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Every once in a while, we have to clean out some spam comments that have wormed their way past the Wordpress interface, and sometimes cleaning them out is a difficult task, because, more than any other group, spammers seem to really GET what we're trying to do here. For instance, Kidney Disease wrote:

Via Dylan Horrocks.

After things here yesterday got a little too real, I'd like to get back to just talking about cool and wonderful things. Like Jaume Plensa's new installation at Madison Square Park, entitled "Echo." The 44-foot high fiberglass resin sculpture depicts the head of a 9-year-old girl caught in a meditative state. Set among the fresh green of early Spring, it gladdens my heart every time I see it.

I realize as I'm trying to assemble today's comic news that my mind wasn't really on it for some reason. Although 9/11/01 is the day that changed the world in sad and horrible ways, it was also a sad and horrible time for me, my friends, my family and my home. The sense of closure I feel today following the death of bin Laden is a powerful one, but it also brought back so many memories of that time.

Please like us on Facebook! And then stand by for the two biggest shockers of the year!

What is normal, anyway?

As everyone has probably already heard (just scroll down the page), Rob Granito is a plagiarizing conman. He claimed to have done work for DC and Marvel, been the secret hand behind Brian Stelfreeze and, hilariously, to have worked on Calvin and Hobbes, and sold direct copies of other people's work with a few scribbles on top for hundreds of dollars. Not the usual pose tracing for a different use or character, but direct copies, with perhaps an arm moved slightly. And he did it for years. Artists known to have been plagiarized includes Jan Duursema, Tim Sale, Bruce Timm, Mark Bagley and Ivan Reis among others. As a response to this, the website Legit-o-mite.com has been started as a clearinghouse for evidence of direct plagiarism and fraud like this, on the part of Granito or any other artist.

Uh oh, when The Beatdips into the Cover Browser you know it's one of those "I'm all stressed out!" posts. Indeed, I'm finishing a VERY big and vital project and just can't keep up with everything going on. (Yes yes, Ron Granito, I know.) I'm very sorry. There are times I jut sit staring into space and wish I had a day where I could do nothing but read email, accept Facebook requests and drink coffee. That day is as likely as a day where I do nothing but shop at Prada and Bottega Veneta, but...you never know!

WOW, The Beat is so far behind in everything. If you've emailed or called or anything we apologize for being in radio silence. There is just not enough time in the day. But even so, we'll be headed to C2E2 tomorrow, first for the Diamond retail event and then the regular show. Good times! We'll have a who's where later -- please send links and party poop. BTW, were the editors of TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED obsessed with the color green? That WAS unexpected.

Consider this an open thread. When not working on The Beat, as longtime readers know, I edit the comics reviews for Publishers Weekly, among other duties there. And of late I've been trying to figure out what to to with digital review copies. Up until recently, I had a pretty hard and fast rule about only sending out books to reviewers that were actual books or galleys (with a few planned exceptions.) It seemed to me that if you couldn't afford to at least send out a handful of xeroxes or books to major review sources, you weren't that serious about publishing. While that may seem a tad draconian to some, the other reason is just logistics: we get dozens of books a week, and have a couple dozen reviewers, and keeping track of everything is very important. It's simply too easy to lose a pdf file or a link in an email unless you have a very careful, natural system in place. Plus, I've polled my reviewers several times, and most of them prefer to review from printed copies. The reason this is even an issue is that PW only reviews ADVANCE copies of books. Few comics publishers can afford galleys of any but the most important books, and getting the books in advance is always a race against the calendar.

Sorry about the server outages today. Basically, I pushed the wrong button and sent my server into a fit as it tried to run that demon image resizing script. The poor thing got so flustered that I had to upgrade the memory, but even that was too little too late and it's still trying to resolve itself.

As comic-cons become bigger and bigger, pop culture events one things is true: Media members like to complain about things. Nasty publicists, poor access, no Wi-Fi, crappy coffee in the press room. The same is true of the toy sphere, and at this year's Toy Fair, the toy media felt they got the short end of the pogo stick. It was definitely an odd situation. As big companies rely on fan media to get the word out about their products to the lucrative collector markets, the way they do it is being constantly reinvented.