Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware will appear in a live conversation moderated by Françoise Mouly tonight as part of the Festival of New French Writing taking place in New York City February 26 through 28. The event will take place at 8:15 pm at NYU’s Skirball Center. The event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 7:45.

Sammy Harkham reveals on the Family blog that his comic book series Crickets “has been cancelled due to changes made by the major comics distributor that effectively made it impossible to continue in the comic book format.” In the announcement Harkham links to Tom Spurgeon’s reporting about Diamond Comic Distributors‘ recent increase in minimum order threshholds.

Drawn and Quarterly published the first two issues of Harkham’s series. Harkham indicates that the projected third issue “will come out in some [DIY] form in the next couple months…after that, I dont know exactly.” Harkham is also the editor of the Kramers Ergot anthology series, published by Buenaventura Press.

Kevin Huizenga announces that material previously planned to run in Or Else #6, which he has discontinued as a series, will be available in a new mini-comic titled Rumbling Chapter Two. The twenty-eight page mini-comic “will be available in a few weeks.” Several of Huizenga’s recent books, comics and mini-comics are currently available for sale online via his section of the USS Catastrophe website.

Kevin Huizenga announced his discontinuation of his comic book series Or Else, five issues of which have been published by Drawn and Quarterly to date. “It doesn’t make sense to do it this way anymore,” he writes on his blog. “Drawn and Quarterly have been great and I want to thank them. For sure I will still be putting out a lot of books and zines, forever, so save your pennies, and watch this space for more news as it becomes available.” Huizenga’s post includes the cover for the projected sixth issue of the series, which will not be published.

Among his many activities, Moliterni wrote and edited several books about comics history and edited comics projects at Dargaud. He was also a co-founder of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angouleme, France. Among English-language readers he may be best known as a contributor to Pierre Couperie and Maurice Horn’s book A History of the Comic Strip, for which he wrote the chapter on “Narrative Technique.” Molierni was 76 years old at the time of his death.

The International Herald Tribune carries an Associated Press report on the Louvre’s exhibit Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée: Le petit dessein, which opened with a reception on Wednesday, January 21. The exhibit of work draws exclusively from comics about the Museum co-produced by the Louvre and Futuropolis, and features pages and sketches from the three so-far published books by Nicolas de Crécy, Eric Liberge, and Marc-Antoine Mathieu as well as pages and sketches from Bernard Yslaire‘s and Hirohiko Araki‘s forthcoming volumes in the series. “We wanted to present this art with the goal of showing its … aesthetic quality,” said curator Fabrice Douar, “but also its quality in the sense of the confrontation between the world of the Louvre and this alternate universe, which is that of comics.”

The BoDoï website carries both installation shots from the exhibit and images of pages and artwork selected for inclusion in the show. The exhibit runs through April 13, 2009.

Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware will appear in a live conversation moderated by Françoise Mouly as part of the Festival of New French Writing taking place in New York City this February, Publishers Weekly reports. The event, taking place February 26 through 28, will feature “eleven major French writers, all translated into English… with leading American writers, in dialogues hosted by well known American cultural critics.” The conversation between Satrapi and Ware will take place on Friday, February 27 at 8:15 pm at the Skirball Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Richard McGuire spoke to Steven Heller about his recent appearance at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the Museum’s “24-Hour Program on the Concept of Time” event, which took place January 6 through 7, 2009. “I talked about ‘time’ in different aspects of my work,” McGuire told Heller. “I started by talking about the Liquid Liquid song ‘Cavern’ and how it’s been sampled and changed and been used over time… A clip from my film Fear(s) of the Dark, of the scene with the guy looking at the photo album, so you see the woman’s life compressed into one minute. Then some New Yorker stuff, like the ‘New Year’s Eve’ cover that rotates and reads both ways, night transforming into day.”

Heller previously interviewed McGuire specifically about the artist’s segment in the Fear(s) of the Dark animated anthology film. An excerpt from McGuire’s short can be seen along with more samples of McGuire’s work at the Prima Linea website.

McGuire is  best known in comics circles for his groundbreaking short story “Here,” which was originally published in RAW vol. 2 no. 1, and was recently republished both in Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories from Yale University Press and in the eighth issue of Comic Art. That issue cover-featured McGuire and also included an interview with the artist and an appreciation by Françoise Mouly.

McGuire is also well-known as the bassist for the musical group Liquid Liquid. The band’s work has recently been re-issued on CD by Domino Records, and the group recently reunited to play several shows. Via Alvin Buenavantura comes the following video clip of the group performing their signature song “Cavern” at Santos Party House in New York, NY, on November 19, 2008.

Comics scholar Paul Gravett posts the first public images from David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp as part of his 2009 publishing preview. “This story pulls you in from the word go,” writes Gravett, who proceeds to offer a short synopsis of the book’s opening sequence. “I’ll be returning to this and giving a detailed Early Bird Review on this site soon.” As previously reported, Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel is due in June 2009 from Pantheon Books.