Meta

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.

Although we've been at the Beat blogging game since 2004, this is the first time we've had our own "creator-owned" website at our very own not-gonna-change url. Making it a year has had a few roller coaster moments, but it's been a year of vast learning and satisfaction. Oh, there have been a few pesky problems along the way, and the front page looks wack (because Team Beat hasn't been able to fix the image resizing script yet) but overall we're just happy to be here and incredibly grateful for all the support we've had from creators, publishers, advertisers and of course, readers.

"Your feeble skills are no match for the dark side!" -- Patriots coach Bill Belicheck channels his inner Palpatine.

Things are winding down for the holidays. The Beat is no exception. We'll be on holiday starting next week, and this time we really mean it. Almost no internet. We'll have a few elves looking in, but posting will be pretty perfunctory through Christmas. We will be posting some holiday art for the next few days so send us links or JPGs...but only through Friday. After that we're gone, baby, gone. Looking forward, we'd like to note that we're already booking advertisements into 2011. The top banner is sold out until April, and there are only scattered openings after that.

Hey there! The Beat is back! The Beat never really left, but we figured that what with the server overload it was best to...

As many of you have noticed, the recent server shuffle has resulted in a loss of visual images.  The Beatrix herself is spearheading our crack team of technological troubleshooters, and we hope to restore normalcy soon. Normally, in situations such as this, we would run "classic" columns from before the advent of the World Wide Web.  Unfortunately, our tape archive was mistakenly recorded over with the 67th Academy Awards. So instead, we have reverted to ASCII mode.

We're still kicking the tires and adding air here at Stately Beat Manor with our new server. Unfortunately, The Beat is a large, complex,...