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Oh you knew it was going to happen. Gotta rebuild traffic somehow. Lucy and Charlie contemplate life in the bathtub. Not named after Peanuts,...

A few people miss the all-in-one page layout—I think it's possible to create a page that presents it all in this fashion and in the next round of tinkers I'll look into that. ... Of course we'll be presenting as much top notch content, breaking news, thought provoking analysis and pictures of lovable kittens to earn these social media thumbs ups, but all of it will definitely help the site recover from the dark old days.

Yay we made it to the other side. And we have KITTENS.

Yes, at long last the great migration is under way. We'll resume posting when the coast is clear. In the meantime DO NOT POST...

So I've been on vacation (on and off) for the last two weeks and hadn't been paying too much attention to the internet—a wonderful activity that I highly recommend every six months or so. On the way home from a wedding I was surprised to learn that the man I call "John V." seems to have become the focus of concentrated internet outrage for a day or so—and I couldn't be more thrilled. John V., a message board poster who uses rotating IPs to avoid filters, has been haunting the comment boards of female writers for over two years. A few months ago, for whatever reason, he seems to have started using Twitter as a base for his insults and rape-obsessed ragings. As you can see from the above, about a month ago he made a series of posts aimed at me, Tom Spurgeon, DCWKA's Sue, Jill Pantozzi and a few others that shocked quite a few people. Although John V. is clearly a misogynist with a deep hatred of women, he also seemed to have a mad on for men of comics like Spurgeon.

What could possibly happen in the week before Labor Day? We tell ourselves that every year, and every year something wild and wacky happens, like Disney buying Marvel, or Rob Liefeld becoming the Twitter Assassin. Despite temptation, we're still taking some time off this week to view historical sites around the US. Todd Terrific is also indisposed this week, and I think Sterling Steve is also on vacation. Tireless Torsten and Jaunty Jessica are still at the helm, however.

§ You may note that the front page of The Beat looks different. I tinkered with the template in order to alleviate some of the strain on the database, so hopefully there won't be any more crashes before we move to our new, updated look and server (which is coming, promise). In the course of doing this, I crashed the database worse than it ever had been before to the point where even after rebooting the server the errant process would immediately lock it up again.

Seriously. I feel like it is New Year's Day again now that you-know-what is over. I can clean the closets, file things away, start NEW projects and just get on with life. BONUS: Comic-Con was so early this year that I actually have five weeks of summer left!

Back in July 1982, the Comics Journal ran an article titled “Archetype Meets Angst” by one Heidi D. MacDonald. Thirty years later, during Comic-Con International surrounded by so many people she knows, we here at The Beat celebrate our Editor-In-Chief, and bestow the honorary title of "exemplar"!

All the apologies in the world for today's Beat outage. I finally figured out how to get it back online. Our Elite Tech Team is working on a more secure and long-lasting solution but in the meantime, Python, Apache, and MySQL are refusing to play nice. Man, I missed the Beat. It was scary not having it around.

We're done at BEA and BlogWorld and so on, and getting back up to speed on posting. Huge thanks to Torsten, Todd, Vanguard Steve, and Jessica for keeping the show running while we were away from the computer. We'll have more BEA thoughts tomorrow but in the meantime, not to make anyone jealous or anything, but here's the promo item of the show...and maybe the year, a travel themed giveaway for Lemony Snicket's new series, "ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS", which has art by Seth...everything from a pen with an octopus to a bar of soap. The first book will have a 1 million copy laydown October 23rd.

Warren Ellis, the acerbic writer and social critic, discusses perhaps reinstating his commenting system, an idea he quickly rejects: