Congo, and an interview with Shaun Tan about The Arrival.

Jeff Smith notes recent sales figures for Scholastic’s repackaging of his Bone graphic novel series: “[T]he paperback edition of BONE 6: Old Man’s Cave, which just shipped last month, is in its third printing for a total of 260,000 copies! The combined hard cover & paperback sales for the series to date: nearly 2,000,000.”

James Kochalka announces that his new children’s book, Squirrelly Gray, has just been published by Random House. According to the artist, the book “alternates a page of verse with a page of comics, and tells the story of how color was introduced to the world.” Kochalka, a frequent contributor to Nickelodeon Magazine‘s comics section, further discusses the book and his previously published children’s comics in an interview with Newsarama:

I’m not sure if many copies of my previous books for kids (Pinky & Stinky, Peanutbutter & Jeremy’s Best Book Ever) actually ever made it into the hands of actual children. They probably mostly sold to my adult fans. I hope that now, with the backing of a huge children’s book publisher, we might be able to get this book into the hands of more actual children.

Kochalka notes that he recently finished another children’s comic, Johnny Boo, to be published by Top Shelf next year, and is currently working on another unattached children’s project.

To mark this year’s Hergé centennial, this fall Little, Brown will publish three Tintin books previously unpublished in the United States, the ICv2 retail website reports. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the first Tintin adventure drawn by Hergé, was never redrawn in a manner consistent with the later albums and has only been available in foreign facsimile reprints aimed at collectors. Tintin in the Congo has a troubled history; despite having been redrawn and re-edited twice by Hergé in his lifetime, the book is still being challenged for its depiction of colonialist attitudes (previous editions also included depictions of casual animal abuse). The third book, Tintin and Alph-Art, collects sketches and other material from Hergé’s last, unfinished work.