Valerie Solanas

Good Friday! Make it even better with this roundup of news from around the web.

• The Writer's Guild of America West has released its 2011-2012 staffing brief, which reveals, among other things, how many women and people of color were hired that year to write the TV shows we all love so much. ThinkProgress breaks down the report and lists the shows that hired neither—and, hey, Californication, I'm so not surprised to see you on that list. [ThinkProgress]

• In related news, Ann Friedman asks cable-news fave Chris Hayes how his show got to be so refreshingly diverse. His answer? “We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more.’ Really, that was it." [Columbia Journalism Review]

• Everything you need to know about the recently passed Arizona Senate bill that would allow business to determine which bathrooms transgendered people may use. [BuzzFeed]

• Should elementary and middle schools be training students to attack and subdue school shooters? According to Mother Jones, some already are. But as one skeptic notes, "You can't get a group of middle-school kids to simultaneously agree on chicken nuggets or pizza in the cafeteria for lunch, much less make a split-second decision to start throwing items at an armed intruder." [Mother Jones]

• In further North-Dakota-is-the-Worst news, a state congressman freaked out at a state coalition membership meeting about VAWA provisions for victims of violence committed by non-native people against natives, saying that he'd like to "Wring the Tribal council’s neck and slam them against the wall.” The director for Spirit Lake Victim's Assistance was on the receiving end of the tirade. [Last Real Indians]

• Rick Ross rhymes about drugging and raping a woman on a new single by rapper Rocko, a fact that fellow rappers and music critics are likely to ignore, charges Jamilah Lemieux at Ebony.com. She's half right, but there's been encouraging pushback beyond the industry, with a Change.org petition asking Ross to apologize for glorifying rape, and another urging Reebok to drop Ross as a spokesman. [Ebony, Change.org, UltraViolet]

• At Tiger Beatdown, Flavia Dzodan explains why she's had just about enough of Jon Hamm's penis. [Tiger Beatdown]

• Finally, if you live in the Bay Area, mark your calendars for what looks like an awesome evening celebrating the work of Valerie Solanas, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of her death. The event is hosted by Michelle Tea, with readers and performances by Kirk Read, Cheryl Dunye, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many more. [Facebook]

What'd we miss? Let us know in the comments, and happy weekend.

This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing a cartoonist whose transition to webcomics has been rather recent: Gabrielle Bell. She started out self-publishing zines, and eventually made the leap to Alternative and later Canadian comic book publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Her print collections include When I'm Old and Other Stories, two volumes of Lucky, Cecil and Jordan in New York, and Kuruma Tohrimasu. She's also been in several editions of Best American Comics, which is how I first became acquainted with her work.

Recently, Gabrielle began publishing the autobiographical Lucky as a surreal webcomic. I recommend you start out with Manifestation, her chronicle of agreeing to write about Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto. We talked about feminism, mothers, and web versus print comics in the interview after the jump.